"I chickened out," I said, standing up. "So you left him a note."
"I know I —"
"You’re fucked up. I’ll go get your shot."
Over the course of two thousand miles, it was bound to happen.
Tuesday morning, I’d passed the exits for Red Desert, Table Rock, Bitter Creek, and Point of Rocks, when thirty miles east of Rock Springs, I heard the whine of a siren — a Highway Patrol SUV crowded my bumper. With my Glock wedged into the pouch behind the passenger seat, I pulled over into the emergency lane, reassuring myself, Why would he want to search the car? Orson’s unconscious. I’ve got the proper license and registration. Ricki’s may not have even happened. I’m golden.
The officer tapped on my window. I lowered it.
"License and registration," he said in that austere, authoritative tone, and removing the papers from the glove compartment, I smiled and handed them through the window.
He walked bowlegged back to his hunter green Bronco and climbed inside.
The clock in the dashboard read 10:15, but it felt later. The prairie had turned arid. Across the northwestern horizon, a chain of tan hills rose out of the flatland. Gray clouds massed beyond.
I noticed the sweater and jeans I’d worn into Ricki’s lying on the floorboard on the passenger side. It happened. They were stained with Luther’s blood, and I regretted not having thrown them out last night at the gas station in Cheyenne. I started to scoop them up, but the gravelly crunch of the officer’s footsteps stopped me.
I righted myself and looked back through the open window into his face. The officer was my age. He reminded me of a lawman in a movie, though I couldn’t recall which one.
"Know why I stopped you, Mr. Parker?" he asked, handing back Orson’s license and registration. I placed them on the passenger seat.
"No sir, officer."
He removed his reflective sunglasses and stared down at me through hard, pale eyes.
"You were swerving all over the goddamn road."
"I was?"
"Are you drunk?" A gust of wind lifted his hat, which he caught and shelved under his arm. He had unruly blond hair, the variety that, if allowed to grow out, might bush into an Afro. The image of the officer with a blond Afro lightened my heart, and I chortled.
"What’s funny?"
"Nothing, sir. I’m not drunk. I’m tired. I’ve been driving for the past two days."
"From Vermont?"
"Yes, sir."
He glanced at the suitcases in the backseat. "Traveling alone?"
"Yes, sir."
"Which one of them suitcases is yours?"
How sly.
"Both of them."
He nodded. "And you only been on the road since Sunday?"
"Yes, sir."
"Must be in some kind of hurry."
"No, not really. I just wanted to see how fast I could cross the country."
I thought he might grin at my ambition, but he remained as stolid as ever.
"Where you headed?" he asked.
"California."
"Whereabouts in California?"
"L.A."
"Eighty don’t go to L.A. Eighty goes to San Francisco."
"I know, but I wanted to drive through Wyoming, seeing as how I’ve never seen this part of the country. It’s beautiful."
"It’s fuckin’ shitland." I gazed into the gold badge above his green breast pocket, filled with the presentiment that he was on the verge of ordering me out of the vehicle.
"Well, you ought to know that you’re heading into one hell of a storm," he said.
"Snowstorm?"
"Yep. Forecast says it’s supposed to get real bad."
"Thanks for the warning. I hadn’t heard."
"Might want to find a motel to hole up in. Maybe in Rock Springs, or Salt Lake, if you make it that far."
"I’ll consider that."
He looked askance at my face; he’d noticed my fading bruises. "Someone hit you?"
"Yes, sir."
"When did that happen?"
"At a bar this past weekend."
"Must’ve been one hell of a fight."
Everything was one hell of a something with this guy. I was definitely putting him in a book.
"Looks like you took a few knocks there," he said.
"Yeah, but you should see the other guy." That threadbare cliché got him. He cracked a smile and, looking off across the wasteland, reckoned that he’d better get going. Peering into the rearview mirror, I watched him saunter back to the Bronco.
Cool fucking cucumber. And I meant me.
Rock Springs was an ugly brown town, dedicated to the extraction of coal, oil, and a mineral called trona from deep beneath the surrounding hills. It was larger and more industrial than I’d anticipated, and I wondered what twenty thousand people did for fun in this northeast boundary of the Great Basin Desert.
I pulled into the congested parking lot of a supermarket. It had been raining and snowing for the last half hour, the flakes sticking to the desert but melting on the sun-warmed pavement. Jogging through the windblown snow toward the entrance, I feared that at any moment the roads would accept the ice, and then we’d never reach the cabin.
The supermarket was an entropic battlefield — frenzied shoppers compulsively stripping the shelves of bread, milk, and eggs. Because I didn’t know what Orson had stocked at the cabin, I grabbed a bit of everything — canned food, fruit, cereal, loaves of white bread, even several bottles of the best wines they had (though they were quite unexceptional). The checkout lines stretched halfway down the aisles, and I’d started to roll my shopping cart to the back of one, when I realized I’d have to wait for an hour just to pay. Fuck this. You’ve done a hell of a lot worse than steal.
So I pushed the cart right on through the automatic doors, back out into the storm. The parking lot was frosted now, blanching as the snow swept down in torrents. Behind the strip mall, red cliffs stood out sharply against the white, and it occurred to me that I’d never seen a desert snowfall.
Upon reaching the Lexus, I opened the back door and began shoveling groceries on top of my suitcase and Walter’s. Orson was making a racket. I told him to shut up, said we were almost home. The parking space beside mine was empty, so I left the cart there and opened the driver’s door.
"Excuse me, sir?" An obese woman bundled up in a puffy pink parka, which did not flatter her proportions, stared at me quizzically from the trunk of the Lexus.
"What?"
"What’s that sound?" She tapped on the trunk.
"I don’t know what you’re talking about."
"I think there’s someone in your trunk."
I heard it, too, Orson shouting again, his voice muffled but audible. He was saying something about killing me if I didn’t give him a drink of water.
"There’s nothing in there," I said. "Excuse me."
"Is it a dog?"
I sighed. "No. Actually, I’m a hit man. There’s someone in my trunk, and I’m taking them out into the desert to shoot them in the head and bury them. Wanna come along?"
She laughed, her face rumpling. "Oh my, that’s rich! Very rich!" she said, chuckling maniacally.
She walked away, and I climbed into the Lexus and backed out of the parking space. The pavement was becoming icy, so I drove tentatively out of the parking lot and back onto Highway 191, as nervous as a southerner on wheels in a snowstorm.
31
WIND blasted the car. The road had disappeared.
I’d been following a single set of tire tracks for the last forty miles. Leaving Rock Springs, almost four hours ago, they’d cut down to the pavement. But as I plowed north up the mind-numbingly straight trajectory of Highway 191, the contrast between the blacktop and the snow had dissipated. Now, looking through the furious windshield wipers, I strained to see the faintest indentation in the snow. It would soon be too deep to negotiate. Even now, I felt the tires slide at the slightest pressure on the accelerator or the brake. Aside from a hurricane that came inland into the Piedmont of North Carolina seven years ago, this was the worst weather I’d ever seen.