The Waiting Room (26 page)

I kept my lights off. I negotiated a long, easy curve at eighty or so, braked hard and fishtailed onto a gravel side road, then pulled over and stopped, so the curve of the side road hid me. Smiling, proud of myself, I decided then and there that all those hours I'd spent watching TV as a kid hadn't been wasted after all.

I sat tight. Five minutes. Ten minutes. I grew more and more certain that my devilishly clever ploy had worked.

I hadn't, however, taken one very simple fact into account. Dust spits up from gravel roads and hangs in the air for a very long time. The Plymouth had kicked up a lot of dust; it had surely been like a road sign pointing to where I was. And I think that dust was also why, I hadn't seen the LTD sitting just behind me with its lights off, its five acres of hood gleaming dully in the light of the half moon.

I whispered tightly,
"
God
damn
you!" threw the door open, and stepped out of the Plymouth.

The LTD's lights went on. High.

"God
damn
you!" I bellowed, and threw my arm up in front of my eyes. "Who
are
you, who the hell
are
you?!"

Silence.

The LTD's engine was off. If I stood there long enough in the glare of its high beams, its battery would wear down and that would be that.

The LTD's engine fired up. It sounded very powerful, very fast. I bellowed again,
"
God
damn
you!"

Then I realized that cops carried shotguns in their cars.

I leaned back into the Plymouth's interior and groped frantically around the front seat. Nothing. I turned toward the back seat, hit the top of my head on the wire screen separating the seats, cursed under my breath, backed out of the car, tried the rear door. It was locked.

I heard the LTD change gears. I looked. It was backing slowly away, off the shoulder and onto the road. It did a quick, skillful turn, then sped toward U.S. Route 7.

"Nuts!" I whispered.

The shotgun was in the Plymouth's trunk, along with a pair of emergency flashers, a spare tire, a black rubber raincoat, a big metal tackle box with lures and bobbers and spools of nylon line inside, and a blue lunch pail. The lunch pail held a peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich on rye, a pickle, two Oreo cookies, and a pint-size silver thermos filled with apple juice. I was going to eat all that, but I got to thinking that poor Rick had been meant to eat it, and never would, so I closed the lunch pail and put it back where I'd found it.

I was going to keep the shotgun on the front seat with me, too, just in case I had another encounter with the LTD. I had planned on doing something very daring with it, like shooting out the LTD's lights or blowing up its radiator. But the hard truth is that I have never liked guns. Even in Nam, when your weapon was almost literally your best friend, I hated it. It made me feel unclean to hold it.

So I left the shotgun in the trunk. Stupid, you'd say, and you'd be right.

I closed the trunk and got back into the driver's seat. I had come to a decision. I was going to drive to within three or four miles of Brookfield, ditch the Plymouth and then hike cross-country into Brookfield. That way I'd lose Art DeGraff and his friends in, the LTD, because I was sure they'd fall in behind me as soon as I hit Route 7 again.

And once in Brookfield, I'd find Abner. I hoped that wouldn't be the most difficult part of my trek. Because it was not until I crossed into Vermont—at about ten o'clock, with the LTD a precise five car lengths behind me (it had, as I'd expected, picked me up just a few minutes after I'd gotten back on Route 7)—that I realized I didn't know where in Brookfield Abner and Phyllis were staying. "They have a little house in Brookfield, Vermont," Madeline had told me. And I guess at the time I pictured some sleepy, twelve-house hamlet and I assumed that the house where Abner and Phyllis were staying would be easy enough to find. I would, in fact, be able to make a beeline to it. That was, as career Marines, say, "P.P.P.P."—
piss-poor prior planning.
Actually, it amounted to no prior planning at all. Just wishful thinking.

I don't know when it first struck me that Abner had once mentioned the house in Brookfield. The problem was, try as I might, I couldn't remember what he'd said, whether he'd said the house was green or white or yellow, or whether it had a porch or a rose trellis or whatever. Perhaps he'd mentioned it during our drunken picnic, but there, in the Plymouth, on U.S. Route 7, I couldn't remember his words exactly. I chalked it up to the fact that I'd been concentrating on getting smashed at the time.

~ * ~

I resigned myself to having the LTD on my tail all the way to wherever I ditched the Plymouth. I counted on it. It was how I was going to make my getaway in the night. I was going to stop on some side road, get my map out of the glove compartment, figure out where I was and in which direction I had to walk to get to Brookfield. Then I was going to get out, casually wipe my fingerprints off the door handles and everything else I'd touched, get back in, and unscrew the interior light so it wouldn't go on when the door opened. Then I was going to sneak out the passenger door and into whatever convenient woods lay nearby. It seemed to be a very good plan. And, on a day when most of my plans had turned into cow manure, I decided that fate owed me something, anyway, so it was a plan that would probably work.

~ * ~

I'd been through the Green Mountain National Forest in Vermont once before, when I was twelve or thirteen and my parents had driven to Rhode Island to visit friends. U.S. Route 7 doesn't go through the Green Mountain National Forest, though. It skirts it to the east. That was too bad, I thought, because I had liked the high hills there; they were somehow greener than the hills around Bangor. Greener and more luxuriant, as if they were the homes of knights and dragons. I believed in knights and dragons then, when I was twelve or thirteen. I did not believe in them at night on U.S. Route 7. They were the stuff of fairy tales. I believed in other things.

I believed in love and friendship. They were, after all, the forces that had driven Abner from the beach house and me through three states to find him. To save him. I clung to that belief. It seemed necessary that I cling to it, especially with that hellish Ford on my tail and God-only-knew-what ahead of me.

Love and friendship. They make things happen, I told myself.

