“Might be ahead, between two of these cars, waiting to sandbag us,” Peake whispered.
“He’s gone back into the woods,” Sharp said in a voice as soft as Peake’s, but with scorn. “Probably watching us from cover right now, trying not to laugh.”
The smooth, fist-sized rock that Ben had tucked inside his shirt was pressing into his belly, but he did not shift his position for fear the slightest sound would give him away.
Finally Sharp and Peake moved together, paralleling each other, stepping out of sight. They were probably looking warily into all the cars and between them.
But they were not likely to get down on their knees and look underneath, because it was insane of Ben to hide there, flat on his belly, nearly helpless, with no quick way out, where he could be shot as easily as the proverbial fish in the barrel. If his risk paid off, he would throw them off his trail, send them sniffing in the wrong direction, and have a chance to boost one of these cars. However, if they thought he was dumb enough—or clever enough—to hide under the station wagon, he was a dead man.
Ben prayed that the owner of the wagon would not return at this inopportune moment and drive the heap away, leaving him exposed.
Sharp and Peake reached the front of the line of vehicles and, having found no enemy, returned, still walking on opposite sides of the cars. They spoke a bit louder now.
“You said he’d never shoot at us,” Peake remarked sourly.
“He didn’t.”
“He shot at me, sure enough,” Peake said, his voice rising.
“He shot at the car.”
“What’s the difference? We were
in
the car.”
They stopped beside the station wagon once more.
Ben looked left and right at their shoes, hoping he would not have to sneeze, cough, or fart.
Sharp said, “He shot at the tires. You see? No point disabling our transportation if he was going to kill us.”
“He shot out the windshield,” Peake said.
“Yeah, but we were staying down, out of the way, and he knew he wouldn’t hit us. I tell you, he’s a damn pussy, a prissy moralist, sees himself as the guy in the white hat. He’d shoot at us only if he had no choice, and he’d never shoot at us
first
. We’ll have to start the action. Listen, Peake, if he’d wanted to kill us, he could have poked the barrel of that piece through either one of our side windows, could’ve taken us both out in two seconds flat. Think about it.”
They were both silent.
Peake was probably thinking about it.
Ben wondered what Sharp was thinking. He hoped Sharp wasn’t thinking about Edgar Allan Poe’s
The Purloined Letter
. He did not suppose there was much danger of that because he did not think Sharp had ever in his life read anything other than skin magazines.
“He’s down in those woods,” Sharp said at last, turning his back on the station wagon, showing Ben his heels. “Down toward the lake. He can see us now, I’ll bet.
Letting us make the next move.”
“We have to get another car,” Peake said.
“First you’ve got to go down in these woods, have a look around, see if you can flush him out.”
“Me?”
“You,” Sharp said.
“Sir, I’m not really dressed for that sort of thing. My shoes—”
“There’s less underbrush here than there was up near Leben’s cabin,” Sharp said. “You’ll manage.”
Peake hesitated but finally said, “What’ll you be doing while I’m poking around down there?”
“From here,” Sharp said, “I can look almost straight down through the trees, into the brush. If you get near him down there on his own level, he might be able to move away from you under the cover of rocks and bushes, without you getting a glimpse of him. But see, from up above here, I’m almost sure to see him moving. And when I do, I’ll go straight for the bastard.”
Ben heard a peculiar noise, like a lid being unscrewed from a mayonnaise jar. For a moment he could not imagine what it was, then realized Sharp was taking the silencer off his pistol.
Sharp confirmed that suspicion. “Maybe the shotgun still gives him the advantage—”
“Maybe?” Peake said with amazement.
“—but there’s two of us, two guns, and without silencers we’ll get better range. Go on, Peake. Go down there and smoke him out for me.”
Peake seemed on the point of rebellion, but he went.
Ben waited.
A couple of cars passed on the road.
Ben remained very still, watching Anson Sharp’s shoes. After a while, Sharp moved one step away from the car, which was as far as he could go in that direction, for one step put him at the very brink of the embankment that sloped down into the woods.
