“I am,” Berke said, but she still stared out her window at the white sea of sand and clumps of spiny vegetation, darkened green by the newly-tinted glass.
“Believe me,” he repeated, “I’m going to do a real job.” He didn’t have to tell her he’d gone over his new role very thoroughly with Roger Chester. Organization was his mantra; how difficult could this be? “By the way, are you feeling the air-conditioning back there?”
“It feels great,” Terry said.
Nomad grunted. He had to give credit where credit was due. Mr. Pep Boy had taken the Scumbucket somewhere—maybe the agency garage—and had the van scrubbed and detailed, though scrubbing and detailing didn’t do much for beat-up battleship gray. Still, it was amazing that there wasn’t a single crumb of last year’s marijuana brownies anywhere on the floorboards, not a forgotten straw nor a plastic cup lid. In fact, there were new rubber mats, still with the new rubbery smell. The multitudinous variety of soft drink, tea, beer, mustard, hot sauce and other stains that had blotched the seats for years like a collection of Rorschach inkblots was gone as if absorbed by a magic ShamWow. The air-conditioning worked like an oil sheik’s dream. And it was nearly silent.
But what really blew the top off the Awesome Meter was the fact that Mr. Dark Glasses At Night had gotten that tint job done within a single day. For the ordinary man, it would’ve been a week on the wait. Windshield, side windows and back glass: all were pimped with the cool green, which made sunglasses unnecessary and also helped the air-conditioning.
Nomad knew the reason for that, as they all did: somebody—Jeremy Pett by name—wanting to fire a shot into the van wouldn’t have as clear a target as before.
On first seeing it, Nomad had asked their Scumbucket benefactor if the pop-up machine-guns, the oilslick shooters and the automated armor shields were in working order, and which seat was the ejector?
“I’m not sure of that other stuff,” came the reply, “but how about riding shotgun today?”
Which was how Ariel had wound up in that front passenger seat, though of course Nomad had known Mr. Fit-At-Fifty was just pulling his chain.
He hadn’t slept very soundly the last couple of nights, and today he was feeling it. When he closed his eyes, he saw George’s face with the oxygen mask strapped to it, in that bed in the hospital whose smell took him back to a death in Louisville. He saw George looking into one corner of the room—It was waiting. Right up there—and then into the other.
I opened my eyes and that girl was here.
Why would George have dreamed about that girl? Of all people…her?
I believe in you, George.
It was creepy, Nomad thought. Way creepy. And then adding that line about safe travel and courage to the song. Ariel had written it down in her notebook, with the other lines begun by the word Welcome.
That single word had been powerful enough to bring tears to Mike’s eyes. And powerful enough for him to dare to start writing a song.
Creepy, he thought. But it could be explained. Dreams were just dreams and Mike had been a lot more sentimental than he’d let on. So there was really no big deal. It was a song. And what else would it be?
“So how about it?” Berke persisted, speaking to their driver. “What do we call you?”
He thought it over. There had been a name for him, back in the day. Before he’d gotten so serious…well, no, he’d always been serious…but, still…
It had been given to him…no, he’d earned it, as he’d earned everything in his life, the hard way…by his fraternity brothers at the University of Oregon. He decided it was good enough for now, as well.
“True,” he said. “With an ‘e’. Opposite of ‘false’.”
Berke tried it out, to see how it sounded and felt: “True. Okay, I guess that works.”
“I can’t see calling you that,” Ariel said.
True frowned. A big fat-assed red SUV was right in front of him, he couldn’t spare even a quick glance at her. “Why not?”
“I don’t know, I just can’t.”
“Oh.” He got it. “Right. Because I’m old. Because you’re thinking you need to be saying ‘sir’ to me, and calling me ‘mister’?”
“I didn’t say you were old.” She paused, trying to figure out exactly what she was trying to say. After a moment more of uncomfortable silence, she asked, “How old are you?”
“Fifty-three. Coming up to fifty-four in November. My story: met my wife in college, at Oregon, married her after graduation, been married—very happily—for thirty years. We have two daughters, one in enviromental science for the city of Tucson, and another an FBI agent in Dallas. We have one grandchild, a boy named Wesley Truitt Adams. My wife and I like to go on cruises when we can, and we enjoy river rafting and mountain biking. I like reading military history. I have a stereo room, and I listen to a lot of Bruce Springsteen and the Eagles but I also like Tony Bennett and bluegrass. What am I leaving out that you might like to know?”
“Big jump from Oregon to Arizona,” Nomad said. “How’d that happen?”
“I was actually born in Yuma. Went to high school there. Played football with the Criminals. Senior quarterback until a Kofa High King got through the defense and knocked me into orbit, three games from the end of the season. But I guess I wanted to see something green. I wanted to see a forest and hear rain and…you know…do something that you feel you need to do. So you go do it. Anything else?”
“You were a policeman before you joined the FBI?” Ariel asked.
“Oh, yeah. Did all that grunt work.” True was trying to read the white-on-black sticker on the bumper of that red SUV. He sped up a little bit, getting closer. The SUV had a Texas tag. The part of the sticker he could read said Have Some Fun. Underneath that were small words he couldn’t make out. Nun? He gave it some more gas.
Nomad asked, “You were a cop in Tucson?”
“Hold it, hold it, I’m trying to—” And then he was close enough to read the smaller words. The second line read Fuck A Nun. About two seconds after seeing that, he saw a black decal with an upside-down cross on it at a corner of the rear glass, and then he realized something was staring at him from the back of the SUV.
He could see the whites of two eyes and below them a gleam of bared teeth. It was a black dog, he thought. A big dog. Its eyes were fixed upon him as if it could see him clearly and distinctly through the green tint. Maybe it could. The way the thing stared at him, immobile though both the van and the SUV were doing about sixty miles an hour and the highway was flashing past underneath, made True think that if that dog could get at him it would rip his throat open from ear-to-ear.
A Melville quote came to him: I saw the opening maw of hell.
True felt the small hairs on the back of his neck tingle. Suddenly a white arm braided with a barbed-wire tattoo emerged from the dark within, hooked around the animal’s neck and pulled the dog away from the glass…
…and then the SUV’s brakelights flared red, True saw a rear-end collision about to destroy his perfect driving record and perhaps the way his head sat upon his spine, and he swerved the van and trailer into the left-hand lane directly in front of a Winnebago painted a sand-colored camo scheme. He came within inches of scraping that hideous sticker off the metal and he felt the whipsaw of the trailer shudder through the van’s frame. The trailer swayed back and forth a few times, as True cut his speed to keep the rig from dragging them off the interstate. The shriek of tires and blare of horns followed.