~ * ~

At just before eleven that night I stopped in the village of Shaftsbury Center, ten miles north of Bennington, Vermont, and about seventy miles south of Brookfield. I stopped to use the men's room at a Chevron station, and I calculated that the LTD would simply wait till I was done.

I parked the Plymouth in darkness to the side of the Chevron station. If someone had, improbably, found poor Rick's body already and an alert had been put out for the Plymouth, then leaving it under the arc lights would be stupid.

I went over to the men's room door, tried it. It was locked. I took a breath, hoped for the best, and went into the station to ask for the keys.

The man inside the station was short, old, and very wrinkled. He wore a red baseball cap and a pair of white overalls that had the name
Lou
sewn in blue over the breast pocket. He gave me a once-over and stared hard at my mouth while I asked him if the rest rooms were in working order. He grunted an affirmative.

"Good," I said. "Do you have the keys?"

He grunted again, turned and got the keys, which were hooked to a big, highly polished wooden likeness of a grizzly bear. Lou, I thought, was a man of few words.

As I made my way to the rest room with that cumbersome wooden grizzly bear in hand, I told myself that everything at this Chevron station was as it should be. There were no Antons here, and no girls in pink taffeta. There was only an odd old man who liked to keep his rest rooms clean.

I put the key in the rest room door, turned it, then glanced around behind me. The LTD was on the shoulder of the road a hundred feet south of the Chevron station, with its headlights off.

I smiled at it, nodded, waved a little. Then I went into the rest room, found that it was indeed spotlessly clean, which pleased me more, somehow, than the cleanliness of a rest room had ever pleased me before. And after I'd used the toilet I stood in front of the mirror and said, "You cocky son of a bitch." I waved at myself in the mirror; "Hello, Art, you asshole! Why don't you come over here; we'll
talk
this out." I quite often talk to myself in mirrors. It's good therapy.

I washed my hands, patted them dry with a continuous roll of immaculate cloth towel near the sink, then turned to go.

I heard a very heavy rap at the rest room door.

I froze.

My knees actually began to knock; my throat grew dry; I got vivid mental pictures of what might be on the other side of the door. Art DeGraff, perhaps, grinning and murderously angry: I imagined him telling me that he wouldn't kill me until later if I showed him where Abner was.

Or maybe Anton, his long-handled axe held high and his hunger mounting with each passing second.

Or the local police, with a warrant for my arrest on charges of car theft and murder.

I muttered a little curse of frustration and disbelief. Then I heard another heavy knock at the door, heavier than the first; it even set up a short-lived, whining, sympathetic vibration in the mirror over the sink.

"God Almighty," I whispered. "God Almighty, God Almighty!"

Another knock. Then another. Then two more in rapid succession.

"Yes?" I croaked.

There was no answer. Only another series of knocks—very frantic now and loud.

I backed away from the door until my rear end hit the wall. I felt the wall—it was cold, made of polishedstone blocks. I hit it with my fist repeatedly.

Another series of loud, suddenly frantic knocks.

"Yes?" I croaked again. "Yes?" I said louder.

Then there was silence.

"Yes?" I said, finding sudden courage in the silence. "Yes, who's there, please?"

Silence.

"This room is occupied," I said, and stepped for-ward to the door. I put my hand on the knob, turned it.

Another knock. Very hard, and very loud. Followed by, "Hey, you okay in there, mister?" It was a young man's voice.

"Huh?" I said.

"Mister, are you okay in there?"

"Yes," I managed.

I took a deep breath and opened the door. A chunky young man of twenty or so, dressed in the same kind of overalls that Lou was wearing, stood in front of the door. Lou stood beside him. According to the pocket of the young man's overalls, his name was Tim. His brow furrowed, his full, bow-shaped lips went into a nervous pout. "What'sa matter with you, mister? You can't hear?"

I nodded. "Yes, I can hear. I'm sorry."

Tim nodded at Lou. "'Cuz Lou, he don't hear so good—he don't hear at all, ak-chooly."

"Yes," I said. "I'm sorry."

He shrugged. "No need to be sorry. He been deaf all his life. It's just that when you didn't answer the door—"

"Well," I stammered, "you know, I was . . . occupied—"

Tim grinned. "Sure you were. But like I say, when you didn't answer the door, Lou figured you had a heart attack or somethin'—it happens; it happened not more than a year ago in this very toilet—so he come and got me an' here I am. All he wanted to know was you want any gas?"

"Gas?" I said.

Tim nodded. "Sure. Gas. It makes your car go."

I glanced at the LTD, still parked a hundred feet south of the station, then at the Plymouth,
in
the shadows to the right of the station. I didn't know if it needed gas. I thought it probably did, considering its size and the distance it had traveled.

I let out a long sigh of relief. "Sure," I said. "Fill it up."

Tim looked at the Plymouth. "Sheriff, huh?" he said. "You undercover or somethin'?" He looked impressed. I decided to play along.

"Yes," I said, and cleared my throat, which had gone dry. "Undercover."

Lou, who'd been studying our lips as we spoke, shook his head.

"Drugs?" Tim asked.

"Can't say," I answered, and cleared my throat again, nervousness clutching at my stomach once more.

"Yeah," Tim agreed, "I know. My brother-in-law, he's a sheriff, kind of. You know, a rent-a-cop." "Yes," I said. "A rent-a-cop."

All the while we were talking, Lou was shaking his head furiously and grunting and staring hard at me. He reminded me of a huge, wrinkled, olive-skinned, bald rat. I looked at him; "She-riff!" I said, shaping the word in an exaggerated way.

He continued shaking his head.

Tim asked, "What kind you take? No lead?"

"I don't know," I answered.

"You don't know?" He sounded skeptical and it took me only a moment to realize why; if the car were indeed mine, I'd certainly know if it took leaded or unleaded gasoline. "Regular," I said, guessing.