“I don’t get it.”
“Heinz figured it out,” Sami said. “What he planned, okay, was to burn down the condo and leave enough clues so that the insurance company would deny the claim because of arson, but not enough evidence that a jury would decide arson. So you sue the insurance company and the jury gives you millions in puny damages.”
“Punitive damages,” I said.
“Okay,” Sami said.
“And that works?!”
“Oh, yes,” Sami said solemnly. “Heinz has done it many times, okay?”
“I love this country,” I said.
“Me too,” said Sami. “Of course, witnesses are not good, okay?”
“I wasn’t going to be a witness!” Nathan yelled.
Sami asked, “Who knew?”
“Ask,” Nathan snapped. “I would have told you.”
Sami shrugged.
“I assume Heinz owns a gun,” I said.
“A big one.”
“Will he come alone?”
“Heinz has no friends,” said Sami. “Except me, okay?”
“Sami,” I said. “You’re not Heinz’s friend anymore, okay? You’re our friend, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Do you know why this is?” I asked.
It was a rhetorical question, but Sami answered, “Because you have the gun, okay?”
I guess if you grow up in Beirut you have a firm grasp of the dynamics of friendship.
“Because I will shoot you,” I said, “if you try to double-cross us.”
I can’t believe I said that. And yes, I am embarrassed about it. I’m embarrassed for two reasons: One; it’s a tired old line from about thirty-seven bad movies. Two; of course he was going to try to double-cross us.
“No, no, no, no, no,” Sami said. “We’re the friends now, okay?”
As an expression of unabashed duplicity, Henry Kissinger couldn’t have it said it better.
“So you’re going to do exactly what I tell you to do, right?” I said to Sami.
“You bet,” Sami said. “What do you want me to do?”
I tried to maintain some vestige of authority as I said, “I don’t know yet. But when I do know, I want you to do whatever it is.”
With that ringing declaration we settled in to wait for Heinz. Not that it was necessarily a given that Heinz would get there first. I hadn’t checked in with Graham, and knowing him like I do, he’d have already started to track me down.
Chapter 22
I figured out that we were in a sort of race in reverse. That is, the longer it took me to chauffeur Heinz-57 to wherever it was we were going, the more time I’d give Joe Graham to get someone there first.
Did you get that?
The point is that I lightened up considerably on my normal lead foot.
See, where I live, Austin, Nevada, is in the middle of your wide-open spaces. In fact they call Route 50, which stretches across Nevada into Utah, “The Loneliest Highway in America,” and we tend to look at the speed limit more as a suggestion than a command. I’ve never gotten a speeding ticket. In fact I don’t even know anyone who’s ever gotten a speeding ticket.
So I normally drive pretty fast but now I slowed down, thinking that “55 Saves Lives” might be pretty literal in this case.
Heinz-57 caught right on.
“You are driving slow,” he said.
“I’m doing the limit.”
“Faster.”
“You told me not to speed.”
He thought about this for a second, then said, “Speed cleverly.”
“It ain’t the autobahn, you know.”
“Step on it.”
I don’t know where he got the “Step on it” bit, but I took him at his word and put that pedal to the floor.
It had nice pickup for a four-wheeler.
“What are you trying to do?!” he yelled.
“Follow instructions!”
“You wish for the police to stop us?!”
Well, yes, bonehead. That’s what I had in mind as long as you gave me permission. I didn’t say that, of course.
Anyway, he yelled, “Slow down!”
“Make up your mind.”
Then Heinz-57 got on the phone and started punching numbers.
“Don’t listen,” he ordered.
“What did you say?” I asked.
“He said not to listen,” Hope answered helpfully.
“I didn’t hear him,” I said. “I wasn’t listening.”
There was something in me that loved jerking Heinz-57’s chain. Maybe it was the hormones.
It didn’t matter, though, because the other party didn’t answer. I could hear that mousy little voice on the other end say, “The mobile phone customer you are trying to reach is not answering. Please hang up and try later.” As if it’s any of their business. I mean if I want to sit there and let that phone ring until Alexander damn Graham Bell gets up and answers it, I will.
Heinz-57 wasn’t all that thrilled either. I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw that he had this bewildered, confused look on his puss. You know, that sort of dazed expression that Type Triple-A anal retentives get when things aren’t going exactly the way they planned.
I made Heinz-57 out to be one of those kind of cooks who absolutely, positively cannot substitute an ingredient in a recipe. There are some people like that, you know. They have everything together and are just paragons of control until they find out they have to use Monterey Jack instead of cheddar and then they just go to pieces.
I filed this piece of psychological insight away, figuring it might be useful at some point, because it was clear just then that Heinz-57 had just had to swallow his first slice of cheddar. (I guess Neal would call that a “tortured metaphor” but screw him.) Whoever it was that old Heinzy was calling, he damn well expected him to be there. And the fact that it was a mobile phone led me to believe that Heinzy was not precisely sure where he was going.
This would, of course, drive a Type Triple-A anal retentive German (Neal would call this a “double redundancy” but screw him again) just nuts.
“Not home, huh?” I said.
See, I’m one of those kind of cooks who just can’t resist squirting lighter fluid on the charcoal briquettes.
“I told you not to listen!”
“What’s that?”
“I told you not to listen!”
“Sorry?”
“He told you not to listen, sweetie.”
“I told you not to listen!!”
“Yeah? And what are you going to do about it?” I asked. You know, lighter fluid, briquettes. Hormones, whatever.
He sat back and sulked for a minute. Then he said, “When we get to the desert you will see what happens.”
“We’re in the desert, dickhead.”
“Language, sweetie.”
“Sorry.”
“Into the Mojave,” Heinz specified. “Where your bodies will never be found.”
“Sorry?” I said. “What did you say? I wasn’t listening.”
But I sure as hell was. Old Heinz-57 was taking us up to the Mojave, where the sun could kill you in about forty-five minutes. That is, if Heinz-57 didn’t want the giggles of shooting us. And he was right-either way, nobody would ever find our bodies. Not mine, not Hope’s, not Nathan’s, not Neal’s.
Neal-the reluctant father of our unconceived child.
Then a really awful thought occurred to me. If Heinz-57 was planning to dump our bodies, had he already dumped Nathan’s?
And Neal’s?
Chapter 23
I was trying to stay awake.
You’d have thought it would be easy, right? What with the fear, anxiety, hunger and thirst and all. But there’s something in the human system that just wants to shut down when things get too hideous, and I was struggling to stay conscious and keep that gun pointed right between the beady eyes of our new friend Sami.
So I tried to think about things.
First I tried to focus on the dynamics of our situation. Heinz was on his way and had a gun. Heinz would be thinking that we were already dead and all he had to do is pick up Sami and drive back. So the thing to do was to hide, throw Sami out as bait, and get the drop-oh God, did I say “get the drop”?-on Heinz before he figured out that we weren’t dead.
Simple, right? What could go wrong?