The van swept in at them again. There was a sudden bang! so loud that Alex thought they had been hit a fourth time. However, there was no impact with the sound. And, abruptly, the Chevrolet lost speed, fell behind them.
“What's he doing?” Colin asked.
It was too good to be true, Doyle thought. “One of his tires blew.”
“You're kidding.”
“I'm not kidding.”
The boy slumped back against the seat, pale and shaking, limp, wrung out. in a thick, almost whispered voice, he said, “Jesus!”
Seventeen
The town survived despite the inhospitable land in which it stood. The low buildings—whether they were of wood, brick, or stone—had all turned a dull yellow-brown in order to coexist with the merciless sun and the wind-blown sand. Here and there, alkaline encrustations limed the edges of walls, but that was the only variation in the drabness. The main highway - which became the borough's most important street - had been a harsh gray-black line through the desert ever since they had crossed over from Colorado; but now it succumbed to the influence of the town, became dun and dusty. Out on the open land, the wind had scoured the road clean; but here, the buildings blocked the wind and let the dust collect. A soft powder filmed the automobiles, taking the shine out of them. The dust seemed like the hands of the living desert, gradually stealing back this meager plot which men had taken from it.
The police station, three blocks west along the main street, was as dreary as everything else, a one-story building that was losing the mortar between its mustard-colored stones.
The officer in charge of the station, a man who called himself Captain Ackridge, wore a brown uniform that fit in with his town and a hard, experienced face which did not. He was six-foot, two hundred pounds, perhaps ten years older than Doyle but with a body ten years younger. His close-cropped hair was black, his eyes darker than that. He held himself like a soldier on parade, stiff and proud.
He came out and looked at the Thunderbird. He walked the whole way around it and seemed to be as interested in the undamaged angles as he was in the long scars down the driver's side. He leaned close to the tinted windshield and peered in at Colin as if the boy were a fish in an aquarium. Then he looked at the damage on the car's left side again and was satisfied with his inspection.
“Come on back inside,” he told Doyle. His voice was crisp and precise in spite of the underlying Southwest accent. “We'll talk about it.”
They returned to the station, crossed the public room where two secretaries were pounding on typewriters and one uniformed, overweight cop was taking a coffee break and munching on an eclair. They went through the door to Ackridge's off ice, and the big man closed it behind them.
“What do you think can be done?” Alex asked as Ackridge went around behind his neatly ordered desk.
“Have a seat.”
Doyle went to the chair that faced the scarred metal desk, but he did not sit down. “Look, that flat tire won't slow the bastard up for long. And if he–”
“Please sit down, Mr. Doyle,” the policeman said, sitting down himself. His wellworn spring-backed chair squeaked as if there were a live mouse in the cushion.
Somewhat irritated, Doyle sat down. “I think–”
“Let's just do this my way,” Ackridge said, smiling briefly. it was an imitation smile, utterly false. The policeman seemed to understand that it was a bad copy, for he gave it up right away. “You have some identification?”
“Me?
“It was you I asked.”
The officer's voice contained no real malice, yet it chilled Doyle. He got his wallet from his hip pocket, withdrew his driver's license from one of the plastic windows, and pushed it across the desk.
The policeman studied it. “Doyle.”
“That's right.”
“Philadelphia?”
“Yes, but we're moving to San Francisco. Of course, I don't have my California license yet.” He knew he was on the verge of babbling, his tongue loosened not so much by the residual fear of their encounter with the madman in the van as by Ackridge's penetrating black eyes.
“You have an owner's card for that T-Bird?
Doyle found it, held the wallet open to the proper plastic envelope, and passed the whole thing over to the policeman.
Ackridge looked at it for a long time. The billfold was small in his large, hard hands. “First Thunderbird you've owned?”
Alex could not see what that had to do with anything, but he answered the question anyway. “Second.”
“Occupation?”
“Mine? Commercial artist.”
Ackridge looked up at him, seemed to stare through him. “Exactly what is that?”
“I do advertising artwork,” Doyle said.
“And you get paid well for that?”
“Pretty well,” Doyle said.
Ackridge started to leaf through the other cards in the wallet, taking a couple of seconds with each. His sober, intense interest in these private things was almost obscene.
What in the hell is going on here? Doyle wondered. I came here to report a crime. I'm a good, upstanding citizen—not the suspect!
He cleared his throat. “Excuse me, Captain.”
Ackridge stopped flipping through the cards. “What is it?”
Last night, Doyle told himself, I faced a man who was trying to kill me with an ax. Today I can surely face this two-bit police chief.
“Captain,” he said, “I don't see why you're so interested in who I am. isn't the most important thing—well, going after this man in the Automover?”
“I always believe it pays to know the victim as well as the victimizer,” Ackridge said. With that, he went back to the cards in Doyle's wallet.
It was all wrong. How on earth could it have gone sour like this—and why had it?
