The Messenger (19 page)

“There’s predators out here. You know what I mean?” he says.

“I guess. Sure.”

“All kinds of people running around.”

Yes, there are, she thinks.

“Where you from in Maryland?”

“Uh … Frederick.”

“This your car?”

“No … my sister rented it.”

“Rented it … okay.” He walks a few steps to the front of the car; mouth turned down, critically scanning the front end, as if he is going to kick the tires. She can see that before tapping her awake he has unsnapped the clasp on his holster.

She feels intensely uncomfortable. Her bladder is full and she has broken out in a sweat. Her skin feels raw. She has a sudden urge to take off all her clothes, and would if the trooper weren’t right in front of her. He’s just standing there, glaring at her, undressing her in his imagination, like all men. Behind her, she hears a blast of radio static. She looks in the rearview mirror and sees that he has parked his patrol car right behind her, blocking her in. She opens the door and starts to get out.

“Just wait inside, ma’am.”

She settles back into the seat. Scared now. Worried. “I was tired,” she says out the window.

“Sure.” Now the trooper walks back to his car and consults his radio. She hears the answering crackle of the radio but none of the conversation is intelligible. They go back and forth three or four times. At the end he comes back to her side of the car.

“So, you’re heading down to Texas? Business? Pleasure?” She can see his face now. He’s dark, the kind of man who could shave all day long and still have a shadow on his cheeks.

“My sister has a job set up down there.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“And she needs some help with her little boy,” she says. He is a first responder, she thinks. “Is it okay if I go use the bathroom?”

“Sure … be my guest.” She gets out and starts up the sidewalk to the low building that houses the toilets. “You better lock up. Somebody’ll come along and steal this thing.”

“Oh,” she says. “I’m not quite awake …” She tries to laugh, but his voice has stopped her there on the concrete walk. She tries to control her shaking hands as she turns and climbs in, inserts the key, raises the windows, and locks up. He just watches her the whole time. She gives him a little smile before she heads back for the toilets. Without the stupid uniform he would be kind of cute. He returns the smile.

Cops. They are all used to women trying to work them for favors. Men in uniform, they know they can get anything they want. If he decided to write a ticket, she would have no choice but to pay or go with him. He could bargain for whatever he wanted from her. That’s the power equation and both of them know it.

The bathroom is huge, dark, and smells like concrete that has been marinated in lemon disinfectant. There are no locks on the doors to the stalls, but the seats are clean enough.

After she flushes she stands there at the sink and takes a series of deep breaths until she can go back outside. She looks okay, but cannot stop her hands from shaking.

When she pushes open the door she sees that he is facing away from her, talking on his radio again. She has a moment—just a flash of panic—where she almost starts running around the building and into the woods. It’s stupid, a stupid idea. She has to get control. She has to calm down. Behind her, the door squeaks on its hinges as she starts back down the walk to the parking lot. He must hear it because he looks back and stops in mid-sentence. It might just be her imagination but he suddenly looks more serious. Something is happening, something has gone wrong.

“Can I see your driver’s license?”

“Sure … it’s inside,” she says, gesturing toward the automobile.

He steps back away from the car, hand on his holster, watching while she unlocks the car, gets in, and digs through her duffel bag until she comes up with her license.

“I thought you were from Maryland?” he says, looking at the big paper international driver’s license. It’s like a booklet in different languages.

“I am now. Originally I’m from Italy.”

“That’s what this is? Some kind of Italian license?”

“Yes. When I get to Texas, then … I’ll get a new one.”

He studies the license for a few minutes, opens the pages one by one. “You have some other ID?”

“I have my passport.”

“Passport. Okay, let’s see that.”

Daria groans inwardly at having to find the passport, angry that she’s being manipulated by this stupid cop into leaving a trail. She finds the passport and hands it over to him. Each exchange is another transfer of virus, she hopes. That’s what he gets for slowing her down, for looking at her, for
inspecting
her.

He is frowning now as he leafs through the passport. Of course it’s in a foreign language and he can’t understand anything except the entry stamp from JFK that will alert him to the fact that she’s only been in the country a single week.

