Yet everything about him, from the sway of his shoulders to the thrust-back arrogance of his face, said it was no trouble at all, no problem, somebody else's affair. He was steady, brisk, steering his numb-faced wife and the kid toward the car with quick efficient strides, for all the world no more concerned than if he were out taking a little exercise after church in the languid hundred-degree heat. She and Bridger were nothing to him, less than nothing, and the thought of it made her seize with hatred. If she'd had a gun, she would have used it. Or she could have. She really believed she could have.
She had something on him, though-evidence, a totem, an artifact. Even as he mounted the cement curb in the Mercedes and took off across the vacant lot, she saw it lying there on the pavement, right where he'd slid into the car and slammed the door behind him. His jacket. Marooned in the rush to escape. Dropped. Forgotten. She was sweating, her heart pounding, already shortening her stride, and she bent without thinking to snatch it up before reversing direction and breaking for her own car with everything she had.
All the while, caught behind the Winnebago as Bridger pounded the horn and she leaned out the window shrieking and gesticulating as if she'd come unhinged and the road opened up and the Mercedes pulled steadily away from them until it was a faint gleam in the distance and then, heartbreakingly, gone altogether, the jacket lay on the floor at her feet. It was there as Bridger swerved in and out of traffic, dialing 911 to shout lies to the dispatcher-“Drunk driver!” he yelled into the phone, “Drunk driver!”-there all the way through the long ascent to South Lake Tahoe while she fixed her eyes on the road, rounding each curve with the expectation of seeing the blinking lights of the highway patrol and Frank Calabrese up against the car with the handcuffs on him. Then they were in the town itself, cruising the streets, scanning the parking lots and back alleys, rolling in and out of motel lots, scrutinizing every red car they came across, and she was so intent on the chase, so wound up in what she was doing, she never gave the jacket a thought. Or the slash on her head either. It was just there, part of the world in its new configuration.
The altitude at Tahoe was 6,225 feet, according to the sign posted at the town limits, and the weather was radically different here. There were streaks of snow on the mountains above the lake, the sky was socked-in and the air coming through the vent felt chilly against her face. Bridger was hunched over the wheel, steering with his wrists, looking beaten. For a long while they said nothing, the car creeping past shops, supermarkets, gas stations, condos, one street after another. “Let's face it, we lost him,” he said finally, his eyes rimmed red with exhaustion. “He could be visiting a friend in one of these condos, he could be in a casino in Stateline, he could-” He shrugged, said something she didn't quite get. “The license-you know, the dealer plates-do you remember what they said, I mean, the dealer name? I think it was Bob-Something Mercedes?”
“Bob Almond Mercedes/BMW,” she said. “Larkspur.”
He'd put on his thoughtful look. They were going so slowly they might as well have been walking. “Because I was thinking-I mean, this isn't getting us anywhere-we could call Milos and he could maybe check out the dealer and see who bought the car, what name, I mean-”
“I don't want to go back there,” she said, surprising herself. “And besides, he wouldn't use his real name, would he?”
“Get a serial number or something-a vehicle identification number.”
“What good's that going to do?”
He didn't answer. Instead, he said, “What about the jacket?”
The jacket, yes. It was flung at her feet like one of those mats they put down to protect the carpet. She reached for it, smoothed it in her lap: raw silk, in black, with red detailing. A smell of cologne rose to her nostrils, and something else too, something deeper, denser: the smell of him, the smell of his body, his underarms, his skin. “Hugo Boss,” she announced, turning over the label. “Nice to know the bastard has taste, huh? Did you see him,” she said, running a hand through the inside pocket, “the way he looked at us? The balls?” There was something there, something hard-sunglasses, Revo, two hundred fifty dollars a pair. She held them up so Bridger could see.
He gave them a cursory glance and then his eyes jumped suddenly to the mirror-someone must have beeped at him-and he hit the blinker and pulled into a No Parking/No Standing Zone as a little black car, a Mini, shot past them. After a moment, he took the glasses from her and held them at length as if examining some dead thing he'd found under the sink, then clapped them on his face. They were wraparounds, metallic silver. “Yeah,” he said, checking himself out in the rearview, “I hear you.”
She plunged her hand into the outer pocket on the left side and came up with a comb to which a straggle of dense dark hairs adhered, a Sharpie pen that looked unused and a thin wad of tissue. An odd feeling came over her, even as Bridger turned to her and said, “How do I look?” She slid her fingers over the teeth of the comb, lifted it to her nostrils-there was the smell of him again, of his scalp and the shampoo he used, and it was as if she knew him in some elemental way, as if she'd been with him, the violation mutual.
A light rain began to spot the windshield. Bridger's head floated there beside her, but he wasn't Bridger exactly, not with the slit reptilian orbits of his eyes, the reflective lenses slashing at his features, reducing him. “Take them off,” she said.
He swiveled his head and removed the sunglasses, and even as he said, “Is that it?” she dug into the other pocket and came up with a slip of paper, a receipt from Johnny Lee's Family Restaurant, and held it up to the light.
“What is it, a credit card receipt? That could be something. What does it say?”
It took her a moment, the print blurred and pointillated, but then it came together, the total, the tax, the account number and the slashing confident signature under the cardholder's name: “Bridger Martin.”
“We have to get rational about this,” he was saying, or at least that was what she thought he was saying. “Rational,” wasn't that it? Of course he might have been talking about “Rashomon,” the Kurosawa film, and for the tiniest sliver of a second she wondered just how the three of them-she, Bridger and the thief-fit into that scenario, with its shifting perspective and deconstructed narrative. She saw Toshiro Mifune, his mouth a rictus of fear and aggression, flailing his sword, and then she was back to Bridger, who was saying something else now, something she was too tired to process.
They were in a nondescript restaurant, fake wood paneling, lights so dim you could barely make out the menu, tuna on rye with a sliver of dill pickle for $9.95 and three dollars for iced tea. It was late in the afternoon now, high summer but wintry for all that, a damp high-altitude gloom hanging over the town as if this weren't California at all, but someplace perennially dreary. Like Tibet. Was Tibet dreary? Her mind was wandering. She was exhausted-and hungry-and here was the tuna sandwich she'd ordered herself in a voice that must have lost all control of the long vowels and those nearly impossible fricatives (a side of french fries) because the waitress had given her the interplanetary stare and she felt like some animal on a leash, but she didn't care: this was her life and there was nothing she could do about it. Not in her present condition. Plus she had Bridger to deal with-she'd dragged him into this, and now he was a victim too “(I don't even have a Citibank card,” he protested, and she imagined him whining, his voice reduced, plaintive, weak). Bridger was upset-she couldn't blame him-but her eyes dropped to the sandwich and shut him out.