Part VII - Funeral Pyre Chapter 2: Strip Naked
Checkout time was noon. at ten thirty-six the rust-eaten Cutlass with a Nebraska tag pulled out of the Liberty Motor Lodge's parking lot. The red-haired woman behind the wheel turned right, onto the ramp that merged into the westbound lanes of I-80. The Cutlass's passenger, a pallid woman with a bandaged hand and hellfire in her eyes, wore a dark gray sweater banded with green stripes. She kept an ice pack pressed against her left hand, and she chewed on her raw and swollen lower lip.
The miles clicked off. Snow flurries spun from the gloom, the headlights of cars on and their wipers going. The Cutlass's wipers shrieked with a noise like a banshee party, and the car's engine chugged like a boiler with spark plugs. In Des Moines, eighty miles farther west, Didi and Laura stopped at a Wendy's and got the works: burgers, fries, salad bar, and coffee. as Laura ate with no thought of manners and an eye on the clock, Didi went to the pay phone and looked up pawnbrokers in the Yellow Pages. She tore the page out, rejoined Laura, and they finished their food.
The clerk at Honest Joe's, on McKinley avenue, examined the diamond through his loupe and asked to see some identification. They took the stone back and went on. The female clerk at Rossi's Pawn on 9th Street wouldn't talk to them without seeing proof of ownership. at the dismal, aptly named Junk 'n Stuff Pawnshop on army Post Road, a man who made Laura think of John Carradine's head stuck on Dom DeLuise's body looked at the diamond and laughed like a chain saw. "Get real! It's paste, lady!"
"Thank you. " Laura picked up the diamond and Didi followed her toward the door.
"Hey, hey, hey! Don't go away mad! Hold up a sec!"
Laura paused. The fat man with the thin, wrinkled prune of a face motioned her back with a ring-studded paw. "Come on, let's dicker a little bit. "
"I don't have time for that. "
"What, you're in a hurryi" He frowned, looking at her bandaged hand. "I think you're bleedin', lady. "
Spots of red had seeped through the bandages. Laura said, "I cut myself. " She drew up her spine straight and tall and walked back to the counter. "My husband paid over three thousand dollars for this diamond eight years ago. I've got the certification. I know it's not paste, so don't give me that crap. "
"Yeahi" He grinned. No horse had bigger or yellower teeth. "So let's see the certification, then. "
Laura didn't move. She didn't speak either.
"Uh-huh. So let's see a driver's license. "
"My purse was stolen," Laura said.
"Oh, yeah!" He nodded, drumming his fingers on the countertop. "Where'd you steal the rock from, ladiesi"
"Let's go," Didi urged.
"You're undercover cops, righti" the man asked. "Tryin' to sting my assi" He snorted. "Yeah, I can smell cops a mile off! Comin' in here with a phony southern accent! You people won't stop roustin' me, will youi"
"Let's go. " Didi grasped Laura's arm.
She almost turned away. almost. But her hand was killing her and they were down to the last of their cash, a gloomier day she'd never seen, and Mary Terror was out there somewhere with David. She felt her frayed temper snap, and the next thing she felt was her hand reaching up under her sweater. She grasped the handle of the automatic in the waistband of her jeans, and she brought the gun up and pointed it at the man's horse teeth.
"I'll take a thousand dollars for my diamond," Laura said. "No dickering. "
The man's grin hung by a lip.
"Oh God!" Didi wailed. "Don't kill him like you did that other one, Bonnie! Don't blow the brains out of his head!"
The man trembled and lifted his arms. He had on cuff links that looked like little gold nuggets.
"Open the cash register," Laura told him. "You just bought a diamond. "
He hustled to obey, and when the register was open he started counting out the cash. "Bonnie gets crazy sometimes," Didi said as she went to the front door and turned over the WE'RE OPEN sign to SORRY WE'RE CLOSED. There was nobody on the street anywhere, the wind and the snow keeping saner people indoors. "She shot a guy through the head in Nebraska yesterday. Trigger crazy is what she is. "
"You want big billsi" the man gasped. "You want hundredsi"
"Whatever," Didi answered. "Come on, hurry it up!"
"I've only. . . I've only got. . . got six hundred dollars in the register. Got some more in the safe. Back there. " He nodded toward a door with an OFFICE sign on it.
"Six hundred's enough," Didi said. "Take the money, Bonnie. Got to get us to Michigan, doesn't iti" She took the automatic from Laura as Didi pocketed the cash. "anybody else in herei"
"Wanda Jane's in the back. She's the bookkeeper. "
"Okay, go on through that door real nice and slow. "
The man started to walk, but Laura said, "Wait. Take the diamond. You bought it. " Didi flashed her a glance of disapproval, and the scared clerk just stood there not knowing what to do. "Take it," Laura said, and at last he did.
