A wasteland of strangers (17 page)

It was sure a nice one, even if it was retro like her house. A boat's something else I'd like to have someday, one of those sleek fiberglass jobs with gold glitter mixed into the paint. We owned a powerboat once, a fourteen-foot inboard, when the Bitch was still living with us. But we couldn't afford to keep it after she ran off with that jerk from Kansas City. Daddy used to let me drive it sometimes. Driving a boat's easier than driving a car. All you have to do is steer. Docking's the hard part, especially when the water's choppy like this morning—

What was that?

I was still standing by the ladder, looking now toward where the sheriffs launch was making loops offshore near the Carey house. I cocked my head and listened. Lots of sounds—the boat engines, loons crying somewhere, a kind of creaking from the dock pilings or the hoist under the Chris-Craft's weight—but not the one I thought I'd heard. I turned away and started back toward the gate. And then I heard it again. A funny kind of sound. I couldn't quite identify it or tell where it was coming from.

For about a minute I stood quiet, listening. Then I went back to where the ladder was and climbed down to the float. I heard the sound again then, but I still couldn't tell what was making it, and like a magnet or something, it drew me right in next to the boat. Pretty soon it came again, and this time it gave me goose bumps all over because I realized where it was coming from and what it was.

When I tugged at the heavy canvas, a flap of it lifted right up; it wasn't really tied on the float side. And when I looked underneath, there was John Faith, lying in the bottom of the boat, on his back behind the driver's seat. Clothes wet and all bloody on one side, his face twisted and his eyes shut tight, the sounds I'd heard—a kind of low moaning— coming from way down deep inside.

George Petrie

AT FIRST I didn't know where I was. I opened my eyes to an unfamiliar room full of shadows and dark shapes, and panic surged and drove me out of bed, halfway across rough carpeting. I stood, trembling and disoriented, my heart raging against my ribs. It wasn't until sounds penetrated from outside—traffic noise, distant voices, the slam of a car door—that the fog cleared away and I remembered.

Motel. Best Western just off Highway 80, outside Truckee.

On the run with a small fortune in stolen bank funds.

Sweet Christ, I really did do it, didn't I?

I groped back to the bed, sank down on the rock-hard mattress. The sheets were sweat-sodden; so were my pajamas. How long had I slept? Digital clock on the TV, red numerals shining blurrily in the gloom. I rubbed grit out of my eyes. Nine-twenty. I'd pulled in here at what... close to midnight? Bed an hour and a half later. Nearly eight hours—

The money!

I lunged to my feet again, fumbled the nightstand light on. Breath hissed out between my teeth: The garbage bags, all six, were on the far side of the bed, where I'd put them last night. This was a ground-floor unit and I'd backed the car in close, unloaded the bags two at a time. Nobody saw me, I made sure of that. Triple-locked the door, tested the lock on the window, and then pulled the drapes tightly closed. Nobody could have gotten in. But I went around the bed anyway, felt each bag, opened each to make certain the packets of bills were still there.

$209,840.

I'd counted it before I'd crawled into bed. Every packet and loose bill, not once, but twice. $209,840. More than I'd expected—a small fortune even in this inflated economy. So many things it can buy me. Women . .. better-looking women than Storm, younger and kinder and even better in bed. Not that it's possible for anybody to be much better in bed than Storm—

No, the hell with her. I won't think about her anymore. She's part of the past, the Pomo prison. Free of her, too, now. The money is the future, and the future is all that matters.

In the bathroom I splashed cold water on my face. My pulse rate was back to normal, but I was still twitchy. I kept thinking about the money, only instead of soothing me, it produced a worm of anxiety. Six garbage bags full of cash. And every mile I drove, every time I stopped somewhere to eat or fill the gas tank or use a rest room, I ran the risk of something going wrong. Accident, car-jacking, traffic violation, other possibilities I couldn't even imagine right now . . .

Cut it out, Petrie. Get a grip on yourself. Two more full days on the road, at least fifteen hundred miles between me and Pomo when the vault lock releases Monday morning, and I can't do it wired the whole time, worrying about everything, feeling and probably looking like a fugitive. That's how you make mistakes. Fatal mistakes. Tight control from now on. I'm finished otherwise. Remember that. Don't forget it for a second.

