There was a road sign at the intersection, and when the guy braked there I had a quick look at the wooden arrow pointing back up the way we’d come. It read: Indian Hill Road. Okay. Now I knew exactly where my former prison was situated.
We pulled over into a cleared area in front of the store. It was a weathered building made of clapboard and corrugated iron siding, with pitched roof lines to prevent snow from piling up on top. It didn’t have a name, or if it did there was no sign announcing it that I could see. We got out, all three of us, and the guy let the dog nuzzle around my legs as we tramped inside. He liked what it did to me; he laughed in my face, a barking sound like the German shepherd might have made. I thought; Easy, easy, he’s not important, none of this is important, to keep myself from doing something foolish, like knocking the laugh back down his throat.
The interior of the store looked and smelled like country groceries everywhere: weak lighting, closely set aisles, rough-hewn floor; mingled odors of damp and dust, brewing coffee, refrigerated meats and overripe cheese and stale bread. A woman sat behind a long counter area, half of it a meat and deli case and the other half a checkout counter, along the right-hand wall. She was in her sixties, grossly fat and encased in a bulging dress much too small for her. A cigarette in a black holder slanted from one corner of her mouth.
The guy said, “Mary Alice, who you think I got here?”
She gave me an impersonal glance, the kind you’d give a side of beef to see how much fat there was on it. “Never saw him before.”
“His name’s Canino, been staying at one of the cabins up on Indian Hill. His wife run off with his car last night and stranded him.”
“Stranded him, eh?”
“Can you beat that?”
“Known it to happen,” Mary Alice said, and shrugged. The aftertremors of the shrug ran down her layers of fat like an earthquake’s along a fault line.
“He lives in Stockton but he don’t know how to get home,” the guy said. “Thinks maybe he can get a bus from Sonora.”
“Suppose he can.”
“Offered me fifty bucks to drive him but I can’t do it. You know somebody?”
“Jed, maybe. Fifty bucks, you say?”
I was getting tired of the two of them talking about me as if I weren’t there. And that damned dog was still poking my legs with his slobbery muzzle. I said to Mary Alice, “Fifty dollars, that’s right. It’s all I’ve got to spare so I won’t haggle.” Then I said to the guy, “You mind calling your dog away from me?”
“What for? He won’t do nothing to you unless I tell him.”
“Get him away from me.”
“Now listen, pal-”
“Get him away from me.”
There was something in my voice or my face that wiped away his amused expression, stiffened him a little. He scowled, seemed to think about taking offense, looked at me in a new way, and then moved a shoulder and said, “What the hell,” and called the dog over to where he was standing.
The fat woman was looking at me in a new way, too, as if she were seeing me for the first time. She probably was. And it was as if the guy’s amusement had lodged in her after it left him, because a faint smile kept tugging at one corner of her mouth. I had the impression then that she didn’t like the asshole any more than I did.
She said to me, “I’ll ring up Jed, see if he can take you. You want anything before I do?”
“I could use some hot coffee.”
The guy said he could use some too, and she went and poured two cups from an urn behind the deli case. She gave me mine first. I drank it standing at the counter; he drank his wandering up and down the aisles, throwing things into a grocery basket, the shepherd following him like a shadow. He caught my eye once but he didn’t hold it. Whatever else he thought of me now, he’d changed his mind about one thing: He didn’t think I was such a schmuck anymore.
AFTERNOON
It was not somebody called Jed who drove me to Sonora; it was a gnarly old geezer named Earl Perkins. Jed was out somewhere, two other people Mary Alice called couldn’t or wouldn’t do the job, even for fifty dollars, and it was almost one o’clock before she rounded up this Perkins character. The asshole and his dog were long gone by then. I was so impatient to get to Sonora, ask my questions at Rite-Way Plumbing and Heating before it closed for the day, that I paced the store aisles to work off some of the nervous tension. Only then I found my thoughts turning to Kerry, to how much I wanted to hear her voice and know that she was all right, and the telephone began to draw my attention, and this just wasn’t the time or place to make that kind of call. So I took myself outside and paced the parking area instead, trying not to think about anything at all.
Perkins showed up in a newish Jeep Cherokee that had snow tires on it but no chains. He was an easy seventy, small and gristled and tough-looking, like a piece of old steak. He looked me up and down, said to my face that I was a damned fool for letting a woman screw me instead of vice versa (Mary Alice laughed at that), and demanded the fifty dollars in advance. I gave him two twenties and two fives. Mary Alice had charged me a dollar for two coffees and a blueberry muffin, so that left me with eighteen dollars cash.
Perkins was a fast driver, even on snow-slick roads; he was also a damned good driver, and once I accepted that, I was grateful for the speed. The impatience was still in me; I sat forward on my seat and touched the.22 in my jacket pocket and thought again about Rite-Way Plumbing and Heating and what I would find out there. A name I would recognize or one I wouldn’t? A lead or a dead end? Either way, I would know soon.
Once we passed through Murphys, the stark winter landscape began to disappear. What had been snowfields and snow-laden spruce and fir became, in these lower elevations, a mosaic of patchy white, dry brown, the dark green of oak as well as evergreen, and hints of spring verdure. When we turned onto Highway 49 at Angels Camp, Perkins drove even faster. There weren’t many cars on the road and he zoomed around most of the ones we came up behind, as if he were trying to win some kind of high-speed rally. It put a little of the edginess back into me then because I was worried about us getting stopped by a county cop or a highway patrolman, of my having to show ID. But I didn’t say anything to him. He would have resented it and probably driven even faster.
It was two-fifteen when we came into the outskirts of Sonora. I knew the town a little, or had a few years ago, but my memories of it weren’t pleasant. An old friend named Harry Burroughs used to live near there and he had hired me to do a job for him and it had turned out badly, very badly. That had been my last visit to this area. It had been summer then and the town had been teeming with tourists come to gawk at “an authentic Mother Lode gold town.” Now, in early March, it was all but deserted-oddly so, I thought. A few cars creeping along the main drag, no pedestrians on the steep sidewalks, most of the stores wearing Closed signs. It might have been dying-a venerable relic rescued and born again for the tourist trade, now enfeebled once more and ready to take its place beside all the other ghosts of the California Gold Rush.
I said as much to Perkins: “Looks like a ghost town.”
“Well?” he growled. He wasn’t much of a talker-he hadn’t spoken a dozen words to me on the drive-and he seemed to resent my wanting to start a conversation now that we had arrived. “Why shouldn’t it be?”
“I don’t know. I was just commenting.”
“What’d you expect on a weekend this time of year? A parade?”
“Weekend?”
“Well?”
“What day is this?”