He had difficulty unbuttoning the inner pocket of his jacket and further difficulty working the buttons on his phone. He reached Juarez again. “Did you find somebody?”
“I’m close. Stay with me. I think we can get you out of there. I know a vet in Madrona.”
“I’m down in a culvert. I can’t move my legs.”
“Jesus, man, call an ambulance.”
“Luntz called already. They came and went.”
“Call them back!”
“Piss on that shit.”
“Will you just call them back?”
“I’m at the end of the blacktop, in some trees.”
“Tell me again — Route 70.”
“The rest stop by the Tastee-Freez north of Oroville.”
“I’m writing it down.”
“I’m in a culvert under the road. You got that?”
“Keep that phone by you.”
“It’s right here. Send somebody.”
“I’ll try. But what if I can’t?”
“Then eat that fucker’s liver while he watches.”
“It’s a promise.”
Gambol closed the phone.
He managed to sit upright against the side of the culvert. The breeze coming through it felt icy. Vehicles rumbled overhead. He laid his cell phone in his lap and tore at
his bloody pants leg and got a look at the purple lipless exploded mouth in his flesh. He cinched the belt as tightly as it would go, but his hands were asleep and the wound seemed to well up and spill over, suck back, well up, spill over in a small but relentless way.
The phone rang. He got his fingers around it and raised it to his cheek. Juarez said, “I told you I knew somebody. I’m sending a vet.”
Gambol opened his lips. Nothing came out.
“You there?”
“Yeah.”
“I found you a vet. Thirty minutes. Stay put, now, hear? Don’t run off.”
Gambol failed to laugh. He tried saying, “Yeah,” one more time, but his lips didn’t move.
He dozed, woke, had no idea how much time had passed, saw that a rivulet of his blood traveled away from him, moving over the dirt collected in the groove of the culvert, disappearing again under massed brown pine needles. He raised his hand to look at his watch but couldn’t get it up to his face.
“Hey—” he said, but very faintly. He himself could hardly hear it.
He put his fingers around the phone in his lap. The phone slipped away with a clatter that echoed in the concrete cylinder, and he let himself collapse toward it. He had his mouth by the phone. He had a finger on the button. He needed the finger to press it. He couldn’t make it happen.
No problem. If he could keep his eyes open, he wasn’t dead. Lying on his belly he stared at the red spectacle of his life as it traveled past his face and headed away from him through the dust. That’s all he needed to do now. He needed to keep seeing his blood.
In the café Luntz sat quite still with his elbows on the counter and a menu in his face.
“Are you going to order?” the waitress asked.
“Is there a Feather River Tavern around here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Feather River Café, something like that?”
“I don’t think so. Are you going to order?”
“Ice tea,” he said, and took a second trip to the men’s room.
He washed his hands and splashed his face with cold water and dried himself with hot air from a nozzle. He smoked half a cigarette in several rapid puffs and threw the rest in the toilet, went out the door, and lifted the receiver of the pay phone beside the restrooms.
Shelly answered and accepted the charges.
“Hey. It’s me,” he said.
“What’s this collect?” Shelly said. “Are you someplace weird?”
“I’m near Oroville.”
He heard her sigh.
“Listen. Shelly, listen. I got on a very messed-up ride with this guy I sort of know. A guy who intended to hurt me. And I think some people are probably coming to see you, Shelly. In fact, I’d count on it. Yeah.”
“You mean cops?”
“Just people.”
“People?”
“It’s bad.”
“Jimmy, Jesus Christ, Oroville? What’s Oroville? What happened?”
“I wish I knew.”
“You don’t
know
?”
“I wish I could tell you. But if anybody wants me — just tell them you heard from me, I’m long gone, I’m never coming back.”
He heard her breath in his ear, nothing else.
“Shelly, it’s a mess. I’m sorry.”
“Well, sorry fixes everything, don’t it?”
“You gotta be mad as all get-out.”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“I’m sorry, buddy,” he said, and hung up.
“How much for the tea?” he asked the waitress as he sat down again.
“One fifty. Aren’t you going to drink it?”
“Let me have a pack of Camel straights, please.”
Gambol’s wallet was so fat Luntz had to stand up to pry it out of his front pants pocket. Fat mostly with hundreds. He found a twenty.
“There might be a Feather River Inn,” she said. “Kind of way up on the Feather River Road.”
Luntz put the wallet away. “No longer an issue,” he said.
Luntz sat in the car in the café’s parking lot listening to an AM sports talk show and counting his blessings: forty-three one-hundred-dollar bills and change, plus a wallet with a tab inside it that said “Genuine Calfskin,” and lots of credit cards. The cards had to go. And probably the car. And definitely the gun.
In his trembling hands he fanned out the crisp new Franklins. It wasn’t much more than this that he owed Juarez in the first place.
Before he took off he cracked the Caddy’s trunk to see what else Gambol might have bequeathed him. Popped the lid and found a heavy white canvas duffel in there and unzipped it.
The duffel held a shiny chrome-barreled pistol-grip shotgun and five, six — seven small boxes labeled “00 Buck,” with maybe eight or ten to a box.
A pale green squad car cruised the far edge of the parking lot. A county rig. Luntz zipped the bag and closed the trunk.
First town he hit he bought a fifty-dollar phone card at the Safeway and called information at the pay phone out front. “Alhambra, California. Dooley’s Tavern. No. Wait a minute. Dooley’s is like a nickname. It’s O’Doul’s. D-O-U-L. In Alhambra.”
The phone said, “For an additional charge of fifty cents, you’ll be connected.”
He lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply and blew smoke at the world. He took two clean breaths and punched the buttons.
“Let me talk to Juarez.”
“Ain’t no Juarez here.”
“He’s in the last booth with the Tall Man and that skinny girl the Tall Man hangs with who used to strip at the Top Down Club. Tell him it’s Jimmy Luntz. Say I owe him money.”
Juarez came on the line and said, “Jimmy,” in an experimental tone of voice.
“Guess what? I smoked old Gambol in a rest stop on Highway 70,” Luntz said.
He could feel Juarez swimming around in his own head, getting a grip on this information.
“Jimmy, you say this is Jimmy,” Juarez repeated.
“Try spending five hours in a car going nowhere, and suddenly, oh, come to think of it, let’s pull over here and get a piece of rebar from the trunk and give you a little compound fracture below the knee. . You try it.”
“Jimmy what. I mean, remind me of your last name,” Juarez said.
“I told him let’s go see Juarez,” Luntz said, “and discuss the problem, you know? But he wouldn’t allow it. As it is, I ended up defending myself.”
“Sure, Jimmy. Could we talk about this? Could you maybe stop by?”
“Definitely not. Not in person. But I mean, I think you can show a little mercy, right?”