I felt better after a long, hot shower. Clearheaded. One thing I could do about the money was to get it out of those garbage bags and into a couple of suitcases. Large, lightweight suitcases. Nobody at a motel would think twice about a man carrying luggage from and to his car. Just another anonymous business traveler. Buy the cases in Reno or Sparks, make the transfer out in the desert somewhere or maybe wait until I reached Ely tonight.

When I came out of the bathroom, the digital clock read five past ten. Overdue getting back on the highway. But hunger gnawed at me—I hadn't eaten anything since noon yesterday, couldn't have choked down food last night if my life depended on it. There was a Denny's adjacent to the motel; I recalled seeing it when I drove in. Quick breakfast. . . no, better make it a large one, stoke up so I wouldn't have to stop again for food this side of Ely. Okay. I zippered my overnight bag, unlocked the door, and started out.

A scowling gray-haired man was standing in front of my car, peering down at the license plate.

Surprise made me suck in my breath, loud enough for him to hear. His head came up. I jumped back inside, shut and locked the door, leaned hard against it. Sweat dribbled on my face and neck; for a few seconds I couldn't seem to get enough air. I made myself breathe in shallow little pants, until the blood-pound in my ears diminished and the feeling of suffocation went away. Then I moved unsteadily to the window, eased aside a corner of the drape.

The gray-haired man was gone.

I fumbled the door open again, still clutching the overnight case, and stuck my head out. The parking lot seemed deserted. I ran to the Buick, dropped my keys twice before I got the trunk open. I threw the case inside, ran back into the room, caught up three of the garbage bags and hauled them out, stuffed them into the trunk, and then ran back for the others. Dripping sweat when I finished. Legs aching as if I'd run ten miles. I slammed the trunk lid, started around to the driver's door.

Christ, there he was again, hurrying toward me from the motel office. Still scowling. Gesturing. Calling out, "Hey! You, Mr. Smith. You just wait a minute—"

I lunged in under the wheel, locked the door. It took three tries to slot the key into the ignition.

He was close now. I saw his mouth move again, but I couldn't hear

him over the roar of the engine. I jammed the gearshift lever into Drive, bore down too hard on the gas pedal, and almost lost control as the car surged ahead. At the exit then, out onto the business road paralleling Highway 80. The freeway entrance ramp was a short ways ahead; a red stoplight at the intersection turned green just in time. And I was on the ramp, on the highway, and in the mirror I could no longer see the motel lot or any sign of pursuit.

The words the gray-haired man had mouthed back there . .. something about signs, backing in? Can't you read a sign? You're not supposed to back in. Was that all it was about? Motel employee or self-righteous guest annoyed because of the way I'd parked my car?

I laughed. But it had a wild sound and I cut it off. I wasn't certain that was what he'd been saying; I couldn't be positive. It might've been something else. He might have been something else.

Suppose his car had been close by and he'd gotten to it in time to keep me in sight? Suppose he was back there right now, following me?

Eyes on the mirror again. Heavy traffic clogged all three lanes; too many other cars traveling at the same speed I was and none of them familiar. I goosed it up to seventy, seventy-five. Still couldn't tell. Too dangerous to drive so fast; highway patrol kept a close watch for speeders along 80.1 slowed down to the legal limit and held it there.

All the way into Nevada I kept watching the mirror. Watching and wondering and struggling to regain the feeling of tight control.

Richard Novak

THAYER WADDLED INTO my office trailing smoke from one of his fifty-cent panatelas. He didn't stand or sit; instead he leaned his fat rump against the table under the window. "You look like hell, Novak," he said. "Why don't you go home, get some rest, before you fall apart?"

I knew how I looked. And I felt worse, but I wasn't about to admit that to Thayer. "You find Faith yet?"

"No."

"Then what're you doing here?"

"Came to tell you I called off the boat search. Sent Abrams and the launch back to Southlake."

"What!" Without thinking I jerked forward, slapped the desk with the flat of my hand. The sudden movement stoked the pain in my broken nose; it felt as though the middle of my face was on fire. "What'd you do that for?"

"Wasted effort, fuel, and manpower, that's why. Abrams was up and down the shoreline half a dozen times, a mile in both directions. If the body was on the surface anywhere, he'd have spotted it."

