Don't think it, don't think it, don't you dare think it.
Except he had to. The way she had landed ... the way she had lain at the foot of the stairs with her head on one side ...
Fresh blood was pattering down on his left hand, he saw. Apparently something was wrong with that side of his head. What had happened? Had the cop hit him, too, maybe with the butt of the monster sidearm he had been wearing? Maybe, but that part was mostly gone. He could remember the gruesome somersault she had done, and the way she had slid down the rest of the stairs, and how she had come to rest with her head cocked that way, and that was all. Christ, wasn't it enough?
"Ralph?" Ellie was tugging at him and panting harshly. "Ralph, get up! Please get up!"
"Dad! Daddy, come on!" That was David, from farther away. "He okay, Mom? He's bleeding again, isn't he?"
"No ... no, he--"
"Yes he is, I can see it from here. Daddy, are you okay?"
"Yes," he said. He got one foot planted beneath him, groped for the bunk, and tottered upright. His left eye was bleary with blood. The lid felt as if it had been dipped in plaster of Paris. He wiped it with the heel of his hand, wincing as fresh pain stung him--the area above his left eye felt like freshly tenderized meat. He tried to turn around, toward the sound of his son's voice, and staggered. It was like being on a boat. His balance was shot, and even when he stopped turning it felt to something in his head like he was still doing it, reeling and rocking, going round and round. Ellie grabbed him, supported him, helped him forward.
"She's dead, isn't she?" Ralph asked. His choked voice came out of a throat plated with dead blood. He couldn't believe what he heard that voice saying, but he supposed that in time he would. That was the worst of it. In time he would. "Kirsten's dead."
"I think so, yes." Ellie staggered this time. "Grab the bars, Ralph, can you? You're going to knock me over."
They were in a jail cell. In front of him, just out of reach, was the barred door. The bars were painted white, and in some places the paint had dried and hardened in thick runnels. Ralph lunged forward a step and grabbed them. He was looking out at a desk, sitting in the middle of a square of floor like the single bit of stage dressing in a minimalist play. There were papers on it, and a double-barrelled shotgun, and a strew of fat green shotgun shells. The old-fashioned wooden desk chair in the kneehole was on casters, and there was a faded blue pillow on the seat. Overhead was a light fixture encased in a mesh bowl. The dead flies inside the fixture made huge, grotesque shadows.
There were jail cells on three sides of this room. The one in the middle, probably the drunk-tank, was large and empty. Ralph and Ellie Carver were in a smaller one. A second small cell to their right was empty. Across from them were two other closet-sized cells. In one of them was their eleven-year-old son, David, and a man with white hair. Ralph could see nothing else of this man, because he was sitting on the bunk with his head lowered onto his hands. When the woman screamed from below them again, David turned in that direction, where an open door gave on a flight of stairs (Kirsten, Kirsten falling, the snapping sound of her neck breaking)
going down to street level, but the white-haired man did not shift his position in the slightest.
Ellie came to stand beside him and slipped an arm around his waist. Ralph risked letting go of the bars with one of his hands so he could take one of hers.
Now there were thuds on the stairs, coming closer, and scuffling sounds. Someone was being brought up to join them, but she wasn't coming easily.
"We have to help him!" she was screaming. "We have to help Peter! We--"
Her words broke off as she was thrown into the room. She crossed it with weird, balletic grace, stuttering on her toes, white sneakers like ballet slippers, hands held out, hair streaming behind her, jeans, a faded blue shirt. She collided with the desk, upper thighs smacking the edge hard enough to move it backward toward the chair, and then, from the other side of the room, David was shrieking at her like a bird, standing at the bars, jumping up and down on the balls of his feet, shrieking in a savage, panicky voice Ralph had never heard before, never even suspected.
"The shotgun, lady!" David screamed. "Get the shotgun, shoot him, shoot him, lady, shoot him!"
The white-haired man finally looked up. His face was old and dark with desert tan; the deep bags beneath his watery ginhead eyes gave him a bloodhound look.
"Get it!" the old man rasped. "For Christ's sake, woman!"
The woman in the jeans and the workshirt looked toward the sound of the boy's voice, then back over her shoulder toward the stairs and the clump of heavy approaching footfalls.
