The Rabbit Factory: A Novel (13 page)

The man holding the gun looked awful. He looked like a butcher with that bloody apron. Merlot was trying not to shake and let the guy see it. But he was pretty outraged, too. He didn’t want to put up with this bullshit. He put up with enough bullshit at the university. And he got paid for that. Twice a month. With health insurance. And a credit union.

“Don’t try anything funny,” the guy said. He knocked some books off the seat and down on the floorboard, and Merlot saw immediately with even more outrage that he was one of those people with no regard for
your
stuff.

He couldn’t help saying: “Hey, man, I paid a lot of money for those books.”

The guy got in and closed the door. He was stepping all over the books. The guy pointed the gun at Merlot. Little black hole. Right in his face. Some death lay in there, waiting to come out.

“Move this thing on down the road,” he said.

“Where to?” Merlot said, since the little black hole was scary.

“You gonna have to speak up,” the guy said. “Just go,” the guy said, and poked him with the gun, on his arm, hard, so hard it hurt.

“Hey, man, that
hurts
!” Merlot said, pretty loud. He had a roach in his pocket. He was just riding around. Taking a break from grading papers. Bored out of his mind. Worried as always about Candy. What did he stop for? Just because the guy looked like he needed a ride. And where the hell were the cops when you needed them?

“Hurt you worse you don’t move your ass.”

Merlot did like he said. He tried to watch the road and tried to cut his eyes sideways to get a look at the guy, but the guy said:

“Don’t watch me, watch the road.”

Merlot wondered what kind of gun it was. How did he know it was a real gun? Merlot didn’t know anything about guns other than the fact that he was afraid of them, but somehow it didn’t look like a real gun. It didn’t look like any gun he’d seen in TV shows or movies. What if the guy was just pulling his leg? What if it was a water pistol? Or a starting pistol? He raised his voice again.

“Mind telling me what kind of gun that is?”

The guy looked at the gun, then back up at Merlot.

“Asshole, it’ll shoot your ass is all I know. You got a light?”

“A light?”

“Push in your cigarette lighter there for me. You know you got a headlight out?”

“Yeah, yeah, I know it.” He’d been meaning to get the damn thing fixed but he’d been so busy getting ready for Christmas break that he just hadn’t had time. And Candy getting worse every day. Now this shit.

Merlot was going about twenty and pushed the lighter in. They didn’t speak while it was getting ready to pop out. The radio was turned low, but Merlot could hear the voice of a man speaking about pills for your nerves in these uncertain times. What if he slammed on the brakes and jumped him?

The lighter popped out and Merlot reached for it, but the guy beat him to it. Merlot looked at him. He had a big fat smelly cigar in his mouth and he was holding the red, glowing lighter up to it. Some smoke started coiling from the end. Merlot could really smell it. It smelled horrible. It reminded him of moldy couches he’d sat on as a child and deserted theater lobbies and some other things he’d just as soon not have to think about right now.

“And speed up,” the guy said.

Merlot sped up. To about thirty. Stoned, that was plenty fast enough. He was holding the wheel with both hands when he went around the curves.

“Is this a carjacking?” Merlot said loudly. “Is this what this is?”

“Put whatever label on it you need to,” the guy said. “And you’re gonna have to turn the heat up a little. Cold as a polar bear’s butthole.”

“What do you expect? It’s winter. It’s deer season. People are out in the woods in flannel coats and shit.”

Merlot reached and pushed the lever over one more notch, which put it on medium. The guy rolled the window down just a little after first pushing the lock and unlock buttons and making all the doors click several times, until Merlot said: “The one in front,” and wanted to add, “Dipshit,” but didn’t, and the guy found the right button.

Merlot wondered if he should turn the radio up. He wondered if the police were looking for this guy. He had to be a desperate guy if he was going around carjacking innocent people like him. If he was desperate, then why was he desperate? He must have done something pretty bad. He might be an escaped convict who’d broken out of jail somewhere. There might be a big search going on for him right now. And here was something else to think about while he wasn’t doing anything but driving this asshole around:

What if they were looking for the guy and had roadblocks set up and he had to blast through one at gunpoint in the minivan? Why hell, there’d be a hail of bullets, wouldn’t there? What if it was like
Bonnie and Clyde
? They’d get cut to bloody ribbons like Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, wouldn’t they?

“How much gas you got?” the guy said.

“Almost a full tank,” Merlot said. “I just gassed it up yesterday.” He waited a moment. “It dropped a dime, so I went ahead.”

He waited again, but the guy didn’t say anything. Maybe he didn’t hear him. He was busy smoking his cigar. Merlot could watch him from the corners of his eyes. He could keep his eyes mostly on the road but kind of lose focus and let them slide to the right just a bit and he did that some more until the guy said: “Keep your eyes on the road.”

The guy seemed to be really enjoying his cigar. He was wreathed in smoke, leaning back in the seat, watching the farms and woods and fences and fields pass, sometimes a few dim, yellow lights. Merlot’s daddy had smoked the stinkingest cigars he’d ever smelled in his whole life. And this guy’s was almost as bad.

But if he
was
an escaped convict, what had he done to get put in in the first place? That was the thing Merlot wanted to know since he liked to question everything objectively. Was he a simple thief or was he a serial killer? Had he done some computer crime or had he molested some schoolchildren? Had he ever killed anybody before? In other words, would he use that gun he was holding if it was real? Was he capable of it? Did he have the guts it took to pull the trigger? And was it even loaded? How did he know it was? It was also possible that the guy might have another hidden weapon on him. Like a knife. Maybe even two. Mightn’t a butcher?

