Strangers (66 page)

As the plane droned north-northeast, Jorja listened to Mantovani on the headphones and indulged in a bit of uncharacteristic, girlish fantasizing. At the Tranquility Motel, perhaps she would meet a special man with whom she could share this new beginning. She recalled Dominick Corvaisis’ gentle but confident voice, and included him in her fantasy. If Corvaisis was the one for her, imagine what her father would say when he learned she was marrying one of those flaky, drunken writers who held their wives by the heels and dangled them out high windows!

She scrapped that particular fantasy soon after the plane landed, for she quickly perceived that Corvaisis’ heart was already claimed.

At four-thirty in Elko, half an hour before sunset, the sky was plated with dark clouds, and the Ruby Mountains were purple-black on the horizon. A penetratingly cold wind, sweeping in from the west, was ample proof that they had come four hundred miles north from Las Vegas.

Corvaisis and Dr. Ginger Weiss were waiting on the tarmac beside the small terminal, and the moment that Jorja saw them, she had the odd but reassuring feeling that she was among family. That sensation was something of which Corvaisis had spoken on the phone, but Jorja had not understood what he meant until she experienced it. And it was quite separate from the feelings she had for Ginger as her roadside savior.

Even Marcie—bundled in coat and scarf, her eyes still puffy from the nap on the plane, the album clutched to her chest—was stirred from her moody trancelike state by the sight of the writer and the physician. She smiled and answered their questions with more enthusiasm than had marked her speech in days. She offered to show them her album, and she
submitted with a giggle when Corvaisis scooped her up in his arms to carry her to the parking lot.

We were right to come, Jorja thought. Thank God we did.

Carrying Marcie, Corvaisis led the way to the car, while Jorja and Ginger followed with the suitcases. As they walked, Jorja said, “Maybe you don’t remember, but you provided emergency treatment for Marcie that Friday evening in July, even before we checked into the Tranquility.”

The physician blinked. “In fact, I hadn’t remembered. Was that you and your late husband? Was that Marcie? But of course it was!”

“We had parked along I-80, five miles west of the motel,” Jorja recalled. “The view to the south was so spectacular, such a wonderful panorama, that we wanted to use it as a backdrop for some snapshots.”

Ginger nodded. “And I was driving east in your wake. I saw you up ahead, parked along the shoulder. You were focusing the camera. Your husband and Marcie had stepped over the guardrail and were standing a few feet farther out, posing at the edge of the highway embankment.”

“I didn’t want them standing so close to the brink. But Alan insisted it was the best position for the best picture, and when Alan insisted on something, there was no use arguing with him.”

However, before Jorja had been able to click the shutter, Marcie had slipped and fallen backward, over the edge, tumbling down the thirty-or forty-foot embankment. Jorja screamed—“Marcie!”—flung the camera aside, vaulted the guardrail, and started down toward her daughter. Fast as she was, however, Jorja had just reached Marcie when she heard someone shouting: “Don’t move her! I’m a doctor!” That had been Ginger Weiss, and she had descended the slope so rapidly that she had arrived at Marcie’s side simultaneously with Alan, who had started down before her. Marcie was still and silent but not unconscious, only stunned, and Ginger quickly determined that the girl had not sustained a head injury. Marcie began to cry, and because her left leg was tucked under her at a somewhat odd angle, Jorja was certain it was broken. Ginger was able to allay that fear, too. In the end, because the slope was rock-free and cushioned by bunch-grass, Marcie came through with only minor injuries—a few scrapes and bruises.

“I was so impressed by you,” Jorja said.

“Me?” Ginger looked surprised. She waited for an incoming single-engine plane to pass overhead. Then: “I did nothing special, you know. I only examined Marcie. She didn’t need heroic care, just Band-Aids.”

As they put the suitcases in the trunk of Dom’s car, Jorja said, “Well, I was impressed. You were young, pretty, feminine, yet you were a doctor—efficient, quick-thinking. I’d always thought of myself as a born cocktail
waitress, nothing more, but that encounter with you started a fire in me. Later, when Alan walked out on us, I didn’t fall apart. I remembered you, and I decided to make more of myself than I’d ever thought I could. In a way, you changed my life.”

Closing the trunk lid, locking it, handing the keys to Dom (who had already put Marcie in the car), Ginger said, “Jorja, I’m flattered. But you’re giving me much too much credit. You changed your own life.”