"Do it!" Ellie chimed in from beside Ralph. "He killed our daughter, he'll kill all of us, do it!"
The woman in the jeans and workshirt grabbed for the gun.
2
Until Nevada, things had been fine.
They had started out as four happy wanderers from Ohio, destination Lake Tahoe. There Ellie Carver and the kids would swim and hike and sightsee for ten days and Ralph Carver would gamble--slowly, pleasurably, and with tremendous concentration. This would be their fourth visit to Nevada, their second to Tahoe, and Ralph would continue to follow his ironclad gambling rule: he would quit when he had either (a) lost a thousand dollars, or (b) won ten thousand. In their three previous trips, he had reached neither of these markers. Once he had gone back to Columbus with five hundred dollars of his stake intact, once with two hundred, and last year he had driven them back with over three thousand dollars in the inner lefthand pocket of his lucky safari jacket. On that trip they had stayed at Hiltons and Sheratons instead of in the RV at camping areas, and the elder Carvers had gotten themselves laid every damned night. Ralph considered that pretty phenomenal for people pushing forty.
"You're probably tired of casinos," he'd said in February, when they started talking about this vacation. "Maybe California this time? Mexico?"
"Sure, we can all get dysentery," Ellie had replied. "Look at the Pacific between sprints to the casa de poopoo, or whatever they call it down there."
"What about Texas? We could take the kids to see the Alamo."
"Too hot, too historic. Tahoe will be cool, even in July. The kids love it. I do, too. And as long as you don't come asking for any of my money when yours is gone--"
"You know I'd never do that," he had said, sounding shocked. Feeling a little shocked, actually. The two of them sitting in the kitchen of their suburban home in Wentworth, not far from Columbus, sitting next to the bronze Frigidaire with the magnetic stick-on daisies scattered across it, travel-folders on the counter in front of them, neither aware that the gambling had already started and the first loss would be their daughter. "You know what I told you--"
"'Once the addict-behavior starts, the gambling stops,' " she had repeated. "I know, I remember, I believe. You like Tahoe, I like Tahoe, the kids like Tahoe, Tahoe is fine."
So he had made the reservations, and today--if it still was today--they had been on U.S. 50, the so-called loneliest highway in America, headed west across Nevada toward the High Sierra. Kirsten had been playing with Melissa Sweetheart, her favorite doll, Ellie had been napping, and David had been sitting beside Ralph, looking out the window with his chin propped on his hand. Earlier he had been reading the Bible his new pal the Rev had given him (Ralph hoped to God that Martin wasn't queer--the man was married, which was good, but still, you could never damn tell), but now he'd marked his place and tucked the Bible away in the console storage bin. Ralph thought again of asking the kid what he was thinking about, what all the Bible stuff was about, but you might as well ask a post what it was thinking. David (he could abide Davey but hated to be called Dave) was a strange kid that way, not like either parent. Not much like his sister, either, for that matter. This sudden interest in religion--what Ellen called "David's God-trip"--was only one of his oddities. It would probably pass, and in the meantime, David did not quote verses at him on the subject of gambling, cursing, or avoiding the raz
or on weekends, and that was good enough for Ralph. He loved the kid, after all, and love stretched to cover a multitude of oddities. He had an idea that was one of the things love was for.
Ralph had been opening his mouth to ask David if he wanted to play Twenty Questions-there had been nothing much to look at since leaving Ely that morning and he was bored out of his mind--when he felt the Wayfarer's steering suddenly go mushy in his hands and heard the highway-drone of the tires suddenly become a flapping sound.
"Dad?" David asked. He sounded concerned but not panicked. That was good. "Everything okay?"
"Hold on," he had said, and began pumping the brakes. "This could be a little rough."
Now, standing at the bars and watching the dazed woman who might be their only hope of surviving this nightmare, he thought: I really had no idea of what rough was, did I?
It hurt his head to scream, but he screamed anyway, unaware of how much he sounded like his own son: "Shoot him, lady, shoot him!"
3
What Mary Jackson recalled, what caused her to reach for the shotgun even though she had never actually held a gun--rifle or pistol--in her entire life, was the memory of the big cop mixing the words I'm going to kill you into the Miranda warning.
