“No,” I said.
“You mean that?”
“You bet I mean it.”
“I don’t think he did it either. I know he didn’t.”
“How could you know it?”
“I just do. He wouldn’t hurt anybody unless they hurt him first. He’s not what people say he is.”
“No, not at all.”
“I’d help him in a minute if I could,” she said.
“Help him how?”
“You know, stay out of jail. Get away.”
“Well, nobody can help him now.”
“They could if he wasn’t dead.”
“You don’t think he drowned in the lake?”
“Maybe not.” She wet her lips. She looked intense, her blue eyes bright and shiny. “What if he’s still alive? What if he’s hurt and hiding somewhere?”
“Trisha, what’re you trying to say?”
“Would you help him if you could? If you were the only person who could do what had to be done?”
A peculiar fluttery sensation had started under my breastbone. And all of a sudden my mouth was dry. I said, “How badly hurt?”
“Bad enough. Say, a couple of bullet wounds.”
“In a vital spot?”
“No. Like under the shoulder.”
“Bullet still inside?”
“Uh-uh. A couple of wounds.”
“Entrance and exit. That’s better, cleaner. Still, wounds like that can infect pretty easily.”
“Yeah. He’d need antibiotics and other stuff, right? And somebody who’d had medical training to get it for him and then fix him up.”
“Where is he, Trisha?”
“How should I know? At the bottom of the lake, maybe. We’re just talking here.”
“We’re not just talking. You know where he is, don’t you?”
“What if I do?”
“Is it someplace where he’s safe?”
“Safe enough. You think I should tell the cops?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“They’d just put him in jail, maybe the gas chamber. For something he didn’t do.”
“I know.”
“Should I just let him die?”
“No.”
“So what would you do? If you knew for sure he was alive and wounded and where he was hiding.”
“He asked you to talk to me, didn’t he? Last night... I mentioned my nurse’s training and he remembered.”
“You didn’t answer my question, Mrs. Banner.”
“Lori,” I said. Then I said, “I’d help him.”
“No shit? Even though it’d be breaking the law?”
“Aiding and abetting a fugitive, it’s called.”
“Whatever. You wouldn’t call the cops?”
“No, I wouldn’t call the cops. I won’t call them.”
“Swear to God?”
“Swear to God. Where is he? How’d you find him?”
“I won’t tell you that. Not yet.”
“But you’d take me to him.”
“If you had the stuff he needs.”
“I can get it. All except a tetanus shot — there’s no way I can manage that.”
“Where’ll you have to go?”
“Rexall Pharmacy.”
“They won’t get suspicious or anything?”
“No.” I was breathing hard. Scared and hyped up both, the same as she was. Jeez-us!
“He’ll have to have some food,” Trisha said. “And clothes. All he’s got to wear now are a couple of blankets.”
“That’s no problem. Plenty of food here. And Earle, my husband, is nearly the same size. Money, though... I don’t have much.”
“He doesn’t need money. He’s got his wallet.”
“What about transportation? Do you have a car?”
“No. We’ll have to go in yours.”
“That’s no problem. But I meant a way for him to travel when he’s well enough... Oh, God, worry about that later. First things first. And we’d better hurry.” Before I had time to think too much about what I was getting myself into. Before I could change my mind. And before Earle decided to come home. “Kitchen’s through the doorway over there. You gather up some food — there’re paper bags under the sink. I’ll get the clothes.”
We were both on our feet, and for about five seconds we stood with our eyes locked. Thinking the same thing, probably. When she’d arrived, less than twenty minutes ago, we’d been more or less strangers, a generation apart and barely civil to each other whenever we met. Now, thanks to John Faith, a kind of serious bonding thing had happened. Well, that was the sort he was, and I guess I knew it the first time I laid eyes on him in the Northlake. You were either for him or against him, no matter what he said or did. All the way, either way.
George Petrie
i am being followed.
By a dark-green van, one of the small, newer ones with the slanted front end. I can’t tell if the driver is the gray-haired man from the Truckee motel or somebody else; can’t even be sure of how many people are inside. The van’s windshield is tinted and splinters of sunlight off glass and metal make it even more difficult to see.
I first spotted the van outside Sparks, when I pulled back onto the highway after buying a pair of canvas suitcases to keep the money in. It stayed behind me when I took the Highway 50 cutoff, and it’s been there ever since through Fallon and across the open desert past Sand Mountain. Every time I speed up or slow down or pass another car, it does the same.
It has to be the gray-haired man. No one from Pomo could’ve tracked me; no other stranger could possibly know about the garbage bags or suspect what’s in them. I don’t remember a dark-green van in the motel parking lot, but it could’ve been parked behind one of the units. Must’ve followed me all the way from Truckee. Too much traffic for me to pick it out until the flow thinned coming through Reno.
I don’t know what to do.
Keep on going to Ely as planned? Another two hundred miles of empty desert and barren mountains, sun glare and heat shimmers off the highway, even at this time of year, that have my eyes burning, my head aching? No. Couldn’t take the tension. And some of the country ahead is even more desolate. He could overtake me without much effort; this old Buick can’t outrun a van like that. Force me off the road when there’s no one around. He’s bound to have a weapon, and there’s nothing I can use to defend myself. Easy for him to kill me, bury my body where no one would ever find it—
Road sign. Junction with State Highway 361 six miles ahead.
There’ll be a rest stop; usually is at a desert crossroads. Service station, convenience store, maybe a restaurant. People. If I pull in there he’ll follow me and then... what? Confront him? He wouldn’t dare try anything with people around. But confronting him won’t accomplish anything. Let me get a good look at him, that’s all. He’d deny following me. Brazen it out. Then sit back in his van and wait for me to drive out onto the highway again.
Three miles to the junction. And he’s even closer behind me now, crowding up, the sun like fire on that tinted windshield.
Christ Jesus, what am I going to do!
Earle Banner
Saturday’s my day off, but I went down to the shop anyway since I didn’t have nothing else to do. Stan was there and we shot the bull for a while, mostly about what a piece Storm Carey was and how that bugger Faith got off too easy, sucking lake water. “Should’ve had his nuts put in a vise,” Stan said, and I said, “Yeah, that’s for sure,” but I was thinking, Yeah, it’s too bad about Storm, she was a sweet lay, some of the best I ever had, but that didn’t change the fact she was a bitch and she’d been asking for what Faith give her for a long time. Same as Lori kept asking for it. Bet she didn’t think Faith got off too easy. Bet she was sorry he was dead meat, even if she hadn’t been letting him boink her and he’d had to go after Storm instead.