Jimson’s face softened, but just a little. “There was something sticky spilled on the seat.” He shrugged. “It might be Coke. We’ll look into it.”
Morgan looked back at him, deflated. What could a detective find in a stain of spilled Coke? Maybe a trace of some drug? Or maybe nothing. And Falon could have ditched the bottles anywhere. Easy to toss them back in the woods in lovers’ hollow, two more empty bottles rolled in dirt and buried among years of collected trash.
He watched Jimson lock his barred door, drop the key into his uniform pocket, watched his retreating back, watched the heavy outer door close. He was locked in a cell by himself—at least for that he was grateful, thankful for the privacy. Maybe Jimson had taken pity on him. Or maybe Jimson thought Morgan had turned too dangerous to share space with the town’s three drunks. All he knew was, this wasn’t happening, couldn’t be happening. There was no way he could have killed someone, and no way he could have forgotten such a horrible act as if it had never happened.
When Jimson had gone, Morgan sat down on the stained bunk. The cell wasn’t as big as their small bathroom at home, but this cubicle wasn’t blue and white and sweet smelling, it was scarred with the filth of generations, that the janitor had tried repeatedly to scrub away, he could see the paler but still visible scour marks. Walls scarred with the shadows of old graffiti, newer smears of dirt, and stains of urine behind the toilet. He read the scribbled messages that were still legible, repeated the four-letter words to himself as if they might help him hang on to his sanity. Two inscriptions begged God’s mercy, penned by someone lying on the iron cot writing at a forty-five-degree angle. The cot’s striped mattress was grimy along the edges and sported three long brown smears. A threadbare blanket and a worn sheet were folded at the foot of the cot beside a grimy pillow. The washbasin was streaked brown with years of iron-rich water. Above the basinhung a ragged, torn towel. Across the corridor a drunk was singing dirty words to “Down in the Valley.” He used the toilet, washed his hands and face with the tepid water but avoided the towel. He smoothed his hair with his wet hands, cupped water in his hands, rinsed his mouth again and again but couldn’t get rid of the dead taste. What had Falon put in his Coke? This had to be something stronger, even, than moonshine. There was no other explanation for the way he felt and for his loss of memory. Whiskey wouldn’t do that, and how could Falon have forced that much whiskey down him? No,the liquor was soaked into his clothes; even his boots, when he pulled them off, smelled of booze, and the leather was still faintly damp.
But as he sat there in the cell alone, his sense of innocence began to fade. Whatmight have happened during those long hours he couldn’t remember? Whatmight Falon have made him do, what would he have beenwilling to do, drugged, that he wouldn’t do while sober?
He spread the sheet over the cot and lay down. The corridor light in his face made his head throb. From the moment Jimson had jerked him out of his car, scenes from yesterday and detached snatches of conversation had swum through his head in a muddle, none of it making sense, Falon’s voice urging him to leave the shop, Falon trying to get him to go somewhere … He remembered telling Falon he never left the shop for lunch. Well, it was too late now to change whatever had happened. What he didn’t understand was why? Falon was mean, had always been mean, but why this horror just now, when he and Becky and Sammie were finally together again?
But that would be exactly Falon’s way: hit them when they were happiest—out of sadism, out of a hunger for Becky that she had never encouraged and that, for all these years, could have festered, could have left Falon waiting for just the right moment, the cruelest moment. But was fate—certainly not the good Lord himself—so cruel that Falon’s evil would at last be allowed to destroy them?
25
The plane burst out of the clouds with a buzzing roar banking directly over Lee, it dropped straight at him, its shadow swallowed him, then the dark silhouette swept on by, raking the field below the lowering plane; at the far end of the rough, unplowed land the yellow Stearman touched down. Wheels kicking up dust, it swung around and circled back toward him, its propeller ticking over slowly as the plane taxied. Lee stepped aside as it rolled up to him. The front cockpit was empty. In the rear cockpit, young Mark Triple pushed back his goggles, but didn’t kill the engine. “Hop in, Fontana.”
