1990 - Mine v4 (55 page)

Mary heard only the first verse, and then she was asleep.

A Harley Man

TAP TAP.

"Lady?"

Tap tap
. "Lady, you okay?"

Laura woke up, the effort as tough as swimming through glue. She got her eyes open, and she saw the man in a hooded brown parka beside her window.

"You okay?" he asked again, his face long-jawed and ruddy in the cold.

Laura nodded. The movement made the muscles of her neck and shoulders awaken and rage.

"Got some coffee." The man was holding a thermos. He lifted it in invitation.

Laura rolled her window down. She realized suddenly that the wind had died. A few small snowflakes were still falling. The gray sky was streaked with pearly light, and by its somber glow Laura could see the huge white mountain ranges that marched along I-80. The man poured some coffee into the thermos's cup, gave it to her, and she downed it gratefully. In another life she might have wished for Jamaican Blue Mountain; now any pot-boiled brew was delicious if it got her engine running.

"What're you doin' out here?" he asked. "The road's still closed."

"Took a wrong turn, I guess." Her voice was a froggish croak.

"Lucky you didn't wind up askin' directions from St. Peter. It was a damned mess between here and Rock Springs. Drifts higher'n my head and wide as a house."

Was
a mess, he'd said. The noise of machinery came to her. "My wipers are out," she said. "Could you clear my windshield off?"

"Reckon I can." He started raking the snow away with a leather-gloved hand. The powder was almost five inches thick, the last inch iced to the glass. The man dug deep, got his fingers hooked, and wrenched upward, and the plate of ice cracked like a pistol shot and slid away. The windshield on her side was clear, and through it she could see a yellow snowplow at work forty yards ahead, smoke chugging from its exhaust pipe. Another plow was shoving snow aside over on the interstate's eastbound lanes, and a third plow sat without a driver twenty feet from the Cutlass. Laura realized she must've been dead to the world not to have heard that thing approaching. Behind the plows were two large highway department trucks, their crews shoveling cinders onto the patches of ice. Gears clicked and meshed in her brain. "You came from Rock Springs?"

"My men got on at Table Rock, but the drifts are broke up from here on. Hell of a mess, I'm tellin' ya."

The snowplows had come from the west. The way to California was open.

"Thank you." She returned the cup to him. The Cutlass's engine was still idling, the gas tank down almost to the
E
. She figured by the amount of daylight that she'd been asleep at least four hours. She released the emergency brake.

"Hey, you'd better find a place to pull off!" the plow's driver cautioned. "It's still mighty dangerous. Nobody ever tell you about snow chains?"

"I'll make it. Where's the nearest gas station?"

"Rawlins. That's ten miles or so. I swear, you're about the second luckiest woman in this world!"

"The
second
luckiest?"

"Yeah. At least you don't have a little baby that could've frozen to death."

Laura stared up at him.

"Woman and her baby caught in the drifts couple of miles ahead," he told her, taking her silence for curiosity. "Worked herself in good and tight. She didn't have no snow chains neither."

"She was in a van?"

"Pardon?"

"A green van? Is that what she was in?"

"Nope. One of them Jeep wagons. Comanche or Geronimo or somethin'."

"What color?"

"Dark blue, I reckon." He frowned. "How come you're askin'?"

"I know her," Laura said. A thought occurred to her. "Did you give her coffee, too?"

"Yup. Drunk it like a horse."

Laura smiled grimly. They had drunk from the same bitter cup. "How long ago was that?"

"Thirty, forty minutes, I reckon. She a friend of yours?"

"No."

"Well, she asked where the nearest gas station was, too. Rawlins, I said. I tell you, travelin' with a little bitty baby in a blizzard without snow chains… that woman must be crazy!"

Laura put the car into drive. "Thanks again. You take care."

"That's my middle name!" he said, and he stepped back from the window.

She started off, guarding her speed. The tires crunched over cinders. Snow chains or not, she was going to make it to Rawlins. She skidded in a couple of places, the highway climbing and then descending across the mountains, but she took it slow and easy and watched the quivering needle of her fuel gauge. Somewhere along the line Mary Terror had ditched her van; that much was clear. Where Mary had gotten the new vehicle, Laura didn't know, but she guessed more blood was on Mary's hands.

The same hands that held the fate of David.

