Tim Whitley turned and looked back at the long, empty road behind them, a thinning black surface that dissolved into shining pools of mirage water in the relentless sunshine. He tried to calculate. They had been driving for about a half hour. No, more. It was at least fortyfive minutes. He didn’t know how fast Hobart had been driving, but it had to be at least sixty miles an hour. That was a mile a minute. “We can’t walk back that far. It’s more than forty miles.”
Hobart said, “No, we can’t. We go in the other direction. There’s a town up ahead.”
“How do you know?”
“I happened to see it on a map. I think it was on the place mat in that diner in Baker. I know the road goes north this far. To the left is Death Valley, and the road swings off to the right to where the town is. We’ll buy a three-gallon can of gas and pay somebody to drive us back here with it.”
“Do you happen to know how far it is?”
“Well, if you walk on the road, it could be ten miles, but the road hooks to the right, so we can take a shortcut across country and meet it. I’d guess it would be four miles that way, maybe even two.”
“Jesus, Jerry,” said Tim. “Walk across the open desert like that?” The car’s air conditioning had cut off with the engine, so the windows were heating the enclosed space like a greenhouse. “It must be over a hundred out there.”
“Sure it’s over a hundred. It’s the fucking desert!” Hobart set the hand brake, wiggled the gearshift to be sure it had clicked into Park, and wrenched the steering wheel to lock it. He took the keys, got out and slammed the door.
The idea of waiting here alone in the car tried to form in Tim’s mind, but he couldn’t grasp and hold it. Being here was unthinkable. It wasn’t that something terrible would happen if he were alone, being alone was terrible. He opened the door and got out. The air was so hot it hit the nerves of his skin like something sharp. He stood looking down at the black pavement with swirls of sand on it.
The road was only a layer of asphalt that some crew had dumped from a truck and rolled flat one day. It wasn’t safety. It was only a sign that some men had been here once a few years ago.
Tim began to walk away from the pavement toward Hobart. After a few steps into the dirt, his tie to the road wasn’t as strong, and he began to trot. When he caught up with Hobart, he was already sweating. They kept walking to the northeast between hills that were just piles of rocks. Tim knew that he needed to be smart and use the few advantages he had. There was the sun, and it was getting lower, so he could identify the west with his eyes closed. He knew that time was important.
He concentrated on keeping up with Hobart. It shouldn’t have been difficult because he had longer legs and he was younger. But Hobart sometimes seemed to be something that wasn’t quite human anymore. It wasn’t that he hadn’t started as human, but that he just wasn’t as weak as a man anymore. He had burned the softness out of himself a while ago. Hobart kept going straight as though he were walking a surveyor’s line. Tim supposed that was a kind of good news. If they went straighter, they’d go farther and meet the curve of the road sooner.
After walking until his shoes had gotten full of sand, Tim noticed that his face was dry. The air was so hot and parched that his sweat dried before it could form drops. He looked at his watch. “We’ve been walking for fortyfive minutes. At this pace I make that three miles, give or take.”
“That ought to be far enough,” said Hobart. He took a gun out of his shirt and shot Tim through the chest, and then stood over him and shot him through the forehead.
He put the gun back into his belt under his shirt, grasped Tim’s ankles, and dragged his body to the side of one of the innumerable piles of rocks. He dug down a few inches with his hands to make a depression, and rolled Tim into it. He covered the body with rocks and then walked the three miles back to the road.
When Hobart reached the car, he opened the trunk, took out the gas can, and poured the three gallons into the gas tank. He started the engine, turned on the air conditioning, and opened the windows to blow the hot air out of the car while he accelerated toward the gas station in Amargosa Valley. With a full tank, he could be back in Las Vegas in a couple of hours.
4
Emily spent three hours with Detective Gruenthal, the police officer who was placed in charge of Phil’s murder. He was a big man with a red face and thinning filaments of hair that were in the process of changing from blond to white. She told him about Phil’s habits, and about the sudden departures: the missing money, not telling her where he was late at night. Gruenthal dutifully took notes, a constant illegible scribbling into a notebook that seemed smaller than his thick hand, then told her that the first avenue to pursue was the money.
Because one signatory was dead, Emily was not permitted to open the safe-deposit box that she and Phil rented. She had to meet Detective Gruenthal and a woman named Zia Mondani who represented the state of California at the bank, where the manager was waiting. Emily and the bank manager entered the vault to retrieve the box. Emily carried the box, and they went into a little room instead of the cubicle that Emily and Phil had always used before.
They all sat down at an empty table and she opened the long, narrow gray metal box. As she took things out she set them on the table in front of Detective Gruenthal. There was the deed to the house. There were Phil’s, Emily’s, and Pete’s birth certificates and Social Security cards.
Gruenthal immediately picked up Pete’s papers. “What’s this?”
“They’re our son Pete’s. He died five years ago in a car crash. Neither of us ever thought to take them out, I guess.” She noticed a copy of Pete’s death certificate and set that in front of Gruenthal, too.
There was their marriage license, and she had to fight to keep from crying in front of these strangers at the sight of it. To distract herself, she quickly picked out the insurance policy for the house and the policy for the two cars, then the pink slips for the cars. There was Phil’s Honorable Discharge from the Marine Corps, a few photographs of the house for insurance purposes, a copy of Phil’s private-investigator’s license in case something happened to the original that hung in the office. She came to the end.
Gruenthal said, “Is that it?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Anything missing?”
“I don’t think so. No.”
Ms. Mondani, the woman from the state, stood up, said, “Thank you, Mrs. Kramer,” and left the room.
Emily began to put the papers back in the box. She tried to remember the things that should have been here, but weren’t. Phil had taken his mother’s diamond pin, the necklace of real pearls that Emily’s grandmother had given her, and the savings bonds. She wasn’t even certain how much any of the items had been worth. The jewelry had never been appraised because Phil had said there was no point in insuring anything that was sitting in a bank. The bonds had been a gift from Phil’s parents when Pete was born, the beginning of a fund for Pete’s college tuition.
As she and the manager returned the box to its slot in the vault, she berated herself. She should have told Detective Gruenthal that things were missing, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She had no idea why Phil had taken them. Was there some need that he had been hiding from her? He always hated to worry her. Maybe he had made some investment that she would have considered risky. She couldn’t tell Detective Gruenthal something so private before she even knew the explanation. How could this stranger understand what she was telling him when she didn’t yet understand it herself?
When the box had been locked away, she could see Gruenthal was feeling impatient. His time had been wasted. “Mrs. Kramer, I’d better be getting back to the station. If there’s anything you remember later, or anything I can do, please call.”