There is another blast of static from his car.
“Four-nine, four-nine …”
she hears the dispatcher say. The trooper shakes his head, scowls, and goes back to his car.

She can’t tell if he hears when she starts the engine. Maybe he’s been lulled since she’s been so cooperative, but when she lets off the hand brake, that gets his attention and he half-turns.

When she jams her foot down, the little Nissan rushes backwards and crushes him against the side of his patrol car. He goes down somewhere back where she can’t see, and she slams the car into drive, crashes up over the curb onto the grass of the rest area. Slewing around, the wheels slipping in the wet earth … slowing, slowing. She knows she should let off the gas, that trying to go faster is just making the tires spin uselessly, but she can’t help it—

Now she can see him. The officer is crawling forward. He’s managed somehow to get his gun out of his holster and has propped himself up with one arm, while she is just sitting there skidding around, the Nissan floundering in the grass. This is it, she thinks. This is where she is going to die—by a bullet, not a germ—shot down in a rest area in West Virginia.

An explosion. A gunshot, she realizes, an old familiar sound—and something instantly penetrating the car, something that takes her breath away. The shock of it lifts her foot off the accelerator, the tires dig in, and the car crunches over the curb down onto the pavement. She cranes her head to see the trooper fallen over on his side, the automatic dangling from his fingers.

Still she can’t get her breath, even as she scrambles out of the car and runs over to where he has collapsed. The side door of the patrol car is crumpled where she jammed him into it, and he has coughed … something up. It looks like blood and water and vomit, and below there is a wet stain spreading across his pants. He is making strangling sounds and his fingers twitch. She reaches down and pulls the gun out of his hand and he doesn’t even resist.
PRESTON
is etched into a gold plastic name tag pinned above his shirt pocket. His wallet is a big lump in his damp back pocket and she unbuttons it and yanks it out. Maybe seventy-five dollars in cash. A pair of credit cards. She takes the cash and the cards, dumps the wallet on the pavement, takes a step backwards, ready to bolt, but then remembers—the passport.

Where is it? She can’t see it, and she drops to her knees. It must have fallen under him, and she gropes around for it beneath his urine-soaked hips—nothing, nothing. She gave it to him. He had it in his hands.
But where is it?

She stands, looking around frantically, and then, on the seat, sees the passport—through the window of the crushed door where he dropped it.

“… four-nine … four-nine …”

There are no other cars in the rest area; she’s just lucky, she thinks. She grabs the passport and turns, only to see the Nissan,
driver’s door flapping, as it slowly rolls across the pavement and up onto the grass, crunching into one of the pine trees planted there as shelter for the picnic tables.

She runs to the car and throws herself into the front seat. There is a hole there, punched all the way through the door, and now she can feel the throbbing in her side. She pulls up the edge of the hoodie—a red splotch of blood.

With her fingertips, she feels. Something just under the surface, and a searing pain where the lump has lodged against her rib, just below the band of her bra. She can’t stay there to tend her injury; her heart is tripping along like a snare drum as she jerks the car into reverse, spinning the wheels again, skidding backwards onto the pavement, and then speeding away.…

Flooring it. All the way down the ramp and onto the interstate. Something must have happened to the muffler when she crashed over the curb, because the Nissan now sounds like a racer, a low growl that changes as the transmission cycles up the gears. She only slows down when she hits eighty, and then forces herself to back off down to the speed limit, the automatic and passport on the seat beside her.

Everything has changed.

He has undoubtedly run her plates, and the make and model of the car, probably even reported her name. She is now an identified fugitive bleeding from a half-spent bullet in her side. She has killed a cop, and she’s seen enough American movies to know what that means.

She is almost to Huntington when she sees a pair of state patrol cars barreling down the other side of the interstate, flashers on and sirens wailing as they speed toward their man down. What’s happened is … someone has stopped, stopped to go to the bathroom, maybe stopped because they have had their breakfast and have to pee, because the kids are complaining. But they’ve stopped, and someone has seen him, someone has called 911 … And she pushes the growling little car faster until she is welcomed into Kentucky.