So that he would not be humiliated by watching the cop pry through his wallet, Alex looked around the room. The walls were institutional-gray and brightened by only three things: a poster-sized framed photograph of the President of the United States; an equally large photograph of the late J. Edgar Hoover; and a four-foot-square map of the immediate area. Filing cabinets stood side by side along one wall, breaking only for a window and an air-conditioning unit. There were three straight-backed chairs, the desk, the chair in which Ackridge sat, and a flagstand bearing a full-sized cotton-and-silk Old Glory.
“Conscientious objector?” Ackridge asked.
Alex looked at him, surprised. “What did you say?
Ackridge showed him the selective service card in his wallet. “You have a CO rating here.”
Why had he ever kept that card? He was under no legal obligation to carry it with him, especially not now that he was thirty years old. They had long ago stopped drafting men over twenty-six. Indeed, the draft was pretty much of a forgotten thing for everyone. Yet he had transferred the card from one billfold to the next—through maybe three or four of them. Why? Subconsciously had he believed that possession of the card was proof that his non-violent philosophy was based on principle and not cowardice? Or had he simply given in to that common American neurosis—the reluctance and sometimes the inability to throw away anything with a vaguely official look to it, no matter how dated it might be?
“I did alternate service in a veterans' hospital,” Doyle said, though he did not feel he needed to justify himself to Ackridge.
“I was too young for Korea and too old for Nam,” the cop said. “But I served in the regular army, in-between wars.” He handed back the driver's license and the wallet.
Alex put the license in the wallet, the wallet in his pocket, and he said, “About the man in the Chevrolet—”
“You ever try marijuana?” Ackridge asked.
Easy, Doyle thought. Be damn careful. Be damn nice.
“Long time ago,” he told the cop. He no longer tried to find a way to get back to the man in the Automover, because he saw that for whatever reasons, Ackridge didn't care about that.
“Still use it?”
“No.”
Ackridge smiled. It was the same bad imitation. “Even if you did use it every day of the week, you wouldn't tell a crusty old cop like me.”
“I'm telling the truth,” Doyle said, feeling new perspiration on his forehead.
“Other things?”
“What do you mean?”
Leaning across the desk, his voice lowered to a melodramatic whisper, Ackridge said, “Barbiturates, amphetamines, LSD, cocaine . . .”
“Drugs are for people who don't really care for life,” Doyle said. He believed what he was saying, but he knew it must sound hollow to the cop. “I happen to love life. I don't need drugs. I can make myself happy without them.”
Ackridge watched him closely for a moment, then leaned back in his chair, crossed his heavy arms on his chest. “You want to know why I'm asking all these questions?”
Alex did not respond, for he was not sure whether or not he wanted to know.
“I'll tell you,” Ackridge said. “I've got two theories about this story of yours—about the man in the Automover. First one is—none of it happened. You hallucinated it all. Could be. Could be like that. If you were really high on something, maybe LSD, you could have given yourself a real bad spook.”
The thing to do, now, was just to listen. Don't argue. Just let him go on and, hopefully, get out of here as soon as possible. Still, Alex could not help saying, “What about the side of my car? The paint's gone. The body is all torn up. My door won't open.
“I'm not saying that is imaginary,” Ackridge told him. “But it could be that you side-swiped a retaining wall or an outcropping of rock-anything.”
“Ask Colin,” Doyle said.
“The boy in the car,' Your—brother-in-law? “
“Yes.”
“How old is he?”
“Eleven.”
Ackridge shook his burly head. “He's too young for me to touch. And he'd probably just say anything he supposed you wanted him to say.”
Alex cleared his throat, which was tight and dry. “Search the car. You won't find any drugs. “
“Well,” Ackridge said, purposely emphasizing his drawl, “let me tell you my other theory before you go getting your dander up. I think it's a better one, anyway. Know what it is?”
“No.”
“I think maybe you were tooling along in that big black car of yours, playing king of the road, and you passed some local boy who was driving the only broken-down old pickup he could afford.” Ackridge smiled again, and this time it was a genuine smile. “He probably looked at you with your loud clothes and long hair and effeminate ways, and he wondered why you could have the big car while he had to settle for the truck. And, naturally, the more he thought on it, the madder he got. So he caught up with you and held a little duel on the highway. Couldn't of hurt his old wreck. You were the only one with something fancy to lose.”
“Why would I tell you it was an Automover? Why would I make up an elaborate story about a cross-country pursuit?” Doyle asked, barely able to control his anger but painfully aware that any expression of it would land him in jail, or worse.
“That's easy.”
“I'd like to hear it.”
Ackridge stood up and pushed his chair back, walked over and stood by the flag, his hands clasped behind his back. “You figured that I might not go after a local boy, that I'd favor one of ours over someone like you. So you made up this other thing to get me onto the case. Once I'd gone on record, started a full investigation, I couldn't have backed out of it so easily when I learned the real story.”
“That is far-fetched,” Doyle said. “And you know it.”
“Sounds reasonable to me.”
Alex got to his feet, his damp hands fisted at his sides. Once it had been easy for him to take this kind of abuse and crawl away without another thought. But now, with the changes that had taken place in him during the last couple of days, excessive humility was not his best suit. “Then you aren't going to help us?”
Ackridge looked at him with real hatred now. For the first time there was genuine malice in his voice. “I'm not a man you can call a pig one day—then run to for help the next.”
