44
ON THEIR TWELFTH DAY OUT, ONE GOT AWAY. That had never happened before. He was an ex-con named Danny Murdock, the fourth model they had picked up this trip. On his right forearm, he had a tattoo of two scaly serpents wrapped around a tombstone that Carl imagined doing something special with once they had him down. They had been riding around all afternoon drinking beer and sharing a jumbo bag of pork rinds and getting him relaxed. They found a spot to park along a long, narrow lake just a mile or so inside the Sumter National Forest. As soon as Sandy shut the engine off, Danny flung the door open and got out of the car. He stretched and yawned, then started ambling toward the water, shucking off his clothes as he went. “What are you doing?” Carl yelled.
Danny tossed his shirt on the ground and turned to look back at them. “Hey, I got no problem giving your old lady the cock, but let me get cleaned up first,” he said, jerking his underwear down. “I’m warning you, though, ol’ buddy, I get past the used part, she ain’t gonna be happy with your ass no more.”
“Boy, he’s got a mouth on him, don’t he?” Sandy said, as she walked around the front of the station wagon. She leaned against the fender and watched the man jump into the water.
Carl set the camera on the hood and smiled. “Not for long, he ain’t.” They shared another beer and watched him swim, arms pumping and feet kicking, out to the middle of the lake and then roll over on his back.
“I gotta say, that looks like fun,” Sandy said. She kicked off her sandals and spread the blanket on the grass.
“Shit, hard to tell what’s in that mud hole,” Carl said. He opened another beer, tried to enjoy being out of the stinking car for a while. Eventually though, his patience with the swimmer wore thin. He had been out there playing over an hour. He went to the edge of the beach and started yelling and motioning for Danny to come in, and each time the man dove under and came back up whooping and splashing water like some schoolboy, Carl got a little more pissed. When Danny finally walked up out of the lake grinning with his dick hanging halfway to his knees and the evening sun sparkling all over his wet skin, Carl pulled the gun out of his pocket and said, “Are you clean enough yet?”
“What the hell?” the man said.
Carl motioned with the gun. “Goddamn it, get over there on that blanket like we talked about. Shit, we’re losing the light here.” He looked back at Sandy and nodded. She reached behind her head and started to undo her ponytail.
“Go fuck yourself!” Carl heard the man yell.
By the time he realized what was happening, Danny Murdock was already bolting into the woods on the other side of the road. Carl fired twice wildly and took after him. Slipping and stumbling, he went deep into the woods, until he was afraid he’d never find his way back to the car. He stopped and listened, but couldn’t hear a thing except for the sound of his own raspy breathing. He was too fat and slow to be chasing anyone, let alone a long-legged prick who had bragged to them all afternoon about outrunning three squad cars on foot through downtown Spartanburg the week before. By then, it was near dusk, and he suddenly realized that the man might have circled back around to where Sandy was waiting at the car. But even with blanks in her gun, he should have heard a shot, that is, unless the fucker took her by surprise. Goddamn that sneaking sonofabitch. He hated going back to the car empty-handed. Sandy would never let him hear the end of it. He hesitated a second, then pointed the pistol up in the air and fired twice.
She was standing by the open driver’s door holding the.22 in her hands when he came crashing through the brush at the edge of the road, red-faced and panting. “We got to get out of here,” he yelled. He grabbed the blanket they had spread on the ground behind the car and hurried over and scooped up the man’s clothes and shoes out of the grass. He tossed them in the backseat and climbed in the front.
“Jesus, Carl, what happened?” she said as she started the car.
“Don’t worry, I got the bastard,” he said. “Put two through his stupid head.”
She looked over at him. “You chased that fucker down?”
He heard the doubt in her voice. “Be quiet for a minute,” he said. “I got to think.” He pulled out a map and studied it for a minute or so, tracing his finger back and forth. “The way it looks we’re maybe ten miles from the border. Just turn around and make a left where we came in, and we oughta run into the highway.”
“I don’t believe you,” she said.
“What?”
“That guy took off like a deer. Ain’t no way you caught up with him.”
Carl took a couple of deep breaths. “He was hiding under a log. I damn near stepped on him.”
“What’s the hurry then?” she said. “Let’s go back and take some pictures.”
Carl laid the.38 on the dash and pulled his shirt up, wiped the sweat off his face. His heart was still beating like a hammer in his chest. “Sandy, just drive the goddamn car, okay?”
“He got away, didn’t he?”
He looked out the passenger window into the darkening woods. “Yeah, the bastard got away.”
She put the car in drive. “Don’t lie to me no more, Carl,” she said. “And another thing, while we’re on the subject, if I hear about you messing around with that little cunt at the White Cow again, you’re gonna be sorry.” Then she pressed her foot to the accelerator, and twenty minutes later, they crossed the state line into Georgia.
45
LATER THAT NIGHT, SANDY PARKED at the edge of a truck stop a few miles south of Atlanta. She ate a piece of beef jerky and crawled in the backseat to sleep. Around three AM, it began to rain. Carl sat in the front and listened to it beat on top of the car and thought about the ex-con. There’s a lesson to be learned from this, he thought. He had just turned his back on the cowardly fucker for a second, but that had been long enough to screw everything up. He pulled the man’s clothes from underneath the seat and started going through them. He found a broken switchblade and a Greenwood, South Carolina, address written inside a matchbook and eleven dollars in his wallet. Underneath the address were the words GOOD HEAD. He put the money in his pocket and rolled everything else up into a ball, then walked across the lot and tossed it in a trash barrel.
The rain was still coming down when she woke the next morning. Eating breakfast with Sandy at the truck stop, he wondered if any of the drivers sitting around them had ever killed a hitchhiker. It would be an excellent job for that sort of thing if a person was so inclined. As they started on their third cup of coffee, the rain let up and the sun popped out like a big, festering boil in the sky. By the time they paid the bill, wisps of steam were already rising up off the blacktopped parking lot. “About what happened yesterday,” Carl said, as they walked back to the car, “I shouldn’t have done that.”
“Like I said,” Sandy told him, “don’t lie to me no more. We get caught, it’s my ass in the sling just as much as yours.”
Carl thought again about the blanks he’d stuck in her gun, but decided it would be better not to say anything about that. They would be home soon, and he could replace them without her ever knowing. “Ain’t nobody gonna catch us,” he said.
“Yeah, well, you probably didn’t think one would ever get away, either.”
“Don’t worry,” he said, “that won’t ever happen again.”
They drove around Atlanta and stopped in a place called Roswell for gas. They had twenty-four dollars and some change to get home on. Just as Carl was getting back in the station wagon after paying the cashier, a gaunt man in a worn black suit timidly approached. “You wouldn’t be headin’ north by any chance, would you?” he asked. Carl went ahead and picked his cigar up out of the ashtray before he turned to look the man over. The suit was several sizes too big. The cuffs of the pants were turned up several times to keep them from dragging on the ground. He could see a little paper price tag still attached to the sleeve of the coat. The man was packing a flimsy bedroll; and though he could have easily passed for sixty, Carl figured the wayfarer at least a few years younger than that. For some reason, he reminded Carl of a preacher, one of the real ones that you seldom run into anymore: not one of those greedy, sweet-smelling bastards just out to take people’s money and make a fat fucking living off God, but a man who truly believed in the teachings of Jesus. On second thought, that was probably taking things a bit too far; the old boy was probably just another bum.