She ramps off the highway, continues along a smaller road for a
mile or two until she finds a place where she can pull off and get herself together.

A quick walk around shows her that the Nissan is damaged, a dented front bumper from the pine tree, a broken taillight, and a dent across the trunk, plus the single ragged hole in the side of the driver’s door. She hides behind the open door and checks her side.

The bleeding has stopped all on its own, but there is a stain the size of a saucer there on the hoodie, so it will have to go. Every time she breathes it hurts, and if she tries to lean to her left, she sees spots and almost blacks out. She takes off her T-shirt and wads it under the bra so that it makes a bandage, roots around in the duffel bag and comes out with a sweater that is bulky enough to cover everything up. She holds her breath and kneels behind the car and tries to pry the license plate off, but it is bolted on too tightly for her fingers.

From the road atlas she sees that she can keep going on this road and will arrive at a larger town … Flemingsburg, in only a few miles, and that this will in turn lead her to a larger highway by which she can reenter the interstate.

There is the inevitable strip mall near Flemingsburg, and she parks around the side of a drugstore, goes in, and, as casually as she can, buys a large roll of adhesive tape, some gauze bandages, rubbing alcohol, and a bottle of Tylenol Extra Strength. At the register she pays with some of Officer Preston’s cash, and then, crouching behind the door of the Nissan, makes a bandage and tapes it over the hole in her side. The bullet is still in there, she can feel it, a hard little egg there against what she has decided is a broken rib. Now she’s glad she ran him over.

She tosses her bloody clothes into a dumpster. Then, holding her breath because every time she bends she wants to scream, she gets back in and drives away down the narrow state road. She slows to look for fishermen below, then tosses the stolen credit cards over a bridge railing. This part of the highway is brand-new, an attempt by the state of Kentucky with the aid of the federal government to upgrade its tattered infrastructure, but the houses and farms she sees are either hovels or the outlying fields of what she suspects are incredibly wealthy estates.

Horse country. Kentucky is
horse country
, she remembers that … the Kentucky Derby. Now she passes one of these ranches; white board fences, endless, unearthly lush pasture upon which the absurdly inbred colts can practice their running. Horse racing is a big thing, even with the Arabs. It’s just mindless brutality as far as she’s concerned. Like caged birds. Terrible. How can a horse’s life be worth ten thousand humans?

In the tiny town of Sharpsburg, she approaches an obviously abandoned house. Now she is thinking like an animal and by reflex she taps the brake—she could pull over, move in and nobody would know. It is a stupid idea that she rejects almost immediately, but she stops the car.

There is a
FOR SALE BY OWNER
sign that she uproots from the rutted dirt track that leads up to the house. The plastic sign pops out of the metal frame, and she drops the frame in the ditch. She drives on, maybe another mile or two until she finds an intersection, pulls over and backs the car onto the grass, props the sign on the dashboard, jams all her stuff into the duffel pack, and—trying to move without groaning—walks carefully onto Route 11 with her thumb out.

“Where did you say you’re going to college?”

“San Francisco … San Francisco … University,” Daria says.

“That’s good, that’s good. It’s good to get an education. I should have done that myself …”

The man who has picked her up is in his forties, maybe in his fifties. It’s hard to tell. He has a round face, and is going bald in patches. He wears a starched white shirt and a black nylon windbreaker that says
DIGICON
on the pocket. He does something with networks and smells of peppermint and keeps looking at her instead of the road while he tells his life story. His name is Dean, or Duane, or Daryll. She forgets immediately.

She doesn’t have to listen. It’s not expected of her. It’s easy for a pretty girl to get a ride. The men are bored and horny, and will
gladly carry her a few miles in the hope of some kind of romantic liaison. They have been rejected so many times that they really don’t expect anything to happen. If they hit on her all she has to do is glare, or mention that she has a virus. Sometimes telling the truth is the best way to chase these sex fantasies back into the dark. Outside of Lexington he drops her off, all smiles, ultra-polite and too afraid to make a pass. She waits at the entrance ramp to the highway for about a half an hour until she gets another lift further toward the city.