"What about Barrelhouse and the other sloughs?"

"What about them? Body couldn't have drifted that far."

"I'm not thinking about a dead body."

"Faith couldn't have swum that far either. Why the hell would he, even if he'd been able to?"

"You forget the Cutoff bridge?"

"No, I didn't forget the bridge. Deputies up there all night, you know that. Deputies in boats in the sloughs at dawn, too. Nothing. He's not in the marshes, dead or alive. Body's snagged somewhere along the shore, or on the bottom, farther out, weighted down by what he was wearing. Either way it'll come up sooner or later. There's nothing more any of us can do right now. And that's not just my opinion, it's Burt Seeley's, too."

"Goddamn it, why do you and Seeley and everybody else automatically assume Faith's dead?"

"You know better, huh?"

"I've got a feeling he's still alive."

"A feeling. That and a quarter'll buy you a pack of gum."

I had nothing to say to that.

"Where's this feeling tell you he is?" Thayer said. "No reports of stolen vehicles, so he'd have to be somewhere in the area."

"Holed up."

"Yeah, only there haven't been any reports of sightings or break-ins either. And the shore search teams checked every possible hiding place."

"You think so? There's always one or two that get overlooked, no matter how fine an area is combed."

Thayer made a derisive sound. "You say you put a bullet in him before he went into the lake. You sure about that?"

"I'm sure." I'd replayed the fight and chase a dozen times in my memory; every time, I saw Faith stagger after I fired the second round. No mistake: That slug hadn't missed. "Somewhere in the upper body. Too dark to tell just where."

"Okay. So you add shock, an open wound, and loss of blood to the temperature of the water. Man, I'd be surprised if he lasted more than ten minutes out there. The odds of him getting far enough to find an overlooked hidey-hole must be, what, a few thousand to one?"

"I don't care about the odds."

"Right. You got a feeling." Thayer sucked in smoke, blew it out in thin little spurts. He wasn't quite smiling, but I could tell he was enjoying himself—almost as much as he had with the media earlier. He didn't like me any more than I liked him. "Seasoned cop has a hunch biting his ass, he's right and everybody else is wrong. Hunches never lie."

"Up yours, Leo."

That almost made him mad. He settled for nasty instead. "What's the bottom line here, Novak? You want Faith to be alive so you can get your paws on him, pay him back personally for the busted nose and what he did to your bimbo?"

I pushed up out of my chair. The pain rush brought tears to my eyes. "Back off," I said.

"Hell, everybody in the county knows you were screwing her—"

"I said, back off!"

"Or else what? You're in no shape to get tough with me."

"Keep baiting me and we'll find out."

He started to say something more, thought better of it, and fixed me with a glare that looked hot on the surface but was lukewarm underneath. He didn't want any trouble with me, even as banged up as I was. There was no sand or steel in the man; just lard, bluster, and hot air. He was a piss-poor sheriff and a piss-poor excuse for a human being.

Say the same about yourself, Novak, after last night.

"You through talking, Leo? If so, get the hell out of my office."

He said, "Faith's dead. Rest of it is just bullshit," and stomped out and slammed the door behind him.

My nose was bleeding again; I could feel the dribbles through the packing. I sat down, tilted my chair and my head back. Focused on the pain, wrapped myself in it. As bad as it was, it was more tolerable than the hurt I felt inside. Storm, John Faith, Dick Novak ... all of us bound together in one poisonous sack of blame and guilt. But Faith, damn him, was the magnet of my hate. A malignant force, like a plague carrier, ever since his arrival in Pomo; if he hadn't come here, none of it would have happened. And he was still out there somewhere, still alive, still malignant. I didn't just feel it, I knew it, the way you know that if you survive the dark of night you'll see daylight again. Until he was found there'd be no daylight for me—no ending, no closure, no new beginning. Faith dead or in custody wouldn't bring Storm back or make last night any easier to live with, but at least then I could go on.

Another knock on the door. This time it was Delia Feldman who stepped inside.

"Somebody else to see you, Chief."

"If it's the mayor again—"

"Audrey Sixkiller."

"Audrey? Tell her I'm busy. I don't need my hand held."