“It wasn’t what you did that day,” Jorja said. “It’s what you
were.
You were exactly the role model I needed.”

Embarrassed, the physician said, “Good God! No one’s ever called me a role model before! Oh, honey, you’re definitely unbalanced!”

“Ignore her,” Dom told Jorja. “She’s the best role model I’ve ever seen. Her humble mutterings are pure
shmontses
.”

Ginger Weiss whirled on him, laughing.
“Shmontses?”

Dom grinned. “I’m a writer, so it’s my job to listen and absorb. I hear a good expression, I use it. Can’t fault me for doing my job.”

“
Shmontses,
huh?” Ginger Weiss said, pretending anger.

Still grinning, the writer said, “If the Yiddish fits, wear it.”

That was the moment when Jorja knew Dominick Corvaisis’ heart was already claimed and that she would have to exclude him from any romantic fantasies she might cook up in the future. The spark of desire and glimmer of deep affection shone brightly in his eyes when he looked at Ginger Weiss. The same heat warmed the physician’s gaze. The funny thing was, neither Dom nor Ginger appeared quite to realize the true power of their feelings for each other. Not quite yet, but soon.

They drove out of Elko, toward the Tranquility, thirty miles to the west. As twilight faded toward night in the east, Dom and Ginger told Jorja what had happened prior to her and Marcie’s arrival. Jorja found it increasingly difficult to hold the good mood she’d been in since stepping off the plane. As they sped through the gloom-mantled barrens, with craggy and threatening black mountains thrusting up at the horizon under a blood-dark sky, Jorja wondered if this place was, as she had thought, the threshold of a new beginning…or a doorway to the grave.

•

After the Lear landed in Salt Lake City, Utah, Jack Twist quickly transferred to a chartered Cessna Turbo Skylane RG piloted by a polite but tight-lipped man with a huge handlebar mustache. They arrived in Elko, Nevada, at four-fifty-three, in the last light of day.

The airport was too small to have Hertz and Avis counters, but a local entrepreneur operated a modest little taxi company. Jack had the cab take him—and his three big suitcases—to a local Jeep dealership, where they
were getting ready to close, and where he startled the salesman by paying cash for a four-wheel-drive Cherokee wagon.

To this point, Jack took no evasive action to shake off a tail or even to determine if he had one. His adversaries clearly possessed great power and resources, and regardless of how frantically he tried to elude them, they would have sufficient manpower to keep tabs on a lone target trying to escape on foot or by taxi in a town as small as Elko.

Once the Cherokee was his, Jack drove away from the dealership, and for the first time he looked for a tail. He glanced repeatedly at the rearview and side mirrors, but he spotted no suspicious vehicles.

He went directly to an Arco Mini-Mart that he had noticed during the taxi ride from the airport. He parked at the dark end of the lot, beyond the reach of the arc lamps, got out of the wagon, and surveyed the shadowy street behind for an indication of a pursuer.

He saw no one.

That didn’t mean they weren’t out there.

In the Mini-Mart, the blindingly excessive fluorescent lighting and chrome display fixtures made him long for the good old days of quaint corner groceries operated by immigrant couples who spoke with appealing accents, where the air would have been redolent of Mama’s homemade baked goods and Papa’s made-to-order deli sandwiches. Here, the only aromas were a vague trace of disinfectant and the thin odor of ozone coming off the motors of refrigerated display cases. Squinting in the glare, Jack bought a map of the county, a flashlight, a quart of milk, two packages of dried beef, a little box of small chocolate doughnuts—and, on a morbid impulse, something called a “Hamwich,” which was “a guaranteed delicious one-piece sandwich of pulverized, blended, remolded ham paste, bread, and spices,” and which was claimed to be especially “convenient for hikers, campers, and sportsmen.” Ham paste? At the bottom of the airtight plastic package was this legend
: REAL MEAT
.

Jack laughed. They had to tell you it was “real meat” because, even though it was wrapped in clear plastic, you couldn’t tell what the hell it was by looking at it. Yes, sir—oh, yes—ham paste and real meat:
That
was why he had gone to Central America to fight for his country.

He wished Jenny were alive and here with him. Real meat. As opposed to fake, polyester meat. She’d have gotten a kick out of that.

When he walked out of the Mini-Mart, he paused to study the street again, but again he saw no one suspicious.

