The Last Coin (31 page)

“Turn left at the corner, along the wall,” Pickett said. “We’ve got to follow him. Out for a constitutional! Turtles, for God’s sake!”

Andrew banked around the corner. There was Uncle Arthur, disappearing three hundred yards down, behind a bank of parking garages. “There’s no exit gate down here,” Andrew said, shifting down into second gear as he approached the little alley that ran along the garages. “He’s not going out.”

“Just follow him.” Pickett gripped the metal dashboard, his face hovering inches from the windshield. “Don’t lose him. This is vital.”

Andrew peered sidewise at his friend’s livid face. “No problem,” he said. “I won’t lose him.”

But just then they lost him. The alley behind the garages swung around in a slow arc, dead-ending against a fire hydrant which sat at the edge of a sward of grass and flowerbeds. Uncle Arthur didn’t care about grass and flowerbeds; he’d shunted between the fire hydrant and a cinderblock wall and was tearing across the lawn, straight through a shower of lawn sprinklers, the tires of the electronic car leaving little curvy ruts.

“Back out, for the love of … Go around!” Pickett was wild with the chase.

Andrew threw the Metropolitan into reverse and slammed away backward down the alley, weaving with the speed of it, almost out of control. He rammed the palm of his hand down onto the horn, honking his way out onto the street again as a carful of gray-haired women jerked to a stop to let him in. The Metropolitan roared off, making a false turn into a cul-de-sac, squealing to a stop, and backing out of it, too. A horn honked in the street, but Andrew didn’t bother to look back. He was fired with his driving, and he tore away, shouting with laughter, punching Pickett in the shoulder. “Relax!” he hollered. “We’ll catch him!”

Lousy driver, was he? If only Rose could see him now, catapulting around the grounds of Leisure World, chasing a tiny automobile carrying God’s own mob of turtles and driven by an impossibly strange old man. How many people could say they’d done that? He realized all of a sudden that Uncle Arthur had disappeared, and he throttled down as they approached a corner, swinging out toward the right gutter. What did the racing man say about turns? Go in slow; come out fast—something like that. He set his teeth and jammed down on the accelerator, sliding around, tires squealing. Maybe it was best that Rose
couldn’t
see him.

“There he is again!” cried Pickett, grabbing his forehead.

“Hold on!” cried Andrew, and he bounced the left side of the car up over the curb, the right side rolling up a little concrete wheelchair ramp. They started off across the lawn as Andrew surveyed the rearview mirror for signs of pursuit. The idea of a earful of ancient Leisure World police tearing along behind appealed massively. Rose would have to bail him out of a makeshift prison on the grounds. Maybe she would bring him the clothes of a washerwoman as a disguise. She’d find him manacled to a shuffleboard pole. He laughed out loud. Stay out of the sprinklers, he told himself, angling away toward the street again. If the Metropolitan bogged down …

“Slow up, for God’s sake!” shouted Pickett. A garage wall loomed ahead. Andrew hauled on the wheel, skidding past the edge of it, the tires skiving out a strip of wet sod. A woman carrying a golf club across the lawn ran for an open door, shouting. Andrew hooted and jammed his foot down onto the accelerator, spinning the wheels and then abruptly heading for the street again. They’d saved a hundred yards taking the lawn. He’d learned something from watching Uncle Arthur. The old man had guts; you had to give him that.

And there Uncle Arthur was, driving on the street again, down toward the shopping center. He was going out the south exit. They were traveling too quick now; in a moment they’d be upon him, and it would be evident that they were following. Andrew spun the steering wheel and they rocketed in behind a collection of dumpsters, where he braked to a stop. “Give him a second,” Andrew said, breathing hard.

“Don’t give him more than that,” said Pickett. “We’ve got to get out of here. If anyone calls the gate and reports us, the guards will shoot us on sight. They carry weapons, damn it. These old men can’t be expected to take the long view when it comes to ripping up lawns.”

“Well it was you who were so hot to trail him. I was just …” Andrew suddenly put the car in reverse, backed around, and then headed out onto the street, looking back over his shoulder. He’d seen an official-looking car creeping along slow across the mouth of the alley some hundred yards distant. “They’re after us!” he said, feeling a flush of excitement again.