When the next car rumbled along, Ben used the cover of its engine noise to slip out from under the Dodge wagon on the driver’s side, where he crouched against the front door, below window level. Now the station wagon was between him and Sharp.
Holding the shotgun in one hand, he opened a few buttons on his shirt. He withdrew the rock that he had found in the forest.
On the other side of the Dodge, Sharp moved.
Ben froze, listened.
Evidently Sharp had only been sidestepping along the edge of the embankment to keep Peake in sight below.
Ben knew he had to act swiftly. If another car came by, he would present quite a spectacle to anyone in it: a guy in filthy clothes, holding a rock in one hand and a shotgun in the other, with a revolver tucked into his waistband. With one tap of the horn, any passing driver could warn Sharp of the wild man at his back.
Rising up from a crouch, Ben looked across the station wagon, directly at the back of Sharp’s head. If Sharp turned around now, one of them would have to shoot the other.
Ben waited tensely until he was certain that Sharp’s attention was directed down toward the northwest portion of the woods. Then he pitched the round fist-sized rock as hard as he could, across the top of the car, very high, very wide of Sharp’s head, so the wind of its passage would not draw the man’s attention. He hoped Sharp would not see the rock in flight, hoped it would not hit a tree too soon but would fall far into the forest before impacting.
He was doing a lot of earnest hoping and praying lately.
Without waiting to see what happened, he dropped down beside the car again and heard his missile shredding pine boughs or brush and finally impacting with a resonant thunk.
“Peake!” Sharp called out. “Back of you, back of you. Over that way. Movement over there in those bushes, by the drainage cut.”
Ben heard a scrape and clatter and rustle that might have been Anson Sharp bolting off the top of the embankment and down into the forest. Suspecting that it was too good to be true, he rose warily.
Amazingly, Sharp was gone.
With the state route to himself, Ben hurried along the line of parked cars, trying doors. He found an unlocked four-year-old Chevette. It was a hideous bile-yellow heap with clashing green upholstery, but he was in no position to worry about style.
He got in, eased the door shut. He took the .357 Combat Magnum out of his waistband and put it on the seat, where he could reach it in a hurry. Using the stock of the shotgun, he hammered the ignition switch until he broke the key plate off the steering column.
He wondered if the noise carried beyond the car and down through the woods to Sharp and Peake.
Putting the Remington aside, he hastily pulled the ignition wires into view, crossed the two bare ends, and tramped on the accelerator. The engine sputtered, caught, raced.
Although Sharp probably had not heard the hammering, he surely heard the car starting, knew what it meant, and was without a doubt frantically climbing the embankment that he had just descended.
Ben disengaged the handbrake. He threw the Chevette in gear and pulled onto the road. He headed south because that was the way the car was facing, and he had no time to turn it around.
The hard, flat crack of a pistol sounded behind him.
He winced, pulled his head down on his shoulders, glanced in the rearview mirror, and saw Sharp lurching between the sedan and the Dodge station wagon out into the middle of the road, where he could line up a shot better.
“Too late, sucker,” Ben said, ramming the accelerator all the way to the floor.
The Chevette coughed as if it were a tubercular, spavined old dray horse being asked to run the Kentucky Derby.
A bullet clipped the rear bumper or maybe a fender, and the high-pitched
skeeeeeeen
sounded like the Chevette’s startled bleat of pain.
The car stopped coughing and shuddering, surged forward at last, spewing a cloud of blue smoke in its wake.
In the rearview mirror, Anson Sharp dwindled beyond the smoke as if he were a demon tumbling back into Hades. He might have fired again, but Ben did not hear the shot over the scream of the Chevette’s straining engine.
The road topped a hill and sloped down, turned to the right, sloped some more, and Ben slowed a bit. He remembered the sheriff’s deputy at the sporting-goods store. The lawman might still be in the area. Ben figured he had used up so much good luck in his escape from Sharp that he would be tempting fate if he exceeded the speed limit in his eagerness to get away from Arrowhead. After all, he was in filthy clothes, driving a stolen car, carrying a shotgun and a Combat Magnum, so if he was stopped for speeding, he could hardly expect to be let off with just a fine.
