But it didn’t come to that. He just said, “You want to be careful on the road, Ms., uh”-he looked down at the little plastic rectangle in his hand-“Ferguson. A pistol can get you out of some tight spots, sure. Maybe you’d do better not getting into them in the first place, though.”
She shook her head. “If I hadn’t bailed out of Denver when I did, I would’ve been stuck there. If you don’t get out of here pretty damn quick, you won’t be able to leave, either.”
“I’m still thinking about it,” he said. Vanessa left it there; she was a refugee, not a missionary. He went on, “You’ll want to buy a couple boxes of cartridges, too, am I right?”
“That’s why God made plastic,” Vanessa agreed.
As soon as she got back to the car, she loaded the. 38. It was a double-action model; you could safely carry a round in every chamber in the cylinder. And she did. She felt better having it. She might have faced a nasty choice in the gun shop. Out on the road, there were bound to be sons of bitches who didn’t believe in giving any choices.
If she got back on the Interstate, she’d end up in New Mexico. If she chose US 50 instead, she’d cross the Colorado prairie till she got to the Kansas prairie. Kansas held no appeal. Sometimes, though, you didn’t get what you wanted. She hadn’t been off I-25 very long, but when she went back cars were coming off at the on-ramp. That couldn’t possibly be a good sign.
And it wasn’t. A cop in a pig-snouted gas mask-which had to work better than goggles and a surgical job-waved what looked like an orange light saber. He yelled something at Vanessa. She couldn’t make out what it was. Reluctantly, she cracked the window. Ash started coming in.
“Interstate’s closed,” the cop said, his voice sounding distant, almost underwater, through the mask. “Big old accident south of town. Worst mess you’ve ever seen, I swear to God.”
Vanessa doubted that. She’d seen L.A. messes, after all. But then she had second thoughts. All the blowing dust might have done to I-25 what tule fog did in California’s Central Valley-it could turn I-5 into Slaughterhouse Five, and did just about every winter. Twenty or fifty or eighty cars and SUVs and trucks all turned to crumpled sheet metal, some of them burning, with dazed and bleeding people wandering around coughing from the ash, every now and then a fresh, tinny crash as a new fool didn’t spot the wreck up ahead soon enough…
“Maybe I’ll go east instead,” she said, thinking And to hell with Horace Greeley.
“Good plan,” the cop said in that otherworldly voice. “If there’s wrecks on 50, they aren’t close to Pueblo.”
Which meant they ound t’t his problem. But which also meant she could put some more miles between her and the supervolcano. By Interstate standards, US 50 was old and shabby. It was also open, though, so Vanessa did her best to make lemonade. She might not be able to go as fast as she wanted to, but at least she was going. She tried to ignore Pickles’ yowls, which was like trying to ignore a toothache.
A lot of cars were crapped out by the side of the road. She blessed the new air filter she’d got in Pueblo. Every so often, she’d come up on a car that had crapped out in the middle of the road. A couple of times, she almost rear-ended one. Was that how the giant pileup on I-25 had started? She wouldn’t have been a bit surprised.
She was a little more than an hour-say, thirty-five miles-out of Pueblo when it started to rain. When the first big drops splatted down on her windshield, she let out a war whoop of delight. Rain would wash the ash out of the air. If she could see where she was going, she’d get there faster.
But the rain didn’t wash all the grit out of the air-there was too much of it in the air for that. And when she turned on the wipers, they did as much harm as good. They pushed grit back and forth across the windshield; she could hear it, almost feel it, scraping first one way, then the other. And it was rock grit, some of it at least as hard as the glass it was grinding across. Arced scratches spread across the broad pane. That wasn’t smeared dirt, the way she hoped for a moment; the windshield was marked for good.
Vanessa swore as loudly as she’d whooped, startling the cat into momentary silence. There was so much ash and dust on the highway that she soon began to feel she was trying to drive through mud. That was exactly what she was doing, too. She had to slow down even more instead of speeding up the way she wanted to.
A lordly Cadillac Escalade zoomed past her. Its giant tires splattered the side of her car-and her side windows-with muck. Then the supersized SUV cut in front of her. She had to hit the brakes to keep from smashing into it, or more likely going under it. More gritty mud splashed her windshield. The wipers did their best to shove it aside. Their best abraded the glass some more.
“You dumb fucking asshole!” she howled, and flipped the Escalade the bird. The imbecile behind the battleship’s wheel probably couldn’t see her do it, what with her filthy, scarred front glass, but she was most sincere.
Then she remembered the brand-new. 38 in her handbag. She’d never understood road-rage shootings before. They’d always seemed the province of gangbangers with shaved heads and teardrop tats. Now she got it. Somebody did you wrong, so you went and made that sucker pay.
She imagined the Escalade slewing crazily off the road, flipping over-weren’t all those stinking SUVs top-heavy as hell? — and bursting into flame. She imagined the jerk driving it toasting till he was overdone, along with Mrs. Jerk and all the little Jerks in their car seats.
And she let out a long, shuddering breath and made damn sure she didn’t reach inside the purse. A moment of fury would be all it took, all right. You couldn’t-well, you shouldn’t-give in to something like that. But people did, all the time. Her old man wouldn’t go out of business any time soon.
Thinking of him made her stick one hand in her purse after all. The only thing she took out was her cell phone. Maybe, with the rain scrubbing the dust out of the air, she’d finally have bars.
No such luck. She tried his number anyway. Again, no luck. Nthing coming in. Nothing going out. She turned off the phone and stowed it.
On she went, slowly. With the road the way it was and with her poor, abused windshield the way it was, slowly was the only way to go. Most of the people heading toward Kansas had sense enough to see things the same way. The jerk in the Escalade was no doubt still doing ninety. He was long gone in front of her. Even if she hadn’t shot him, she wished him no good.
Every once in a while, Somebody listened when you made a wish like that. Less than fifteen minutes later, she drove past the Escalade. It was over on the shoulder with the hood popped. Mr. Jerk-who proved what he was by not bothering with a mask-stared forlornly at the engine. If he was waiting for AAA to come rescue him, he’d have a long wait.
Vanessa not only knew the feeling of Schadenfreude, she knew the word. Knowing the word sharpened the feeling. If only sex worked that way! The Escalade shrank in her rearview mirror and vanished into rain and dust.
Then she had to hit the brakes and crawl. Someone hadn’t slowed down enough or had skidded in the new mud on the asphalt. The crash hadn’t closed US 50-not yet, anyhow-but it sure had snarled traffic. If a jalopy in the backup decided this was a good time to overheat..
Why are you borrowing trouble? Vanessa asked herself. Don’t you have enough already? In a way, those were questions without answers. In another, they were questions that hardly needed answers. She borrowed trouble because she was the kind of person who borrowed trouble. If she wanted to, she could blame that on her tight-assed father or on being the middle child or on Mrs. McKenzie, her neurotic- make that nutso, she thought, remembering Wes across the street from her folks-first-grade teacher. None of which changed things one goddamn bit. She borrowed trouble.