And he meant it. Oh God yes.
She swung around with the gun. The big blond cop was standing in the doorway, looking at her with his bright gray empty eyes.
"Shoot him, lady, shoot him!" a man screamed. He was in the cell to Mary's right, standing next to a woman with an eye so black that the bruise had sent tendrils down her cheek, like ink injected beneath the skin. The man looked even worse; the left side of his face appeared to be covered with caked, half-dried blood.
The cop ran at her, his boots rattling on the hardwood floor. Mary stepped back, away from him and toward the big empty cell at the rear of the room, pulling back both of the shotgun's hammers with the side of her thumb as she retreated. Then she raised it to her shoulder. She had no intention of warning him. He had just killed her husband in cold blood, and she had no intention of warning him.
4
Ralph had pumped the brakes and held the wheel with his elbows locked, letting it work back and forth a little in his hands but not too much. He could feel the RV trying to yaw. The secret to handling a high-speed blowout in an RV, he'd been told, was to let it yaw--a little, anyway. Although--bad news, folks--this didn't feel like just one blowout.
He glanced up into the rearview at Kirsten, who had stopped playing with Melissa Sweetheart and was now holding the doll against her chest. Kirstie knew something was going on, just not what.
"Kirsten, sit down!" he called. "Belt in!"
Except by then it was over. He wrestled the Wayfarer off the road, killed the engine, and wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. All in all he didn't think he'd done badly. Hadn't even toppled the vase of desert flowers standing on the table in back. Ellie and Kirstie had picked them behind the motel in Ely this morning, while he and David were first loading up and then checking out.
"Good driving, Dad," David said in a matter-of-fact voice.
Ellie was sitting -up now, looking around blearily. "Bathroom break?" she asked. "Why're we tilted this way, Ralph?"
"We had a--"
He broke off, looking into the outside mirror. A police-car was rushing toward them from behind, blue lights flashing. It came to a screaming stop about a hundred yards back, and the biggest cop Ralph had ever seen in his life almost bounded out. Ralph saw that the cop had his gun drawn, and felt adrenaline light up his nerves.
The cop stared right and left, his gun held up to shoulder height with the muzzle pointing at the cloudless morning sky. Then he actually turned in a circle. When he was facing the RV again, he looked directly into the outside rearview, seeming to meet Ralph's eyes. The cop raised both hands over his head, brought them down violently, then raised and brought them down again. The pantomime was impossible to misinterpret--Stay inside, stay where you are.
"Ellie, lock the back doors." Ralph banged down the button beside him as he spoke. David, who was watching him, did the same thing on his side of the car without having to be asked.
"What?" She looked at him uncertainly. "What's going on?"
"I don't know, but there's a cop back there and he looks excited." Back where I had the flat, he thought, then amended that. The flats.
The cop bent and picked something up off the surface of the road. It was a meshy strip with little twinkles of light bouncing off it the way light bounces off the sequins on a woman's evening dress. He carried it back to his car, dragging one end along the shoulder, his gun still in his other hand, still held up at a kind of port arms. He seemed to be trying to look in all directions at once.
Ellie locked the aft door and the main cabin door, then came forward again. "What in the samhill is going on?"
"I told you, I don't know. But that doesn't look, you know, real encouraging." He pointed into the mirror outside the driver's window.
Ellie bent, planting her hands just above her knees and watching with Ralph as the cop dumped the meshy thing into the passenger seat, then backed around to the driver's side with his gun now held up in both hands. Later it would occur to Ralph just how carefully crafted this little silent movie had been.
Kirstie came up behind her mother and began to bop Melissa Sweetheart softly against her mother's stuck-out bottom. "Butt, butt, butt, butt," she sang. "We love a great big motherbutt."
"Don't, Kirstie."
Ordinarily Kirstie would have needed two or three requests to cease and desist, but something in her mother's voice this time caused her to stop at once. She looked at her brother, who was staring as intently into his mirror as the grownups were into Daddy's. She went over to him and tried to get in. his lap. David set her back on her feet gently but firmly. "Not now, Pie."