“I've never called any policeman a pig,” Alex said.
But the cop was not listening. He appeared to be looking straight through Doyle when he said, “For fifteen years or better, this country's been like a sick man. It's been absolutely delirious, staggering around and bumping into things, not sure where it was or where it was going or even if it would survive. But it isn't so sick any more. It's casting off the parasites that made it ill. Soon there won't be any parasites at all.”
“I get you,” Alex said, shaking uncontrollably with both fear and rage.
“It will up and kill all the germs and be as healthy as it once was,” Ackridge said, grinning broadly, hands still clasped behind his back, rocking on his heels.
“I understand you perfectly,” Alex said. “May I leave?”
Ackridge laughed in short, sharp barks. “Leave? Gee, I really would appreciate it if you did.”
Colin climbed out of the car and let Alex slide inside, then followed him and pulled the door shut, locked it. “Well?”
Alex gripped the steering wheel as hard as he could and stared at his whitened knuckles. “Captain Ackridge thinks I might have been taking drugs and imagined the whole thing. “
“Oh, great.”
“Or that maybe some local boys were harassing us in a pickup. He sure doesn't want to favor us over some good old boys having their fun.”
Colin buckled his seatbelt. “Was it really that bad?”
“I think he'd have jailed me if you hadn't been along,” Doyle said. “He didn't know what to do with an eleven-year-old boy.”
“What now?” He pulled at his Phantom of the Opera T-shirt.
“We'll fill the gas tank,” Alex said. “Buy some take-out food and drive straight through to Reno.”
“What about Salt Lake City?”
“We'll skip it,” Doyle said. “I want to get into San Francisco as soon as I can—and get as far off our schedule as possible, in case that bastard does know our route.”
“Reno isn't just around the corner,” the boy said, remembering how far it had seemed on the map. “How long will it take us to get there?”
Doyle surveyed the dusty street, the yellow-brown buildings, and the alkali-skinned automobiles. These were all inanimate objects without intentions of their own, malevolent or otherwise. Yet he feared and hated them. “I could get us into Reno a little after dawn tomorrow.”
“Without sleeping?”
“I won't sleep tonight anyway.”
“Driving will wear you out, though. No matter how you feel now, you'll fall asleep at the wheel.”
“No,” Alex said. “If I feel myself nodding off, I'll pull over to the side of the road and take a fifteen- or twenty-minute nap.”
“What about the maniac?” the boy asked, jerking a thumb toward the road behind them.
“That flat tire will slow him up some. It won't be easy handling the van by himself, jacking it up . . . And once he's on the road again, he won't drive all night. He'll figure that we stopped at a motel somewhere. If he knows we planned to be in Salt Lake City tonight-and I still don't see how he could know-then he'll be up there looking for us. We can get away from him for good, this time.” He started the car. “If the T-Bird holds together, that is.”
“Want me to plan a route?” Colin asked.
Alex nodded. “Back roads. But roads we can make decent time on.”
“This might even be fun,” Colin said, opening the map once more. “A real adventure.”
Doyle looked at him, incredulous. Then he saw, in the boy's eyes, a haunted look that must have matched his own, and he realized that the statement had been sheer bravado. Colin was trying as best he could to stand up under the incredible stress-and he was doing remarkably well for an eleven-year-old.
“
You're really something else,” Doyle said.
Colin blushed. “You too.”
“We make quite a pair.”
“Don't we?”
“Zooming off into the unknown,” Alex said, “without even blinking an eye. Wilbur and Orville.”
“Lewis and Clark,” the boy said, grinning.
“Columbus and - Hudson.”
“Abbott and Costello,” Colin said.
It might have been just the circumstances, but Doyle thought that was the funniest line he had heard in years. It brought tears to his eyes. “Laurel and Hardy,” he said when he was finished laughing. He put the car in gear and drove away from the police station.
The van was as difficult to handle as a stubborn cow. After half an hour of constant struggle, Leland got the wheels blocked and the jack pumped up enough to remove the punctured tire. The wind coming across the sand flats made the Chevy sway lightly on its metal crutch. And if the furniture in the cargo hold shifted without warning . . .
An hour after he had begun, Leland tightened the last nut on the spare and let the van down again. When he heaved the ruined tire into the truck, he realized he should stop at the first service station to get it repaired. But . . .
Doyle and the kid had gotten too much of a head start already. Though it was true that he could pick them up again tonight in Salt Lake City, he did not want to lose the chance of finishing them out here on the open road. The closer they got to San Francisco, the less sure he was of himself and his ability to dispose of them.
And if he didn't get them out of the picture, what would Courtney think? Courtney was depending on him. If he didn't take care of those two, then he and Courtney could never be together like they wanted.
Therefore, the tire could wait.
He closed the rear doors of the van, locked them, and went around to the cab. Five minutes later he was doing ninety-five on the flat, deserted highway.
Detective Ernie Hoval of the Ohio State Police ate supper in an interchange diner which most of the cops in the area favored. The atmosphere was pretty bad, but the food was good. And policemen were given a twenty percent discount.