She turned into the gas station at Rawlins, filled the tank, and scraped the rest of the snow off the windshield. She relieved herself in the bathroom, swallowed another Black Cat tablet — its caffeine equivalent to four cups of strong black coffee — and she bought some junk food guaranteed to make her blood sugar soar. The gas station's small grocery also sold gauze bandages, and she bought some to rewrap her hand with. Another bottle of Extra-Strength Excedrin and half a dozen canned Cokes, and she was ready to go. She asked the teenage girl behind the counter about seeing a big woman with a baby, traveling in a dark blue Jeep wagon.

"Yes, ma'am, I seen her," the girl answered. She would be pretty when she got her acne under control, Laura thought. "She was in here 'bout thirty minutes ago. Cute little ol' baby. He was raisin' a ruckus, and she bought him some diapers and a new passy."

"Was she hurt?" Laura asked. The girl stared blankly at her. "Bleeding," Laura said. "Did you see any blood on her?"

"No, ma'am," the girl said in a wary voice. Laura could not know that Mary had awakened, seen the plows coming in the early light, and had removed her bloodstained trousers, blotting up the leakage with the last Pampers and struggling into a fresh pair of jeans from her suitcase.

Laura paid what she owed and went on. She figured she was thirty to forty minutes behind Mary Terror. The snowplows and cinder trucks were out on I-80 like a small army. Except for some flurries, the snowfall had ceased and it was all over but the cleaning up. She began to see more cars on the interstate as she crossed the Continental Divide west of Creston, the mountains looming around her in a rugged white panorama and the sky chalky gray. The highway began its long, slow descent toward Utah. When she passed Rock Springs, she saw state troopers waving tractor-trailer rigs back onto I-80 from a crowded truck stop. The interstate was officially open again, the Rockies stood swathed in the clouds behind her, and she gradually increased her speed to fifty-five, then to sixty, then to sixty-five.

She crossed the Utah state line and immediately saw a sign that said Salt Lake City was fifty-eight miles ahead. She looked for a dark blue Jeep wagon, spotted a vehicle that fit the description, but when she got up beside it she saw a Utah tag and a white-haired man at the wheel. The interstate took her into Salt Lake City, where she made a gas stop, then curved along the gray shore of the Great Salt Lake, straightened out, and shot her toward the sandy desert wastes. As Laura ate her lunch of two Snickers bars and a Coke, the clouds opened and the sun glared through. Patches of blue appeared in the sky, and little whirlwinds kicked up puffs of dust from the winter desert.

She passed Wendover, Utah, at two o'clock, and a big green sign with a roulette wheel on it welcomed her to Nevada. Desert land, jagged peaks, and scrub brush bordered I-80 all the way to the horizon. The carcasses of road kill were being plucked at by vultures with wingspans like Stealth bombers. Laura passed signs advertising "giant flea" markets, chicken ranches, Harrah's Auto Museum in Reno, and a rodeo in Winnemucca. Several times she looked to her right, expecting to see Didi sitting on the seat beside her. If Didi was there, she was a quiet ghost. The tires hummed and the engine racketed, dark blooms of burning oil drifting out behind. Laura kept watching for Mary's Jeep wagon; she saw a number of them, but none were the right color. On the long straight highway, cars were passing her doing eighty and ninety miles an hour. She got into the windbreak of a tractor-trailer truck and let the speed wind up to seventy-five. Nevada became a progression of signs, the names of desert towns blowing past: Oasis… Wells… Metropolis… Deeth, the second
e
of which someone had altered with spray paint to spell
Death
.

She was truly alone now, journeying into frightful country.

At the end of the road was Freestone, fifty miles north of San Francisco. What was she going to do when she found Jack Gardiner? What would she do if none of those three men
was
Jack Gardiner? What kind of man would he be now? Would he shun Mary Terror or embrace her? Surely he'd read about her in the papers or seen the story on TV. What if — and this thought sickened her — he was still a killer at heart, and he took David as an offering and he and Mary fled together? What if… what if… what if. Those questions were unanswerable. All she knew for sure was that this road led to Freestone, and Mary was on it.

The Cutlass shuddered.