In the office, a wizened woman with butch-cut gray hair was smoking a cigarette, sitting in a smoke haze and talking on the telephone as she watched a soap opera on a portable TV. Didi didn't have to speak; the man's face and the pistol did all the talking. Wanda Jane croaked, "Jumpin' Jesus! Hal, I think we're bein' -" Didi put her hand down on the phone's prongs, cutting the connection.
"Wanda Jane, you keep your mouth shut," Didi ordered. "You two strip naked. "
"The hell I will!" Wanda Jane thundered, her face reddening to the roots of her hair.
"They've already killed somebody!" the clerk said. "They're both crazy!" He was already unbuttoning his shirt. When he unbuckled his belt, his huge paunch flopped out like the nose of the Goodyear blimp.
Didi hurried them up. In a couple of minutes they were both nude and lying on their bellies on the concrete floor, and an uglier two moons Laura had never been so unfortunate to see. Didi tore the phone out of the wall and scooped their clothes up. "You lie here for ten minutes. Bobby's watching the front door. If you come out before ten minutes are up, you're dead meat, because Bobby's even crazier than Bonnie. Hear mei"
Wanda Jane grunted like a bullfrog. The man with horse teeth gripped his new diamond in his fist and bleated, "Yeah, we hear you! Just don't kill us, okayi"
"See you next time we come through," Didi promised, and she pushed Laura out of the office in front of her.
Outside, Didi dumped the clothes in a trash can. Then she and Laura ran to the Cutlass, which was parked down the street a few doors from the pawnshop, and Didi took the wheel again. In five minutes they were heading back toward I-80, and in ten minutes they were on their way west again, six hundred dollars richer and minus a diamond that had become to Laura only a dead weight.
Didi kept checking the rearview mirror. No flashing lights, no sirens. Yet the speedometer's needle showed a little over sixty, and Didi left it there. "From shoplifting to armed robbery in less than a day," Didi said, and she couldn't hold back a wicked grin. "You're a natural. "
"a natural whati"
"Outlaw. "
"I didn't steal anything. I left him the diamond. "
"That's right, you did. But didn't it feel good, making him look at that gun and bust a guti"
Laura watched the wipers fight the spits of snow. It had been thrilling, in a way. It had been so alien to her normal sense of propriety that it had seemed like someone else holding the gun, wearing her skin, and speaking in her voice. She wondered what Doug might think of it, or her mother and father. One thing she realized was true, and it filled her with gritty pride: she might not be an outlaw, but she was a survivor. " 'Strip naked,'" she said, and she gave a hard note of laughter. "How'd you think of thati"
"Just buying time. I couldn't think of any other way to keep them in that office for a while. "
"Why'd you keep calling me Bonniei and you said we were on our way to Michigani"
Didi shrugged. "Pigs'll be looking for two women on thei
r way to Michigan. One of them has a southern accent and is named Bonnie. They may be traveling with a male accomplice named Bobby. anyway, the pigs'll look in the opposite direction from where we're going. They won't know what to make of somebody trading a three-thousand-dollar diamond for six hundred bucks at gunpoint. " She smiled faintly. "Did you hear what I saidi 'Pigs. ' I haven't said that and meant it in a long time. " Her laughter bubbled up, too. "Did you see Wanda Jane's face when I told them to stripi I thought she was going to drop a fig!"
"and when that guy's belly came out I thought it was going to flop right to the floor! I thought Des Moines was about to have an earthquake!"
"Guy needed a girdle! Hell, he couldn't find a girdle big enough!"
They were both laughing, the laughter taking some of the edge off what they'd just done. as Laura laughed, she forgot for a precious moment the pain in her hand and in her heart, and that was mercy indeed.
"He needed a whale girdle!" Didi went on. "and did you see the butts on those two!"
"Butt and Jeff!" Laura said, tears in her eyes.
"The Honeymooners!"
"Two moons over Des Moines!"
"I swear to God, I've seen bowls of Jell-O with better -" Muscle tone, she was about to say, but she did not because of the flashing blue light that had suddenly appeared in the rear windshield. The scream of a siren came into the car, and the hair stood up on the back of Laura's neck.
"Christ!" Didi shouted as she jerked the Cutlass over into the right lane. The patrol car was roaring up in the left lane, and Didi's heart hammered as she waited for it to swerve on their tail. But it kept going, sweeping past them in a siren blare and dazzling blue lights, and it sped away into the murk of swirling sleet and snow.
Neither woman could speak. Didi's hands had clamped into claws around the steering wheel, her eyes wide with shock, and Laura sat there with her stomach cramping and her bandaged hand pressed against her chest.