He was on the road again. That was the most important thing now—staying on the road until he had caught up with Rachael either out on I-15 or in Vegas.
Rachael was going to be all right.
He was sure that she would be all right.
White clouds had moved in low under the blue summer sky. They were growing thicker. The edges of some of them were gunmetal-gray.
On both sides of the road, the forest settled deeper into darkness.
28
DESERT HEAT
Rachael reached Barstow at 3:40 Tuesday afternoon. She thought about pulling off I-15 to grab a sandwich; she had eaten only an Egg McMuffin this morning and two small candy bars purchased at the Arco service station before she’d gotten on the interstate. Besides, the morning’s coffee and the recent can of Coke were working through her; she began to feel a vague need to use a rest room, but she decided to keep moving. Barstow was large enough to have a police department plus a California Highway Patrol substation. Though there was little chance that she would encounter police of any kind and be identified as the infamous traitor of whom the radio reporter had spoken, her hunger and bladder pressure were both too mild to justify the risk.
On the road between Barstow and Vegas, she would be relatively safe, for CHiPs were rarely assigned to that long stretch of lonely highway. In fact, the threat of being stopped for speeding was so small (and so well and widely understood) that the traffic moved at an average speed of seventy to eighty miles an hour. She pushed the Mercedes up to seventy, and other cars passed her, so she was confident that she would not be pulled over by a patrol car even in the unlikely event that one appeared.
She recalled a roadside rest stop with public facilities about thirty miles ahead. She could wait to use that bathroom. As for food, she was not going to risk malnutrition merely by postponing dinner until she got to Vegas.
Since coming through the El Cajon Pass, she had noticed that the number and size of the clouds were increasing, and the farther she drove into the Mojave, the more somber the heavens became. Previously the clouds had been all white, then white with pale gray beards, and now they were primarily gray with slate-dark streaks. The desert enjoyed little precipitation, but during the summer the skies could sometimes open as if in reenactment of the biblical story of Noah, sending forth a deluge that the barren earth was unprepared to absorb. For the majority of its course, the interstate was built above the runoff line, but here and there road signs warned FLASH FLOODS. She was not particularly worried about being caught in a flood. However, she was concerned that a hard rain would slow her down considerably, and she was eager to make Vegas by six-fifteen or six-thirty.
She would not feel half safe until she was settled in Benny’s shuttered motel. And she would not feel entirely safe until he was with her, the drapes drawn, the world locked out.
Minutes after leaving Barstow, she passed the exit for Calico. Once the service stations and motels and restaurants at that turnoff were behind her, virtually unpeopled emptiness lay ahead for the next sixty miles, until the tiny town of Baker. The interstate and the traffic upon it were the only proof that this was an inhabited planet rather than a sterile, lifeless hunk of rock orbiting silently in a sea of cold space.
As this was a Tuesday, traffic was light, more trucks than cars. Thursday through Monday, tens of thousands of people were on their way to and from Vegas. Frequently, Fridays and Sundays, the traffic was so heavy that it looked startlingly anachronistic in this wasteland—as if all the commuters from a great city had been simultaneously transported back in time to a barren era prior to the Mesozoic epoch. But now, on several occasions, Rachael’s was the only vehicle in sight on her side of the divided highway.
She drove over a skeletal landscape of scalped hills and bony plains, where white and gray and umber rock poked up like exposed ribs—like clavicles and scapulae, radii and ulnae, here an ilium, there a femur, here two fibulae, and over there a cluster of tarsals and metatarsals—as if the land were a burial ground for giants of another age, the graves reopened by centuries of wind. The many-armed Joshua trees—like monuments to Shiva—and the other cactuses of the higher desert were not to be found in these lower and hotter regions. The vegetation was limited to some worthless scrub, here and there a patch of dry brown bunchgrass. Mostly the Mojave was sand, rock, alkaline plains, and solidified lava beds. In the distance, to the north, were the Calico mountains, and still farther north the Granite Mountains rose purple and majestic at the horizon, and far to the southeast were the Cady Mountains: all appeared to be stark, hard-edged monoliths of bare and forbidding stone.