He shook his head none.
“Gimme your keys.”
He fished them out of his pocket.
“Which one’s for the trunk?”
He held it up. I took the ring and opened the trunk.
“Get in and lie down.”
He looked at me with pleading eyes. I grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and spun him around and sat him down hard in the trunk. I motioned with the gun and he swung his legs over the rim, curling his butterball body around the spare tire.
I slammed the trunk. It was 10:08, and the enemy himself had delivered us from evil.
I got Eleanor moved over and threw the guns on the seat between us. We careened down the ramp in the fat man’s car. Eleanor sat frozen, gripping her knees like a kid on her first roller-coaster ride. I reached the street just as the shuttle pulled out. I pealed rubber turning north into Sixth Avenue. I was soaring, I was high enough to hit the moon. I had to rein myself in, force myself to stop for a red light. The last thing I needed, now that I had the game all but won, was to get stopped by a traffic cop, and me with a car full of guns.
I was trolling the side streets looking for an on-ramp. I stopped for another light. “Darkman,” Eleanor said, but I looked and the street was empty.
“He’s gone. We kicked his ass, Rigby. It’s time to start thinking about what you’ll do when you get to New Mexico.”
I leaned over the wheel and looked at her. She looked like a stranger, mind-fried with fear.
“We won,” I said.
She looked like anything but a winner. She looked like the thousand and one women a cop meets in a long and violent career. A victim.
“Darkman…”
“Is he your stalker?”
She looked at me. “He’s everywhere. I can’t turn around…”
“He’s a wrong number, honey, a guy in a gorilla suit. He’s only scary if you let him be.”
“He was in New Mexico.” She closed her eyes and quaked at some private demon. “No matter where I go he finds me. I pick up the phone and he’s there, playing that song.”
The guy behind us blew his horn. The light was green. I moved out, giving her shoulder a little rub, but she seemed not to notice.
“He’s there,” she said. “I saw him.”
I scanned the street in my mirrors and saw nothing.
“Oh, God,” she said. “Oh God oh God oh God…”
“We beat him. We’re gettin‘ out of here.”
“Take me back to jail.”
“We’re going to New Mexico.”
“No!…No…take me back to jail…”
“I want you to listen to me.”
“Take me back to jail…take me…take me…”
No more talk, I thought: the less said at this point the better. I thought if I could get her on the plane, I could win her back: then we’d have the whole ride into Albuquerque to calm down and start digging the truth out. I gave her a long sad look. She had covered her face with her hands, but I could see her eyes looking at me through her fingers.
I gunned the car and banked south into the freeway. I was almost up to thirty when she wrenched open the door and, with a shriek of madness, jumped.
17
I hit the brakes and the car spun across the wet pavement and slammed into the guardrail. I leaped out on the rim, running along the edge of a dark gulf. She was somewhere down in the street: I couldn’t see her, but I heard her scream as I skidded down the slope. I had a long clear look at the street running back downtown: she hadn’t gone that way, so she had to have ducked under the freeway to the east. This led me into a dreary neighborhood of shabby storefronts and dark flophouses. The rain had kept people off the street and the hour was late…the block was as dead as an old graveyard. The wet clop of my feet punctured the steady hiss of the rain, but I was chasing a ghost. She was gone.
I reached a cross street still clinging to a shred of hope. She could be blocks away by now, going in any direction. Guess wrong and kiss her good-bye: the next time she stuck her head up, she’d be scouting books in Florida. She could make a pauper’s living forever in that anonymous subculture, never pay taxes, never have her name recorded on any official docket, never be seen again by friend or foe. I pushed on into the rain, as if she had suddenly materialized in the block ahead. But the street was as empty as ever. I came to another intersection and stopped to look. No use running anymore, I could just as likely be running away from her. I walked along a dim wet block looking in cracks and crevices. Gone with the goddamn wind, son of a bitch. I passed the flickering light of a neighborhood bar and looked at my watch: 10:23. It was still possible to make the plane, if she came to her senses this very minute, if we stumbled into each other in the murk, if the car was still on the ramp where I’d left it, if I was all paid up with the man upstairs, if pigs could fly and I could break every speed limit going to Sea-Tac and get away with it. I stopped and leaned against a mailbox and longed for a break, but Luck had gone her fickle way.
I looked into the bar on a hunch. Nobody there but the neighborhood drunk, who’d been holding up his end of the bar since Prohibition ended. I walked up the street in the rain, unwilling to admit that the fat lady had sung her song. Something could still happen. Something can still happen, I thought again, but my watch was pushing ten-thirty, and it had to happen now.
What happened wasn’t quite what I had in mind. A car turned into the street and I knew it was Pruitt half a block away; I had the color and shape of that Pontiac cut into my heart forever. I stepped into the shadows and watched him roll past me. Apparently he hadn’t seen me: he cruised by slowly; I stood still and watched him go the length of the block. He was hunting, same as me: he would drive a bit, slow, occasionally stop and look something over. It seemed she had given us all the royal slip. Pruitt stopped at the corner and turned. I broke into a full run, reaching the cross street well before he had turned out of the next block. He was taking it easy, trying to miss nothing as he worked around one block and into another. The block was dark: a streetlight was out, and I thought I could run along the edge of the buildings without being seen. Something might still be salvaged from this rotten night, if I could get close enough to pull that door open and jerk Pruitt’s ass out of that car.
A pair of headlights swung toward me two blocks away. I flattened into a doorway as the two cars flicked their brights on and off. It was the fat man’s car—I could see the crushed fender where it had hit the guardrail. I patted my pocket and knew I had left them the keys, a stupid mistake, and I’d left their guns there on the seat as well. The two cars pulled abreast for a confab. Then Pruitt turned right, went on around the block, and the fat man was coming my way. He passed and I could see there were two of them in the car—the kid, riding shotgun, was slumped in the seat as if he hadn’t yet come back to the living. Lacking Pruitt, I’d be thrilled with another shot at these two. I wanted to put somebody in the hospital, and any of the three were okay with me.
I let the fat man go on into the next block. I moved out in the rain and ran after Pruitt. He was still the grand prize in this clambake, but by the time I reached the next corner he was gone. Again, I could go off in any direction and be right or wrong, or wait right here while the wheel took another spin. When nothing happened, I crossed to the dark side of the street and walked along slowly, hoping they’d all catch up. For a time it seemed that the action had moved on to another stage. No one came or went. I worried about it, and I was worrying three blocks later when Eleanor turned a corner far ahead and walked briskly up the street toward me.
She was two blocks away but coming steadily. I stood flat in a shallow doorway and egged her on in my mind. I peeped out and she was still there. She passed a light in the next block and I could see her clearly now, looking none the worse for her tumble down the slope. Her hair had come down but that was good: I could get a grip on it and hold her that way if I had to. She was close enough now that I could catch her, but I let her keep coming, each step a little added insurance. If she kept on, she’d pass so close I could grab her without a chase. I had pushed myself as far back in the doorway as I could get: I didn’t dare even a peep as she came closer. I thought sure I’d have her, then everything seemed to stop. I had lost the sense of her, I had to look. She was still a block away, stopped there as if warned off by intuition. I waited some more. With a long head start and terror in her heart, she could still make it though.