Four miles farther west, they passed a car that had skidded off the highway into the guardrail. The patrol car was parked nearby, the Smokey talking to a young man in a sweatshirt with SKI WYOMING across the front. Traffic had slowed, the afternoon had darkened to a plum violet, and the pavement glistened. Didi touched her window. "Getting colder," she said. The Cutlass was a laboring, gas-guzzling beast, but its heater was first rate. She cut their speed back to fifty-five, grainy snow flying before the headlights.
"I can drive if you want to take a nap," Laura offered.
"No, I'm fine. Let your hand rest. How're you doingi"
"Okay. Hurting some. "
"If you want to stop somewhere, let me know. "
Laura shook her head. "No. I want to keep going. "
"Six hundred dollars would buy us airline tickets," Didi said. "We could catch a flight to San Francisco from Omaha and rent a car to Freestone. "
"We couldn't rent a car without a driver's license. anyway, we'd have to give up the gun to board a plane. "
Didi drove on a few more miles before she spoke again, bringing up a subject that had been needling her since the incident at the lumberyard. "What good is a gun going to be, anywayi I mean. . . how are you going to get David back, Laurai Mary's not going to give him up. Shell die first. Even with a gun, how're you going to get David back alivei" She emphasized the last word.
"I don't know," Laura answered.
"If Mary finds Jack Gardiner. . . well, who knows what she'll doi Who knows what he'll doi If she shows up at his door after all these years, he might flip out. " She glanced quickly at the other woman and then away, because the pain had crept back onto Laura's face and latched there in the lines. "Jack was a dangerous man. He could talk other people into doing his killing for him, but he did his share of murders, too. He was the mind behind the Storm Front. The whole thing was his idea. "
"and you really think that's himi In Freestonei"
"I think that's him in the photo, yeah. Whether he's in Freestone now or not, I don't know. But when Mary gets to him with David as some kind of a. . . love offering, God only knows how he'll react. "
"So we've got to find Jack Gardiner first," Laura said.
"There's no telling how far Mary is ahead of us. She'll get to Freestone before us if we don't go by plane. "
"She can't be that far ahead. She's hurt, too, maybe worse than I am. The weather's going to slow her down. If she gets off the interstate, it'll just slow her down more. "
"Okay," Didi said. "Even if we do find Jack first, what theni"
"We wait for Mary. She'll give the baby to Jack. That's why she's going to Freestone. " Laura gently touched her bandaged hand. It was hot enough to sizzle, and throbbed with a deep, agonizing pulse. She would have to stand the pain, because she had no choice. "When my baby is out of Mary's hands. . . that's why I might need the gun. "
"You're not a killer. You're tough as old leather, yeah. But not a killer. "
"I'll need the gun to hold Mary for the police," Laura told her.
There was a long silence. The Cutlass's tires hummed. "I don't think Jack would like that," Didi said. "Whatever identity he's built for himself, he's not going to let you call the police on Mary. and once you get David back. . . I'm not sure I can let you do that either. "
"I understand," Laura said. She'd already thought about this, and her thoughts had led her to this destination. "I was hoping we could work something out. "
"Right. Like a presidential pardoni"
"More like a plane ticket to either Canada or Mexico. "
"Oh boy!" Didi smiled bitterly. "Nothing like starting life over in a foreign country with zilch money and a K-Mart sweater!"
"I could send you some money to help you get settled. "
"I'm an american! Get iti I live in america!"
Laura didn't know what else to say. There was nothing else, really. Didi had started her journey to this point a long time ago, when she'd cast her lot with Jack Gardiner and the Storm Front. "Damn," Didi said quietly. She was thinking of a future in which the fear of someone coming up behind her suffocated the days and haunted the nights, and everywhere she walked she carried a target on her back. But there were a lot of islands in the waterways of Canada, she thought. a lot of places where the mail came in by seaplane and your closest neighbor lived ten miles away. "Would you buy me a kilni" she asked. "For my potteryi"
"Yes. "
"That's important to me, to do my pottery. Canada's a pretty country. It would be inspiring, wouldn't iti" Didi nodded, answering her own query. "I could be an expatriate. That sounds better than exile, don't you thinki"
Laura agreed that it did.
The Cutlass passed from Iowa into Nebraska, following I-80 as it snaked around Omaha and on across the flat, white-frosted plains. Laura closed her eyes and rested as best she could, with the wipers scraping across the windshield and the tires a dull roar.
Thursday's child, she thought.
Thursday's child has far to go.
She remembered one of the nurses saying that, at David's birth.
and she hadn't thought of this before, but it came to her between the scrape and the roar: she'd been born on a Thursday, too.
Far to go, she thought. She'd come a long way, but the most dangerous distance still lay ahead. Somewhere on that dark horizon, Mary Terror was traveling with David, getting closer to California with the passing of every mile. Behind Laura's eyes, she saw David lying in a pool of blood, his skull shattered by a bullet, and she shoved the image away before it took root. Far to go. Far to go. Into the golden West, dark as a tomb.