A cop car passed them casually and went over a hill. But in a valley three minutes later they met it coming right back with its lights on dim, and when it came alongside them, Merlot could see the star on the side and as soon as Merlot could see it in his side mirror he could see that it had hit its brakes and was angling to the opposite side of the road. It looked like it was going to turn around. Oh yeah. It was definitely turning around. He was going to get stopped for that headlight being out. The cop had seen it in his rearview mirror when he passed. He was surprised it hadn’t happened before when he was riding around. Now some new shit was going to hit the fan. Now they’d see how bad Mr. Gun-Toting Antisocial Bully Butcher here would be against forces of good who were also armed with guns.

So, should he say anything? Huh? Should he say anything?

What if saying something was worse? What if there were bullets flying? What if the guy killed the cop? What if the cop accidentally killed him, Merlot? Hell, bullets got to flying, innocent people got shot.

So should he say something? He decided he should.

“That cop’s turning around,” he said.

“Mother…
fucker,”
the guy said in a calm but incredibly pissedoff way, and Merlot could see the cop car backing quickly from the other side of the road, and the blue lights came on before it even got fully turned around. The guy found the ashtray and put the cigar out.

“He’s pulling me over,” Merlot said. “I’ll have to pull over.”

“No. Don’t pull over.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“I mean don’t pull over. Keep going.”

“But what if he pulls up alongside me?”

“Keep going.”

“What if he tries to shoot my tires out?”

“Keep going.”

By now the cop car was right on his tail and there was no mistaking it, the cop wanted him to pull over. It was an effort of will to keep his foot off the brake, but he was very conscious of the gun pointed at him.

The guy said: “If you pull over, I’ll shoot you.”

That made Merlot pretty indignant.

“So you’ve got it all figured out, have you? What if he tries to ram us or something?”

“Anybody ever tell you you got a big mouth?”

“Not since my old man died.”

The siren came on in the cop car behind them. Then in a straight stretch of road the cop car pulled up beside him and kept pace. A voice came over a loudspeaker: “Pull over now, sir! Pull over right now!”

“What am I gonna do?” Merlot said.

“Keep going.”

“It’s a cop! I’m supposed to stop!”

“Keep going.”

Just then the interior light came on in the cop car, and Merlot could see that it wasn’t a man driving the cop car. It was a woman, a black woman with a medium ’Fro, in a blue uniform, and she had the mike up to her mouth. He could see even from there that she was very well endowed, about like Dolly Parton was endowed.

“Pull it over!” the voice said. It was a nice voice but really loud. She was running right beside him and Merlot could have almost looked right into her eyes if he had taken them off the road for a few seconds, but he couldn’t. He tried to give her a helpless look, but he knew she wasn’t getting it. The blue lights were flashing everywhere. They lit up a frozen rabbit. They lit up a dead and frosty-tailed mule that somebody had evidently just
left
on the side of the road for the road guys to pick up.

“Speed up,” the guy said.

“Speed up? She’s right beside us.”

“She?”

“It’s a female cop. I can see her.”

“Oh yeah?” the guy said. “Lemme see.”

He leaned over and Merlot caught a whiff of his breath and knew it had been quite a while since this guy had bothered to floss. Whoa. He bet he didn’t have a steady girlfriend. Neither did Merlot. Candy being the way she was, it was hard to have a regular girlfriend. Or even one he could bring over, invite to stay for dinner, attempt to hump on the couch afterward.

“Roll your window down,” the guy said.

“This is the last time I’m telling you,” the voice over the loudspeaker said, pretty loudly.

Merlot pushed the button for the window, uneasy doing it, wondering why the guy wanted it down as it started coming down. But before he could think for very long about it, the guy leaned over and stuck the gun out and pulled the trigger and a window on the passenger’s side of the cruiser shattered and the cruiser swayed, squealed its tires, slid sideways, and stopped.

Merlot could see it in his side mirror, receding, sitting there, blue lights going, siren still screaming, the interior light still on, and a glimpse of the woman cop, but there was just that glimpse, and then the guy told him to roll the window back up.

Merlot did what he was told, but he was sick, sick sick sick. Oh he was sick!
What’d you roll the window down for? Dumb-ass!

Anjalee raised her head and smiled a wicked smile at him, put one finger to her lips, and swung her hair back from her face briefly before lowering it again. He put another pillow behind his head.

Later they lay back on satin sheets in the plush Peabody suite that was a hell of a lot nicer than any room Frankie had ever put her in, eating nachos with melted cheese poured over them and shrimp cocktails and crackers and for her a tossed salad with pepperoni and chopped-up bits of provolone. He’d ordered up a bottle of Dom and two glasses. He didn’t watch any sports and she seemed pleased with that. It turned out they both liked Larry King, but he didn’t have anybody on worth a shit that night. CNN had taped live coverage of some crooks in the stock market getting arrested in New York and people yelling at them. It turned out that Anjalee was a long-time
Zorro
fan just because of Guy Williams, so they watched him and Don Diego and Sergeant Garcia and then they watched a Lucy show on
Nick at Nite,
the one where she was working on the candy factory assembly line and had to cram a bunch of it in her mouth when it got to going way too fast for her to keep up with it.

They got food all over the nice bed. They did it again, slowly, carefully, even lovingly. They kissed tenderly. He wondered how much she was going to charge him. He wondered if it would be more or less than what she had charged Frankie, the dumb son of a bitch. He was a hamburger by now. Or a dogburger.

Later they took showers and got dressed and went out. He had a driver for his car, a man in a chauffeur’s uniform who didn’t say a word, only drove them through Memphis and down I-55 to the exit at Senatobia where he turned off and headed for the casinos at Tunica, the bright lights of the little Vegas in the Mississippi Delta. Where even the legendary Merle had played. And he decided something on the way down. He decided he wasn’t going to say shit about what was probably left of Frankie.