She smiled ‘Hi’ as he perched himself on a stool by the bar. ‘What would you like?’
‘Hi. Coffee, please.’ Even before he asked for it, coffee was implicit in the idea of shelter offered by the diner.
Once he was sat at the bar no one took any notice of him. His hair dripped on the counter and into his coffee. 34 He ordered food, looked around. A dozen people, mostly alone or in pairs. Every now and again the window bleached white by lightning. The barwoman brought his food, asked where he was heading.
‘I’m on my way to Nelson,’ he lied reflexively. ‘I got lost in the rain some way back.’
‘That’s what it’s like this time of year. Never rains but it pours. Never pours but it floods. And it always rains.’
‘And you have rooms here?’ Walker was scooping up his food American-style, using just the fork, talking and chewing.
‘For one? For one night?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s no problem. Matter of fact, it wouldn’t be a problem if you wanted rooms for eight people for a week.’
Walker paid for everything and took a beer upstairs. The room was on the top floor. He spent twenty minutes standing under a shower that was not quite hot enough, then sat on the edge of the bed, drinking beer and thinking about tomorrow, wrapped in a towel. Clothes drying over a fan-heater.
He finished the beer and walked over to the window, the town hunkered down under the rain. A car eased along the main street, slowed, pulled into the parking lot beside the diner. Walker flicked off the light and went back to the window. The car had disappeared from sight but he could see puddles stained red by the tail lights. Then the lights were switched off and there was the slam of doors opening and closing. He pulled on his clothes, warm from the heater, damp. He tossed a few things from the bathroom into his hold-all and moved out into the corridor, locking the door behind him. A sign said emergency exit. It had not been used in a long time and he had to wrench it noisily open. The fire escape was behind the neon welcoming you to the Monroe Diner. He pulled the emergency door shut and zig-zagged down the rusted steps. Rain purpled and greened around him. Hanging from the lowest rung he dropped to the wet tarmac. He moved round the parking lot to the car he had seen from his window. By now they would be on their way up to his room. All the doors were locked. He scanned the ground, found a large stone. Lightning flashed lazily. When the thunder came he hurled the stone through the driver’s window. As he opened the door the interior light flashed on for a moment, a dim echo of lightning. He swept glass from the seat, pulled the ignition wires from the steering column. As soon as he touched them together the engine sparked into life.
He edged round the diner and out on to the rain-slick street. Two hundred yards down the road he flicked on the headlights. In a film now, he thought to himself, someone hidden in the back seat would put a gun to his head and whisper, ‘Freeze.’ Suddenly nervous, he looked over his shoulder, almost disappointed to find no one there.
Wind and rain howled through the broken window. He was chilled from his damp clothes. Twenty miles out of town he pulled over and clambered awkwardly into a sweater and jeans. He stretched the wet shirt over the broken window. It bulged and sagged and made no difference, but with dry clothes and the heater blowing he felt better.
As soon as he was warm he became sleepy. When he felt himself nodding off he slapped his face and turned off the heater until he was cold and alert, miserable again. Alternating between shivers and yawns. There was no question of stopping — he had to put as much distance as possible between himself and Carver before morning. Assuming it was Carver. He went over the scene back in Monroe and realized that for all he knew the occupants of the car were simply travellers who had decided to rest up for the night instead of pressing on through the storm. Rather than being a stroke of luck that he had been at the window as the car drove in, it could equally have been whatever was the opposite of a stroke of luck — he was too tired to think of the word, maybe there wasn’t one — that they came along when they did and set off his paranoia like an alarm. Shit! He pounded the steering wheel and accidentally sounded the horn. He reassured himself by playing the scene over again, this time focusing on his reactions — on how it hadn’t occurred to him even for a moment that the car hadn’t come for him. Even if they didn’t convince, the double negatives at least obscured the issue. Anyway, there was no going back. There was no going back but either way, he thought, going back over the same question again, he should get rid of the car as soon as he could — but wherever he left it it would still point in his direction. As soon as they found the car, any lead he had built up effectively counted for nothing — but he couldn’t abandon the car in an unfindable place without marooning himself. The relentless orbit of thoughts tired him but at least, he reasoned, setting off the whole process again, at least it kept him from falling asleep.
The rain showed no sign of letting up. When he could barely keep his eyes open he pulled off the road and squelched up a narrow lane. He turned off the engine, climbed over the seat and curled up in the back.
Rain hammered on the roof of his dreams.
CHAPTER THREE
He was woken by the alarm of bird calls, a wet sun squinting through branches. He opened the door and pissed yellow into the trees. All around was the slow drip of last night’s rain. His mouth was dry and he cupped a few drops in his hand to moisten his tongue.
He touched the loose ignition wires and the engine came to life immediately, heaving clear of the suck of mud. Back on the road the sun shone hard through the windshield. In the distance was a blue line of mountains.
A sign said MERIDIAN 120 MILES. The highway glistened.
Meridian, as the thickness of the phone book had suggested, was a big city. He drove downtown and parked the car beneath the track of the Elevated Train. It was a perfect spot to leave the car: abandoned vehicles were strewn all around, many already stripped down to rusty frames as if picked clean by vultures. Walking away he looked into the back of a burnt-out station wagon and noticed the remains of a road atlas: a core of red highways, smoke-grimed, becoming charred, leading to ashes.
He bought coffee and a street plan. Rampart Street was eight stops along the line but after so long in the car he preferred to walk. He followed the El, walking beneath the giant concrete legs that strode through the city. The sun streamed through the track, cross-hatching the ground with shadows. Patches of sky blazed through the angles of wood and metal. Every ten minutes a train thundered overhead, obliterating everything. In his childhood the future had been depicted in terms of white capsules zipping noiselessly along rails suspended over the efficient life of a gleaming city. What had actually resulted was graffiti-mottled trains rattling over a landscape of rusting vehicles that no one wanted.
Rampart was a dilapidated street running parallel to the El, a couple of blocks to the south, number seventeen a faded one-storey place. A green-and-yellow FOR RENT sign added colour. He tried the bell and waited. A bird, bright as a goldfish, was perched on the phone line. Walker clambered over a fence and made his way round the back. Wooden steps led up to a door which opened when he tried it. He looked around and moved inside, shutting the door behind him, eyes adjusting. A tap dripping. He walked through the kitchen and into the hallway. Mail was piled up by the front door, junk mostly, a couple of letters and — he recognized the handwriting instantly — a card from Malory. Two lines: ‘Hope this reaches you before you move. Thanks for everything.’ Unsigned, postmarked Iberia, the date too smudged to read.