Reaching for the struts, Lee made the long step up onto the wingwalk. Pausing, he looked down into the open metal hopper where Mark had bolted in a makeshift seat for him. Not much to hold him in there, only that little leather strap screwed into the sides of the plane. He glanced back at Mark.
“Climb on in, it’s safe as a baby carriage.” Leaning forward, Mark handed him a pair of goggles. “They’ll keep the bugs out of your eyes. Make sure your seat belt’s fastened.”
Warily Lee stepped in, groping for the seat belt. He got the ends together, pulled the belt so tight he nearly cut himself in half. He wasn’t half settled when the engine roared again and they were moving, Lee gripping the sides of the hopper hard, the ground racing by in a brown blur. He was lifted, weightless, as the tail came up, then a belly-grabbing leap, forcing him to hang on tighter than he had ever clung to a bucking cayuse. Ahead, a flock of birds exploded away in panic. Looking gingerly over the side, he hung on with both hands as the plane banked, tipping sideways. They swept low over the rusty tin roofs of the packing sheds, not a soul stirring in the ranch yard. In the paddock, Lucita’s spotted mare crowded nervously against the rail fence, staring up at the rising plane. In Lucita and Jake’s yard Lee glimpsed a tiny flash of white, Lucita’s little Madonna. Then they were out over the green fields, the melons and vegetables, the cotton and alfalfa broken by irrigation ditches thin as snakes, then the sharp line where the green stopped and the pale desert stretched away to the low Chuckawalla Mountains, brown and barren and wind carved. He’d feel more secure if he were riding behind Mark instead of up here in front where he felt like he should have control but didn’t—but hell, if this bird took a dive he wouldn’t know what to do anyway.
Forcing himself to settle back, he concentrated on the panorama below, so different than what you could ever see from the ground. He told himself this was a good feeling, floating high above the earth with nothing to hold him up there, and he tried to set his mind on the job ahead, patting the traveler’s check folder in his shirt pocket, making sure it was safe. He’d never pulled a scam like this one. The excitement of it made his stomach twitch, but also made him smile. Yesterday he’d skipped lunch, borrowed Jake’s pickup and headed for town, first for his post office box—and his birth certificate was there waiting for him. Smiling, he’d headed for the Department of Motor Vehicles where he applied for a driver’s license in the name of James Dawson, hoping to hell the clerk hadn’t known Dawson. Hoping the DMV wouldn’t check past the P.O. address, wouldn’t start digging around in the birth certificates. There must be a lot of Dawsons in the world, but he had to have some kind of ID. He told the clerk he was a mining consultant moving down from San Francisco, would be doing some work for Placer Mining Company. Said he hadn’t had a driver’s license in years because the last company he worked for furnished a driver, he said that when he was in the city he preferred to take the cable car or walk. He’d had to take a driver’s test, a piece of cake on the open desert roads, and he had aced the written test.
Fifteen minutes after he received his temporary license he had returned to the post office, parking around on the next street out of sight. Entering the lobby, standing in line before the window with the temporary cardboard sign reading BANKING BUSINESS, he was encouraged by the long line. A busy teller, hurrying through her transactions, was just what he wanted. A teller making quick decisions wouldn’t want to linger over unnecessary questions. When his turn came he gave the young redhead a grandfatherly smile, asked her for seven hundred dollars in traveler’s checks, in hundred-dollar denominations. He had stood admiring the young smooth look of her as she recorded the check numbers in the customer’s transaction folder, which was printed with the logo of the bank. He told her conversationally that he was on his way to San Francisco. She said she loved San Francisco, that the fee would be two dollars, and she had counted out the traveler’s checks to put into the folder. As he reached to his hip pocket, he picked up the folder. He dug convincingly in his pocket for his billfold, then looked surprised, looked up at her, frowning. “Oh, shaw. I’m sorry, miss. I left my wallet in the car.”