GPS (26 page)

He’d been on the road all night, then all day, and now Wednesday’s sun was headed west too. Though he’d battled fits of oncoming sleep through much of his high-speed blast from southeast Texas across the desert plains and into the mountains of Utah, Jeff now carried a panicky, wide-awake feeling as he drove. Since spending the previous Sunday night passed out in the dangerously wide-open Toyota in front of the apartment, he had strange feelings about things he thought he heard around him that night.

He knew he’d left the GPS turned on as he passed out, and he remembered clinging to the Blackhawk pistol. He thought he remembered the woman’s voice emanating from the speaker periodically through the night, enough to make him stir but not enough for him to remember now what she had been saying. Those were the kinds of thoughts that kept him awake as he drove toward Utah.

Now looping around the same part of Orem for the second time, Jeff was reaching his boiling point with the GPS on his windshield. He remembered the techie message board he’d seen, and suddenly imagined how his own post would read on the “Warren GPS Rant” —
“I’ve had a lot of fun with this little devil on my windshield!! Man, who knew it could do all that stuff??? It took me to Florida, Texas and, oh boy, that trip to New Mexico!!!!!! But if you need it to find you a baseball stadium in a little town in Utah, if say, your job depended on it?? Forget it!!!!! I was forced to follow the stadium lights!!”

“
Off-route. Recalculating ... In 200, feet, turn, left.”

Jeff laughed and threw his left hand in the air, stunned at the sudden failure of the object that now looked so awkward in the car. He’d begun alternating between using the windshield mount and one that attached the unit to the dash. For now, it was suctioned to the middle of the windshield and he wanted to smack it off and see what the bitch said then. She’d told him two wrong turns now, and continued to tell him to make turns without the usual, repeated, tedious advance warnings to do so.

“I, can’t, turn, left, because Mr. Green BMW won’t let me get over! Are you kidding?” He was reaching a level of rage that rivaled even his reactions to the most blatant, deliberately overbooked flights he’d ever refused to give up his seats on.

“
To, begin, training, please press, the select, button.”

Just as he breezed by the street down which he could actually see the stadium lights glowing, at 7:27 p.m. Utah time on Wednesday evening, the GPS he’d spent so many hours gazing curiously into said it again. This time Jeff wanted it to stop saying that, at least for now. After waiting and waiting for something, some supernatural sign from the GPS, he would have chosen any minute other than right now to receive it, so naturally it came now.

He needed to get inside that stadium, and after 1,500 miles over better than 19 hours of driving without even so much as blinking, roaring through a handful of gas stations to do it, there was no way in hell he was going to miss this game. Jeff spun the volume down on the radio so he could hear perfectly whatever was next from the GPS — either some direction to the stadium or this other madness.

Each time the GPS repeated the phrase,
“To, begin, training, please press, the select, button,”
Jeff glanced up to see the 8-inch screen showing all zeroes under DESTINATION. 0d0h0m0s, and it was flashing. Time’s up. Did it really want him to press the select button right now? In traffic? This close to doing his business in Utah and getting the hell out? No way.

Jeff had already decided he was unwilling to throw in the towel on Sandy and the pitiful Mets just yet. It was a decision he’d actually argued with himself about on and off for the first hour of his drive out of New Orleans on Tuesday, when he wasn’t thinking about the ticking clock. But he’d spent an appreciable amount of time before he ever left town hoping that something would happen out there, that some intervening force would sweep in and grab him. Not likely, he’d thought at the time, and so he had tried to prepare himself to watch at least a couple of games and log some hard miles in doing so.

“
Off-route. Recalculating.”
Of course.

The green BMW swam along to his left like a remora, unrelenting. Driving with one hand while clinging to the gun hidden in the middle console with the other, he stared over at the man as both of them crawled up to a yellow light turning red. The asshole had hogged the lane long enough to roll right up to a main intersection —
“In, 200, feet, turn, left”
— and kept Jeff handcuffed to the middle lane, turn signal on but still not working, man completely oblivious to his left. He would now have to haul ass past the man when the light changed — Celica versus BMW — to get in the far left lane and try to make the next turn. But he wasn’t missing another inning even if he had to ignore the GPS, and even if he did follow the glow of the stadium lights like some kid reporter looking for a high school football game.