She smelled something burning. She looked at the dashboard and saw the temperature gauge's needle almost off the dial. Oh Jesus! she thought as panic chewed at her. "Don't quit on me!" she shouted, looking for an exit. There wasn't one in sight, and Deeth was two miles behind. The Cutlass's engine was rumbling like a concrete mixer. "Don't quit on me!" she repeated, her foot pressed down on the gas pedal. And then the hood burst upward, steam spewed out with a train-whistle shriek, and she knew the radiator was finished. The car, like her own body, had been pushed past its threshold of pain. The only difference was, she was stronger. "Keep going! Keep going!" she shouted, tears of frustration in her eyes. The Cutlass had given up. Its speed was falling, whips of steam flailing back from the overflowing radiator. The truck in front of her kept going; the world was short of shining knights. "Oh Christ!" Laura yelled. "Damn it to hell! Damn it!" But cursing would produce no cure. She guided the wounded car over off the interstate, and it rolled to a stop in gravel next to a vulture-picked jackrabbit.

Laura sat there as the radiator bubbled and moaned. She could feel Mary moving farther away from her with every passing second. She balled up her fist and slammed the wheel, and then she got out to survey the carnage. Whoever said the desert was hot had never visited it in February, because the chill pierced her bones. But the radiator was a little spout of hell, rusty water flooding out and the engine ticking like a time bomb. Laura looked right and left, saw desolation on both sides. A car flashed past, then another a few seconds later. She needed help, and fast. A third car was coming, and Laura lifted her right arm to flag it down. The car left grit stinging her face. Then the interstate was empty, just her, the busted Cutlass, and a jackrabbit chewed down to the rib cage and ears.

Deeth was too far to walk. What the next exit was, and where a service station might be, she had no idea. Mary was on her way to Freestone, and Laura wasn't going to wait here all day for a Samaritan. She walked out into the interstate and faced east.

Maybe a minute passed. And then sunlight glinted off glass and metal. The car — a station wagon, it looked to be — was coming fast. She put her hand up under her double sweaters and touched the automatic's grip. If the car didn't start to slow down in five seconds, she was going to pull the gun and do a Dirty Harry. "Stop," she whispered, the wind raw in her face. "Stop. Stop." Her hand tightened on the grip. "
Stop
, damn it!"

The station wagon began to slow down. There was a man at the wheel, a woman on the passenger side. They both looked less than eager to be helpful, and Laura saw a child's face peering up over the front seat. The man was driving as if he still hadn't decided whether to lend a hand or not, and the woman was jabbering at him. Probably think I look like a hard case, Laura thought. It occurred to her that they would be correct.

The man made his decision. He pulled the station wagon over behind the Cutlass and rolled down his window.

Their names were Joe and Cathy Sheffield, from Orem, Utah, on their way to visit her parents in Sacramento with their six-year-old son Gary. AH this Laura learned on the way to the next exit, which was a place called Halleck four miles up the highway. She told them her name was Bedelia Morse, and she was trying to get to San Francisco to find an old friend. It seemed right. Gary asked why her hand was all bandaged up and why there was a boo-boo on the side of her face. She said she'd had a bad fall at home. She didn't answer when he asked where her home was. Then, after another minute or two, Gary asked her with all innocence if she ever took a bath, and Cathy shushed him and laughed nervously but Laura said it was okay, she'd been on the road a long time.

Joe took the Halleck exit. It wasn't much of a town, just a few cinderblock buildings, some weatherbeaten houses, a diner made from an old train car, and a stucco post office with an American flag snapping in the wind. But one of the cinderblock buildings bore a crudely painted sign that identified it as Marco's Garage, with a row of gas pumps out front and a couple of cars sitting around that looked as if they'd been stripped by pack rats. Behind the garage was a dump of old car hulks and a mound of bald tires. There was a bright orange towtruck, though, and Joe Sheffield pulled his station wagon up beside it.

A man emerged from inside one of the two garage bays. He was short and stocky as a fireplug, and he wore grease-stained overalls and a T-shirt, his muscular arms covered with tattoos from wrists to shoulders. His hands were black with grime. He was also slick bald, and had on yellow-tinted goggles.

"Well!" Joe said cheerfully. "Here's somebody!"

Laura had a moment of knowing what she should do. She should pull her gun, order the Sheffields out of the station wagon, and leave them there while she sped on after Mary. Marco's Garage was an armpit, and getting her car fixed here was going to be a trial by frustration. She should pull the gun and take the station wagon, and she should do it right now.