"But what is it? What's the big deal?"
"Nothing, no big deal," David said, never taking his eyes off the mirror.
The cop got into his cruiser and drove up the road to the Wayfarer. He got out again, his gun still out but now held along his leg with the muzzle pointed at the road. He looked right and left again, then walked over to Ralph's window. The driver's position in the Wayfarer was much higher than a car's seat would have been, but the cop was so tall--six--seven, at least--that he was still able to look down on Ralph as he sat behind the wheel in his captain's chair.
The cop made a cranking gesture with his empty hand. Ralph rolled his window halfway down. "What's the trouble, Officer?"
"How many are you?" the cop asked.
"What's wr--"
"Sir, how many are you?"
"Four," Ralph said, beginning to feel really frightened now. "My wife, my two kids, me. We have a couple of flats--"
"No, sir, all your tires are flat. You ran over a piece of highway carpet."
"I don't--"
"It's a strip of mesh embedded with hundreds of short nails," the cop said. "We use it to stop speeders whenever we can--it beats the hell out of hot pursuit."
"What was a thing like that doing in the road?" Ellie asked indignantly.
The cop said, "I'm going to open the rear door of my car, the one closest to your RV. When you see that, I want you to exit your vehicle and get into the back of mine. And quickly."
He craned his neck, saw Kirsten--she was now holding onto her mother's leg and peering cautiously around it--and gave her a smile. "Hi, girly-o."
Kirstie smiled back at him.
The cop shifted his eyes briefly to David. He nodded, and David nodded back noncommittally. "Who's out there, sir?" David asked.
"A bad guy," the cop said. "That's all you need to know for now, son. A very bad guy. Tak!"
"Officer--" Ralph began.
"Sir, with all due respect, I feel like a clay pigeon in a shooting gallery. There's a dangerous man out here, he's good with a rifle, and that piece of highway carpet suggests he's nearby. Further discussion of the situation must
wait until our position has been improved, do you understand?"
Tak? Ralph wondered. Was that the bad guy's name? "Yes, but--"
"You first, sir. Carry your little girl. The boy next. Your wife last. You'll have to cram, but you can all fit into the car."
Ralph unbelted and stood up. "Where are we going?" he asked.
"Desperation. Mining town. Eight miles or so from here."
Ralph nodded, rolled up his window, then picked up Kirsten. She looked at him with troubled eyes that were not far from tears.
"Daddy, is it Mr. Big Boogeyman?" she asked. Mr. Big Boogeyman was a monster she had brought home from school one day. Ralph didn't know which of the kids had described this shadowy closet-dweller to his gentle seven-year-old daughter, but he thought if he could have found him (he simply assumed it was a boy, it seemed to him that the care and feeding of the monsters in the school-yards of America always fell to the boys), he would have cheerfully strangled the bugger. It had taken two months to get Kirstie more or less soothed down about Mr. Big Boogeyman. Now this.
"No, not Mr. Big Boogeyman," Ralph said. "Probably just a postal worker having a bad day."
"Daddy, you work for the post office," she said as he carried her back toward the door in the middle of the Wayfarer's cabin.
"Yup," he said, aware that Ellie had put David in front of her and was walking with her hands on his shoulders. "It's sort of a joke, see?"
"Like a knock-knock without the knocking?"
"Yup," he said again. He looked out the window in the RV's cabin door and saw the cop had opened the back door of the police cruiser. He also saw that when he opened the Wayfarer's door, it would overlap the car door, making a protective wall. That was good.
Sure. Unless the desert rat this guy's looking for is in back of us. Christ Almighty, why couldn't we have gone to Atlantic City?
"Dad?" That was David, his intelligent but slightly peculiar son who had started going to church last fall, after the thing that had happened to his friend Brian. Not Sunday school, not Thursday Night Youth Group, just church. And Sunday afternoons at the parsonage, talking with his new friend, the Rev. Who, by the way, was going to die slowly if he had been sharing anything with David but his thoughts. According to David it was all talk, and after the thing with Brian, Ralph supposed the kid needed someone to talk to. He only wished David had felt able to bring his questions to his mother and father instead of to some holy joe outsider who was married but still might--