“
To, begin, training, please press, the select, button.”

“What training? Hey BMW man, do you know what training?” Jeff shouted, scowling to his left, then glancing up at the red light and back to his left again. “Maybe it’s for you, you jackass.”

He looked to his right and immediately locked eyes with a frowning, round-faced man, sitting in a black SUV in the right lane. Jeff quickly turned his attention to the new guy, weighing whether or not to continue his trash-talking tirade in this jerk-off’s direction until the light turned green. What was he looking at?

“
To, begin, training, please press, the select, button.”

“What the hell are you looking at, bro?” Jeff, now panting in exhausted distress, let go of the gun with his right hand so he could raise both arms up defiantly while glaring at his new target.

The light was still red.

After several seconds without a reaction, Jeff realized his words had gone completely unheard, as is often the case in road-rage altercations. The man in the SUV wasn’t staring at him, he now realized. The man was staring, frowning, at the GPS on the windshield, it appeared. Well, now he
was
, in fact, staring at Jeff and now he was saying something and reaching down. Not good, not good, Jeff thought, as he frantically tried to decide whether or not he should just floor it through the light that was still red, right into crossing traffic in what had to be Orem’s busiest intersection, or if he should pull out his gun and control the situation more lawlessly.

“
To, begin, training, please press, the select, button.”

The man was unbuckling his seatbelt, opening his door and climbing out of what Jeff now realized was a Range Rover. Still wearing the same frown he was when Jeff first peered over at him, the man slid calmly out of the truck and reached into his jacket pocket for something. Jeff’s right hand was back on the Ruger. Terrified at the thought of how it would look to just open fire on a total stranger in traffic, and how it would change his life forever, he kept his right hand hidden, trembling in the middle console, the Blackhawk daring him to drag it out and do some damage.

The man, holding some sort of cell phone as it turned out, now leaned fearlessly down and jiggled the Celica’s passenger side door handle and Jeff — thinking for a split second to himself thank God that door stopped opening from the outside three months after he bought this thing — pulled the car ahead about five feet with a sudden jerk that left the man stumbling. Jeff inched further and further into the crosswalk of the intersection, the light still red and cars still steadily rolling past in the other direction. He was ready to just plow on through if there was any break in traffic whatsoever. He glanced over to see he’d finally gotten the attention of the BMW man, who was suddenly looking on with a nervous gape.

“
To, begin, training, please press, the select, button.”

At the same time Jeff saw the man’s face reappear in his passenger side mirror, still calmly frowning, he did two things at once. He leaned up and hit SELECT on the GPS screen and he floored the Celica’s gas pedal.

The light was still red.

The only thing Jeff could remember in the seconds that followed was the feeling of being stuck in the GAME OVER screen in an old Atari game, when all the tanks, robots, asteroids, or cars, just passed through one another seamlessly. The Celica, for a split second, just seemed to glide right through all the other cars.

Then it disappeared.

PART III

“
I’d walk through hell in a gasoline suit to play baseball.” —
Pete Rose

- 31 -

“Alto! Alto! Alto!” a voice shouted from behind him, and Jeff slammed on his brakes at the sight of a rear bumper directly in front of him. A man with a machine gun strapped across his back, and not the man from the Range Rover, was trudging up behind him. There were men, gunmen, soldiers of some sort, up the street, many of them using their guns to wave a long line of cars ahead to whatever awaited.

Jeff’s entire body was drenched in sweat, his T-shirt a cold, clammy mess clinging to his thumping chest. He was gasping for breath. There was a tense bustle all around him. This wasn’t Utah anymore. The GPS had slowly begun to recover from whatever had happened, showing some dry-looking, khaki-colored place on its screen much like the place that now surrounded him. The GPS was still ACQUIRING SATELLITES, so it wasn’t sure where it was, either.