“Out the gate!” cried Pickett, swiveling around to look out the rear window. “Quick, before they spot us and radio ahead.”

Andrew hesitated. He was tempted to make a U-turn and confront the prowling search car—speed past it honking his horn, lean out of the window and gesture insanely with both hands, lead it on a wild chase through the twisting streets, clipping off fire hydrants, crunching down mailboxes, scattering pigeons on the lawns, straightaway through the fence and onto the oilfields, dragging fifty feet of chain-link with him. Motive? he’d say when they booked him. And then he’d laugh.

He grinned at Pickett as they set out—approaching the gate. There was a car in front of them, slowing down to cross the little, bent steel fingers that thrust out of the road. A single guard lounged in the gatehouse. Andrew could hear the phone ringing as the car in front of them sped off. On a wild impulse, he tromped on the clutch and shoved the Metropolitan into first gear, gunning the engine and rolling down his window.

“Don’t,” whispered Pickett.

Andrew nodded with an air of utter confidence. “I’ll handle this.”

The guard, holding the phone now, hunched down suddenly and peered out through the window at them, astonished. He hollered into the receiver. “Yes!” he shouted. “It’s them!” and he let the phone drop and lunged toward the door.

“Go!” shouted Pickett desperately.

There was a click and a bang, and a long wooden gate began to sweep down across the road. Andrew regarded it coolly. Pickett slammed Andrew’s shoulder and shouted. “For the love of God!” The guard fumbled in his coat—for what? A gun, a badge, a can of Mace? Andrew laughed out loud and started to speak, but then his foot was kicked off the clutch and Pickett’s shoe was suddenly jammed atop his own on the accelerator. The Metropolitan shot forward, under the half-shut gate, careening toward a concrete planter, the steering wheel twisting to the left.

Andrew jerked around and grappled with the wheel, shouting incoherently and pulling it too far to the right, the car skewing around in a fishtailing slide. “Get your damned foot … !” Andrew shouted, pulling the wheel back again. All in an instant, Pickett sailed against the door. Off balance now, he pressed down all the harder on the accelerator and on Andrew’s shoe as Andrew slammed his left foot down onto the clutch. The engine screamed, a cloud of exhaust shot out, and Andrew let up on the clutch, anticipating the sound of smashing engine steel. He heaved again at Pickett’s foot.

“Oh!” Pickett yelled. “Damn!” and they skidded past the tail end of a parked car, spinning around into the parking lot of the Leisure Market. A shopping cart flew. Andrew pulled his foot, freed at last, off the accelerator, jammed on the brake, and then, his hands shaking on the steering wheel, he drove slowly and deliberately across the parking lot, out the exit onto Westminster Boulevard and up the street until he turned into the parking lot of the Haynes Steam Plant, pulling in among a clutch of cars and cutting the engine.

He sat for a moment in silence and then said, “They won’t find us here.” He breathed heavily to counteract the slamming of his heart. Then he got out of the car and went around to the back to examine the hubcap that had scraped the curb. It was mashed in all the way around, as if someone had beaten it with a hammer. “Aw hell,” said Andrew. It wasn’t just anywhere that you could get a hubcap for a Metropolitan. The front bumper was dented too, where he’d hit the shopping cart. The chase had taken its toll.

Pickett still sat in silence when Andrew climbed back in. “Sorry about the foot on the accelerator,” he said. “But what in the world did you want to tell the guard? I told you they were licensed to carry weapons.”

“I had the wild urge to quote poetry to him,” Andrew admitted, grinning suddenly and recapturing some little bit of the outlandish feeling that had surged through him when he had confronted the guard.

“Poetry!”

“Vachel Lindsay, actually.” Andrew let out a whoosh of breath, calming down now. “ ‘Boomlay, Boomlay, Boomlay, Boom!’ ”he quoted, slamming his fist against the dashboard.“ ‘Banging on the table with the handle of a broom!’ What do you think? Would it have done the trick?”

“Of course,” said Pickett. “Of course it would have. That’s just what it would have done.” He twisted around and looked past the cars, back toward the street. “He wasn’t in the shopping center.”

