“I am not”, she signed.
“You have to know when to cut your losses”-he tried to make a joke of it-“otherwise you wind up with a peg leg, or worse: you go down with the whale. You don't want to go down with the whale, do you?”
She didn't laugh. Didn't even crack a smile. For a moment he wondered if she'd understood him, and he was about to repeat himself, though nothing falls flatter than a joke reiterated, when her eyes went hard. Her shoulders were cocked toward him, her hair fanned out as if a sudden breeze had caught it, and when she spoke her words were stamped with the impress of her teeth: “It's not funny. You're not funny.”
They'd come to the glassed-in counter now, Dana next in line, and the shrunken harried-looking woman in plastic cap and gloves, whose job it was to layer meat, cheese and vegetable matter on the customer's roll of choice, was saying “Next” in vain. “You're not funny.” Jesus, did she have to be so negative all the time? Couldn't she lighten up? Even for five minutes?
Of course, he wasn't in the sunniest of moods himself (they were both wiped, both in need of food, a shower, a couple hours comatose on a king-size bed in front of a pulsating TV screen) and something in him, the first flicker of a cruel impulse he never knew he possessed, made him wait till the woman had raised her voice-“Next!” she cried in exasperation, “Next!”-and finally reached across the counter to poke Dana with her plastic-clad index finger. No one likes to be ignored, that was what he was thinking-that was what he was communicating here, a little lesson, tit for tat-even as Dana gave him a savage look, then turned to the woman and ordered, pointing out the items she wanted because pointing was the norm in this establishment, the whole process of shuffling down the line and creating the sandwich a cooperative pantomime between customer and worker punctuated by the odd verbal cue: “Six-inch or twelve? Balsamic-cheddar whole-grain or regular Italian? To drink?”
He waited till they were back in the motel, shoes off, sunk into the bed under the tutelary eye of the TV and working on the sandwiches, before bringing up the subject again. “I don't know,” he said, looking her in the face. “I just wonder what the plan is, that's all.”
She was at a disadvantage, because it took both hands to compress a twelve-inch submarine sandwich and keep it from disintegrating into its constituent parts, but she was game. She paused to swallow, then leaned over to take a sip of the extra-large diet soft drink clenched between her legs. He saw that her face was relaxed now, the tension and fatigue beginning to loosen their grip. She came up smiling. “The plan,” she said carefully, “is to stay at my mother's and let her spoil us for a few days.” She opened wide, took a foursquare bite of the sandwich, chewed, swallowed, both hands engaged. “Then,” she said, gazing from him to the TV screen and back, “we get in the car, go up the FDR Drive to the Deegan Expressway to I-87 to the Sprain Brook and take that to the Taconic. If memory serves, it's 9A after that and then Route 9 right on into Peterskill.” She bent forward for another bite, a baffle of bread, Swiss cheese and smoked turkey blunting her diction. “It's a scenic route,” she said, chewing, “beautiful trees, dogwood, wildflowers. You're really going to love it.”
It was past noon when they woke, the room frigid and dark, as remote from the world as a space capsule silently drifting across the universe, and they might have slept even later if Bridger hadn't become aware of a muted sound, a rhythmic thumping insinuating itself in the space between the low groan and high wheeze of the air conditioner. At first, he didn't know where he was, everything dim and robbed of color, a sensation of wheels sustaining him, of motion, but then he was fully awake and the noise-someone was knocking at the door, that was it-rousing him to action. He slipped into the pair of shorts he'd flung on the carpet the night before, the feel of them cold against his skin-cold, and faintly damp with yesterday's sweat. The knocking seemed to intensify. He glanced at Dana. Her face was wrapped in sweet oblivion-nothing could wake her, and the thought made him feel tender and protective. What would have happened if he wasn't there? The place could have been on fire and she'd never know. He fumbled his way to the door and pulled it open.
A woman was poised there before him, her fist arrested in the act of knocking-a woman with indignant eyes and her black hair pulled back in a knot, and why did she look so familiar? For a moment, he was mystified, but then he took in her sandals and the tangerine-colored sari, and began to understand. “What?” he said, squinting against the assault of sunlight. “What is it?”
“Checkout time is eleven a. m.,” the woman said.
“Oh, yeah,” he muttered, “yeah, sorry.” The heat, gathered up off the pavement and filtered through every creek, pond and mosquito-infested puddle in the neighborhood, rose up to stab at him till he winced: “humidity.” He'd never really known what it meant except in the abstract. He was sweating already.
“For your information, it is now twelve twenty-five in the afternoon.” Sorry.
The look she gave him was drained of sympathy. “Don't make me charge you an extra day, do you understand what I'm saying?” Her eyes flicked to the bed and the bundled form of Dana, then flew at his face. “Don't make me do that.”
Then they were in the car again, back on I-80, back in Purgatory, back on the road that never ends, and it wasn't until they hit a truck stop outside Bloomsburg that they had a chance to comb their hair, brush their teeth, put something in their stomachs. It was a joyless meal, a mechanical refueling of the body little different from filling up the gas tank. He drove the final leg, trying to extract some entertainment value from the radio, one alternative channel after the other fading out till he gave up and tuned in the ubiquitous oldies. The sun was right there with them all the way, relentless, pounding down on the roof of the car through the long afternoon, the cranked-up DJs in their air-conditioned studios making jokes about the heat-“Triple digit!” one guy kept shouting between songs-and they must have heard “Summer in the City” three or four times rolling through New Jersey. Or he must have heard it.
Dana didn't seem to mind the heat-or the silence either. She sat beside him, enfolded in her own world, tapping away at her laptop-this was her chance to work on her book, she told him, didn't he see that? “Enforced solitude. Or not solitude,” she'd added with an apologetic smile, “that's not what I mean.” He knew what she meant-and he wasn't offended. Not particularly. She was trying to make the best of things, as if anything good could come of all this. He wished her well. Hoped she finished her book, sold it to the biggest publisher in New York and made a million dollars, if that would make her happy. Because there was no doubt that Frank Calabrese and the whole insane enterprise of running him down wasn't making anybody happy, not her, not him, not Radko. Or the thief either.
The thief. He'd almost forgotten about him, almost forgotten what they were doing here and why. The trees were dense along the road, traffic building, his eyes enforcing the distance between cars, and all he could think about was the power this single individual had over them, how he was the one who'd put them here, in this car, in the glare of New Jersey on a hot July afternoon. He saw him then, saw the guy's face superimposed over the shifting reflection of the windshield, saw the way he walked, rolling his hips and shoulders like some pimp in a movie, like Harvey Keitel in “Taxi Driver,” and felt something clench inside him, a hard irreducible bolus of hatred that made him reverse himself all over again. He'd been tired the night before, that was all. Tired of the road, tired of the hassle, tired of Radko-tired even of Dana and the way she shut him out. But yes, they were going to find this guy. And yes, they were going to see him put behind bars. And no, it didn't have all that much to do with Dana, not anymore.