He returned to the Cherokee at the dark end of the lot and put up the tailgate. He opened one of his suitcases, withdrew an empty nylon rucksack, the Beretta, a loaded clip, a box of .32 ammunition, and one of the pipe-type silencers. As his breath steamed from him in the cold air, he
transferred the groceries from the paper bag to the rucksack. He screwed the silencer onto the gun, slammed the loaded clip into the butt. When he had distributed all the loose ammunition among the many pockets of his heavily insulated leather jacket, he closed the tailgate.

Behind the wheel of the Cherokee once more, Jack put the Beretta on the seat beside him and set the rucksack on top of it for concealment. Using the new flashlight, he passed a few minutes studying the map of Elko County. When he switched the flashlight off and put the map away, he was ready to engage the enemy.

For the next five minutes, he drove through Elko, using every trick he knew to reveal a tail, staying on quiet residential streets where traffic was light and where a surveillance team would be as obvious as a festering cold sore, no matter how good they were. Nothing.

He parked at the end of a cul-de-sac and got an anti-surveillance broadband receiver from one of the suitcases. This device, the size of two packs of cigarettes, with a short antenna that telescoped out of the top, received all possible radio bands from 30 to 120, including FM from 88 to 108. If a transmitter had been fixed to the Jeep while he was in the market, enabling a tail to follow at a distance, his broadband receiver would pick up the signals; a feedback loop would cause the receiver to emit an ear-piercing squeal. He pointed the antenna at the Jeep and slowly circled the vehicle.

The Cherokee had not been bugged.

He put the broadband receiver away and got behind the wheel of the wagon again, where he sat for a minute in thought. He was under neither visual nor electronic surveillance. Did that make sense? When his adversaries put those Tranquility Motel postcards in his safe-deposit boxes, they must have known he would come to Nevada at once. Surely they also knew that he was a potentially dangerous man, and surely they would not allow him to plot against them on their own turf unobserved. Yet that seemed to be precisely what they were doing.

Frowning, Jack twisted the key in the ignition. The engine roared.

On the Lear from New York, he had pondered the situation at length and had arrived at several theories (most of them half-baked) as to the identity and intentions of his adversaries. Now he decided that nothing he dreamed up was half as strange as whatever was actually happening.

No one was watching. That spooked him.

The inexplicable
always
spooked him.

When you couldn’t understand a situation, that usually meant you were missing something important. If you were missing something important, that meant you had a blind side. If you had a blind side, you could get your ass shot off when you were least expecting it.

Alert, cautious, Jack Twist drove north from Elko on State Route 51. After a while, he turned west, following a series of gravel and dirt tracks, sneaking behind the Tranquility Motel instead of making an open approach on I-80. Eventually he was reduced to traveling overland on sometimes dangerous terrain, from an elevation as high as four thousand feet, down across sloping foothills toward the plains. When the clouds parted, revealing a three-quarter moon, he switched off the headlights and continued, guided only by the glow of the lunar lamp, and his eyes soon adjusted to the night.

Jack topped a rise and saw the Tranquility Motel, a lonely group of lights in a vast dark emptiness, a mile and a half below and southwest of him, this side of I-80. There were not as many lights as there ought to have been; either the place had little business or it was not open. He did not want to advertise his arrival, so he would proceed on foot.

He left the Beretta in the Jeep and took the Uzi submachine gun. Actually, he did not expect trouble. Not yet. His adversaries, whoever the hell they were, had not teased him into coming all this way merely to kill him. They could have killed him in New York if that was all they wanted. Nevertheless, he was prepared for violence.

In addition to the Uzi—and a spare magazine—he took the rucksack of groceries, a battery-powered directional microphone, and the Star Tron night-vision device. He pulled on gloves and a toboggan cap.

Jack found the hike invigorating. The night was cold, and when the wind gusted, it stung but not unpleasantly.

Because he’d expected to go to ground immediately upon arrival in Nevada, he had dressed suitably when he left New York. He wore high-topped hiking shoes with hard rubber soles and heavy tread, longjohns and jeans, a sweater, and a leather jacket with a thick quilted lining. The crew of the chartered Lear was surprised by his appearance, but they treated him as if he were in tuxedo and top hat; even an ugly man with one cast eye, dressed like an ordinary laborer, elicited respect when he could afford to lease a private jet rather than fly commercial airlines.