Mine

Part VII - Funeral Pyre Chapter 6: a Harley Man

 

  Tap. Tap.

  "Ladyi"

  Tap tap. "Lady, you okayi"

  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 okayi" 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 herei" 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 offi"

  "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 Springsi"

  "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 chainsi"

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

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

  "The second luckiesti"

  "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 vani"

  "Pardoni"

  "a green vani Is that what she was ini"

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

  "What colori"

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

  "I know her," Laura said. a thought occurred to her. "Did you give her coffee, tooi"

  "Yup. Drunk it like a horse. "

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

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

  "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 hurti" Laura asked. The girl stared blankly at her. "Bleeding," Laura said. "Did you see any blood on heri"

  "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 kep
t 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 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 Gardineri What would she do if none of those three men was Jack Gardineri What kind of man would he be nowi Would he shun Mary Terror or embrace heri 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 togetheri 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.

  But the moment passed. They were good people. There was no need to mark their lives with the barrel of a gun even though she never would dream of using it as anything but a bluff. Some hard case, she thought.

  "Thanks for the lift," she told them, and got out.

  The station wagon pulled away. Gary waved at her through the rear window. and then Laura turned to face the bald-headed grease monkey who stood about three inches shorter than her and stared up at her through his yellow goggles like a bullfrog.

  "You fix carsi" she asked stupidly.

  "Naw. " He laughed like a snort. "I eat 'em!"

  "My car's broken down a couple of miles from Deeth. Can you tow it herei"

  "How come you didn't go to Deeth, theni"

  "I was heading west. I came here. Can you tow iti" She realized the tattoos on the man's arms were interlocked figures of naked women.

  "Busy right now. Got a car in both bays and two waitin'. "

  "Okay. When can you tow iti"

  "an hour, give or take. "

  Laura shook her head. "No. I can't wait that long. "

  "Sorry, but that's the breaks. "See, I'm all alone here. I'm Marco, like the sign says. "

  "I want you to go get my car right now. "

  He frowned, deep lines furrowing across his broad forehead. "Got wax in your ears, babei I said I -"

  Laura had the gun in her hand. She placed it against his bald skull. "What did you sayi"

  Marco swallowed, his adam's apple bulging. "I. . . said. . . I'm ready when you are, babe. "

  "Don't call me babe. "

  "Okay," he said. "Whatever you say, chief. "

  On the subject of baths, Marco had a lot to learn. Laura knew she didn't smell like roses, but Marco exuded an odor of stale sweat and dirty underwear that made one wish for a whiff of Limburger cheese. at the Cutlass, Marco peered into the radiator and whistled. "Hey, chief! You ever heard of puttin' coolant in this thingi You got enough rust in here to sink a battleship!"

  "Can you
fix iti"

  "You can shoot it and put it out of its misery. " He looked at the gun Laura held by her side. "Why don't you put that away now, annie Oakleyi Have I got a target on my assi"

  "I have to get back on the road. Can you fix it or noti" The towtruck was starting to look attractive, but trying to steer that damned thing with one hand and an elbow would be beastly.

  "You want honest or bullshiti" he asked her. "Bullshit says yeah, sure, no sweat. Honest says you'll need a new radiator, bottom line. Got some rotten hoses in there and belts that are about to go. Oil lines look like a rat's been chewin' on 'em. You still with mei"

  "Yes. "

  "Major labor," he went on, and he scratched his pate with black fingers. "Have to find a radiator that'll fit this clunker. Probably have to drive to the parts shop in Elko to get one. We're talkin' two big bills, and I'm not gonna be able to even get started good before closin' time. "

  "I can spend four hundred dollars," Laura said. In her pocket was five hundred and thirty-four dollars, what remained of the cash from her engagement diamond. "Can I buy a used car around here anywherei"

  "Yeah, I can find you somethin'. " He cocked his head at her, his hands on his bulbous hips. "It'll have an engine, but it might not have a floorboard in it. Four bills ain't gonna buy you much, unless. . . " He grinned, showing a silver tooth. "You got somethin' to tradei"

  She pretended not to have heard that, because he was real close to becoming a soprano. She needed his hands, not his dubious equipment. "How about your car, theni"

  "Sorry, chief. I'm a Harley man. "

  "I'll pay you four hundred and fifty dollars to fix my car," she said. "Except I want you to keep working on it until it's finished. "

  The lines furrowed deep again. "What's the rushi You kill somebodyi"

  "No. I'm in a hurry to get where I'm going. "

  He prodded at the right front tire with a boot that had been scrubbed with steel wool. "Let's see your money," he said.

  Laura returned the pistol to her waistband, reached into her pocket, and showed him the cash. "Can you do it in three hoursi"

  Marco paused, thinking about it. He looked up at the sun in the cloud-dappled sky, back to the radiator, and sucked air across his lower lip. "I can put a radiator in and do a patch job. Got a retarded kid who helps me sometimes, if he ain't readin' his Batman funnies. Have to close down the pumps and shut up shop except for the one job. Elko's about twenty miles there and back. Four hours, minimum. "

  It was approaching three o'clock. That would get her out of there by seven. San Francisco was still over five hundred miles away, and Freestone another fifty miles north, according to the maps. If she drove all night she could make Freestone before dawn. But when would Mary get therei Sometime after midnight if she kept going straight through. Laura felt tears pressing to burst free. God had turned a blind eye. Mary was going to get to Freestone at least four hours before she would.

  "That's the best I can do, chief," Marco said. "Honest. "

  Laura drew a deep breath. They were wasting time talking. "Get it done," she said.