With his window still rolled down, he immediately felt a much heavier heat in the air. It was staggering, in fact, and his throat was cracked in a nervous drought. He panted for air, and would have killed for a bottle of water. As he looked around the Celica, it was pretty obvious a nice cool drink would have made the journey across with him just fine, because everything else in the car had.

In front of him and adding to the stifling heat were at least a hundred cars, SUVs and pickup trucks filling the two-lane, one-way road. Behind him there were more pulling up, steadily building a traffic jam as far back as he could see. Looming in front of an expanse of desert mountains on the horizon was what looked to be the top of a grandstand to a baseball park, or football stadium perhaps. Jeff thought of Sandy, and then Felix. His mind had taken all baseball thoughts and flushed them for the time being until he caught a glimpse of that stadium, if that’s what it was. This definitely wasn’t the Orem Owlz game. Incredible, Jeff thought as the heat made his head thud slowly in unison with his heartbeat, that his cross-country haul in attempt to regain his footing with the Mets had led him to the desert again.

The little devil on his shoulder had been reminding him for weeks the desert was out there, somewhere, and that it was waiting for him. The angel, if there ever had been one, must have hopped off his shoulder that night in New Orleans and scooted under the fence with Lefty. Despite weeks of drunken stupors, and dreams so real he’d begun to believe they
were
real, there suddenly were no fuzzy outlines to what Jeff saw in every direction. He was back, and his initial, sober reaction to the new world around him fell just shy of terror.

“Who are you sir? What is your name?” a gunman who scrambled up to the car asked as Jeff looked with wonder at the nervous energy which seemed to propel the many guards along ahead of him. His hand was on his own gun in the middle console, much more visible than he immediately realized. The anxiety was palpable as the soldiers tried to usher the cars through as quickly as possible, all the while clinging to their guns and looking over their shoulders. “Sir, what is your name at once?”

“Delaney, sir,” Jeff replied, having not called anyone sir with any seriousness since, well, ever. “Jeff Delaney, sir. Where am I?” The man pulled a piece of paper from his shirt pocket without answering, scrolling down what appeared was a list much shorter than the line of cars ahead. “Do you have my table? Hello?”

“Keep it moving, funny man. We’ll see how much you’re joking by tomorrow. Tell the man at the gate your name, he tell you where to go, and your name better still be Delaney by the time you get up there, chico. Hey Garza!” the man now shouted at the soldier 30 yards ahead. “Delaney coming through right here in the red ... uh, Celica. He’s packing, too! Check your list, bro! He’s one of Fonseca’s brats!”

Jeff drove on immediately, not wanting to hear anything else about what would be happening to him. He closed the middle console with the Ruger in it. Fonseca! That sealed it. He was back. Somehow, that GPS had carried him across again, and this time, the reality of the place was not dulled by alcohol. “Why’d you do it, you idiot?” Jeff yelled at himself, scared at the sudden reality of it. “Why’d you do it?”

He almost immediately reminded himself why he’d done it, why he’d finally pressed SELECT on the Warren and put the Celica pedal to the floor. First and foremost, he’d done it because that guy, that lunatic in the Range Rover next to him in traffic, had recognized him. Or no, he had recognized the GPS, or wanted it, or knew Jeff knew something about it. Something.

Anyway, Jeff got the hell out of there for his own safety. But it was also because he wanted to get out. At least for now. Part of him had finally lunged forward and said hell with it, and the rest of him had let it happen.

The mere thought of it had Jeff smiling that crazed smile again. Again, he caught himself doing it in the rearview mirror and quickly stopped. He breathed in deeply, pressing and releasing the brake pedal as the cars crawled along. He gazed out at the electric orange-and-blue dusk on the lengthening sky. He slowly began to catch his breath, though sweat continued to pump out of his head.

It was bumper-to-bumper in a zig-zagging line, and now Jeff looked to the GPS to see it showing a more detailed map. Utah had vanished. The new satellites had been acquired and the new picture looked fully developed now. Now, the terrain had a burnt orange-and-brown color, matching the dry plains in the foreground and treacherous looking peaks in the distance.