“This guy ain’t making sense today,” Juarez said, maybe to the Tall Man. “You are living in a happy dream,” he told Luntz, “if you think there is any such thing as mercy.”
Luntz hung up.
Jimmy Luntz drifted in the copper-tone Caddy alongside some kind of river, continuing north on 70, smoking his Camel and dropping the ashes on the floor. Gambol didn’t let you smoke in his ride, but it wasn’t his ride anymore, was it?
Anita took her vintage Camaro — her beat-up near-worthless 1973 Camaro — out under the willows by the Feather River and put on
Damn the Torpedoes
and dropped the seat all the way back and lay there with both doors open.
When the tape reached its end and would have reversed itself, the silence was such a blessing she hit the button and killed the power. Her hearing came up: the hiss of the river in this wide slow spot, and the breeze in the branches, the tick of willow leaves.
Only now did she begin to notice that the day was warm and fine. Or had been. The sunset shone down the river now, and the willows cast long shadows.
She grabbed her overcoat, a big blue thing with a velvet collar, got out of the Camaro, and tossed the coat down on the riverbank in the last patch of sun. A little dirt and leaves — who cares? She lay back and looked up at blue emptiness.
“TRY THE CAJUN CHICKEN,” she shouted at the sky.
Hearing a vehicle, she sat upright. Across the river a copper-colored Cadillac with one of those cushy-looking vinyl roofs pulled to a stop at a campsite among a bunch of cottonwoods. A man in black dress pants and a white T-shirt got out holding what seemed very much like a large revolver.
He reversed the weapon in his grip, holding it by the barrel, and tossed it underhand into the river, his gaze following its arc out to the middle of the water and then across, beyond, to meet Anita’s eyes watching him.
This guy didn’t know much about follow-through. His throwing arm wavered in the air and collapsed at his side, and he wiped his fingers on his black slacks. A slouchy guy,
a skinny guy. He wasn’t wearing a Hawaiian shirt at the moment but undoubtedly possessed several.
He took in the fact of her without seeming particularly surprised, and then he got into his Cadillac and shut the door and started backing it up. But he wasn’t leaving. He edged his ride into a shady spot and turned off the engine.
Anita considered this situation a minute before getting up and taking the keys from the Camaro’s ignition and walking around to open its trunk. Inside she located two mayonnaise jars full of washers and screws, put one under each arm, and went around to the front of the car and took from the glove compartment a loaded stainless steel.357 Magnum.
She walked thirty feet across the bare spot where she’d parked and set the two jars on the dirt. She returned to the car, faced her targets, and took aim with a two-hand grip in what was often called the Weaver stance, the gun out front of her line of sight and both feet planted wide apart, elbows flexed and her shoulders slightly hunched, and fired twice.
Both jars exploded in a mist of glass and rusty nuts and bolts.
She lay down again on her coat, the gun resting on her belly, and let the day’s last sunshine warm her on one side.
The sound of the Cadillac’s engine came to her across the water, starting up and accelerating loudly as it took
off — tires spinning, gravel rattling against the bark of trees — and then fading away.
Since sundown the temperature must have dropped twenty degrees. Luntz stopped in a movie theater parking lot in the town of Madrona and put on his shirt and white tux and sat listening to cool jazz on the Brougham’s radio. The radio’s clock display said 6:45.
When had he last eaten? He couldn’t remember. He had no hunger. This, he told himself, is fear. So live with it.
He played with the radio on the AM band until he found a station that sounded likely — a young girl reading classified ads, mowers and pickups and appliances for sale by their owners. Then the local news. No gunplay reported. They mentioned the closing of a local supermarket.
Was Gambol a corpse? Were the cops after him, or not? How had everybody’s day turned out?
He tried the FM band. Jamaican rhythms. Somebody sang
Nobody move
Nobody get hurt
— and he listened carefully to the rest of the song before turning off the radio.
The Rex Theater was showing
The Last Real Champ
,
according to the marquee. It was half over. Luntz bought a ticket anyway.
He sat leaning forward in the theater’s second row with his forearms on the seat in front of him and his chin on his hands. In the film a guy followed a woman out of a bowling alley and caught her by the elbow, and she turned, and he said, “I’d throw everything away for a woman like you.”
And she replied, “Really?” and you could tell they were headed for a happy ending.
In the final seconds of the final round the same guy rallied to destroy an opponent inexplicably forty pounds beyond his weight class. The defeated champion lay on the canvas, staring straight upward.
Early in his teens Luntz had fought Golden Gloves. Clumsy in the ring, he’d distinguished himself the wrong way — the only boy to get knocked out twice. He’d spent two years at it. His secret was that he’d never, before or since, felt so comfortable or so at home as when lying on his back and listening to the far-off music of the referee’s ten-count.
After the film it was raining, a light, steady rain. Ruthless neon on the wet streets like busted candy. Eight p.m., dark enough to ditch the Cadillac. He drove it over to the town’s tiny airport and parked and took the contents of his gym bag, the socks and underwear and toilet kit, and slipped them into Gambol’s duffel and threw the gym bag into the darkness. He took off his black dress socks and put back on his shoes and wiped the car down with the socks,
inside and outside, and left the keys under the floor mat and walked with Gambol’s bag out of the parking lot and across a field of tall wet grass toward a couple of motels, the Ramada Inn and another one whose neon sign just said VACAN. The anonymous establishment, made of fake logs and cheap in its soul, looked like a place that didn’t necessarily mess with credit cards.
He went over and booked a room. All wet, no car, no socks, paying cash.
The numbers on the radio read 10:10. Aces and zeroes. Luntz lay on his bed in the Guess What Motel on the Feather River Road with all the lights on listening to voices from a jerk-off movie in the next room.
Like the building’s exterior, the walls of this small room looked like logs. He put his hand out and discovered he touched real wood. He hadn’t known they still made things out of actual logs. He’d assumed all logs were fake.
He sat up and pointed the remote control at the television. Nothing happened. He slapped it against his palm and tried again unsuccessfully. He reached down and hefted Gambol’s duffel bag from the floor beside him and sat up with his feet on the floor and his left hand resting on the bag for a good two minutes before pulling the zipper all the way from one end to the other.
The weapon inside, with its pistol grip and its gleaming
chrome barrel about eighteen inches long, looked untouchable. He didn’t touch it. He closed the zipper and stashed the bag under the bed and went out for some no-fake mountain air.
The rain had quit. He stood under a lot of stars, too many, more stars, in fact, than he’d ever seen. The chilly night air tasted clean and innocent. That lucky feeling came over him.