“Who? The guard?”

“No. Your uncle. His car wasn’t parked in the shopping center. He’s gone on. Where in the world? We lost him because we were screwing around.”

Andrew frowned. “Say it—
I
was screwing around. Let’s go. They’re not going to chase us. The guards don’t have any jurisdiction off the grounds, and they aren’t going to call the police over something like this. The city police don’t send out squad cars over a chewed-up lawn. I didn’t mean to do that—to cause any damage. I got carried away.”

Pickett kept silent.

“Let’s head down to rat control and talk to Chateau—see what he’s found out about the fish elixir.”

“Good enough,” said Pickett, sighing. “But where the devil was the old man taking those turtles, and why? How are we going to find out? This is vital. I’m sure of it.”

Andrew shrugged as they turned off into traffic, driving up Westminster Boulevard toward Studebaker Road, intending to make a U-turn, then head back again east, along the edge of the oilfields.
Vital
—Andrew couldn’t fathom it. What was vital were about a dozen things: painting another swatch of house, getting the kitchen together, being
responsible
for a change. And here he was out hoodwinking around, as if he were eighteen. What he
wasn’t
responsible for was the godamned fate of the world, for the machinations of Pickett’s bogeymen. Damn all this business about coins and magic. What had come of it but a dented hubcap?

And damn the pig spoon, too. He hadn’t wanted it anyway. Not really. He was half-ready to
give
it to Pennyman, just to have done with it. Except that Pennyman was a foul slug, and Andrew wouldn’t give him a nickel, unless it was attached to a nail driven into the floor. He grinned despite himself. Well, he and Pickett could stop around to talk to Chateau, who would, of course, know nothing about the elixir, which was probably just fancy cod liver oil. Then they’d hotfoot it home. They could be there by eleven if they hurried. Andrew would make an issue of their returning, as if they were just then wrapping up a really solid morning of fishing. It wasn’t
lying
, actually, to carry on like that; it was something like self-preservation. It would be the last time, too. For a couple of days he would be wrapped up utterly in the business of the cafe and the chef’s hats, which Rose, in her infinite wisdom, had agreed to assemble. She was giving him a chance to prove himself in his own oddball way. He knew that. It was a matter of trust on her part. He couldn’t betray her.

He banged his hand against the steering wheel. He’d very nearly disgraced himself that morning. For what? Well, he would turn over that leaf now; he’d be good, worthy of her …

“Speed up,” said Pickett.

“What?”

“I said pick it up a little bit. This is a 45-mile-per-hour zone. What are you doing, about 20?”

“Yeah, sorry.” He
had
been doing about 20, and drifting toward the shoulder on the right. He set his teeth and sped up, making the turn at the light and reversing direction in the suddenly gloomy morning.

A fog had hovered in, and the sunlight brightened and waned with each blowing drift. Dark oil derricks stood alien and lonesome in the mist, and the insect heads of oil pumps rose and fell like iron grasshoppers scattered randomly across two hundred acres of dirt wasteland. There was a tang of oil seeping into the trapped air of the Metropolitan even with the windows rolled up. The fields were deserted, empty of people and of structures, except for a couple of rusted shacks way off in the murk. Andrew slowed the car despite his determination. The rush of energy he’d gotten during the chase had entirely drained out of him.

“There! Wait!” shouted Pickett suddenly. “Pull over!”

Mechanically, Andrew twisted the wheel and bumped up a driveway into the dirt of the oilfield, the car behind them rushing past with a blaring horn.

“Around behind that shed,” Pickett ordered, rolling his window down and shoving his head out.

The car slowed and stopped. Andrew cut the motor, listening to the foggy silence and to the creak, creak, creak of the pumps.

“What?”

“Off to the north. That way,” he said, pointing. “Isn’t that his car? Of course it is.”

Andrew squinted. The windshield was fogging up. Pickett was right. There was the rear end of Uncle Arthur’s car, half-hidden behind a pile of wooden pallets. “Do you see him?”

“No,” said Pickett. “Yes. There he is, off by the fence, by the oleander bushes. He’s up to something. Let’s go.”