Sten didn’t answer. He just put the car in gear, swung a U-turn and followed the pickup back down the road, all the way down, past the supermarket and back out onto the Coast Highway, where it turned north and kept on going. At speed. And here was where the big engine had the advantage, though Sten tried gamely to keep up. By Cleone, they’d lost them, but Carey got the 911 dispatcher on the phone as soon as they were in range. “What do I tell them?” he asked, his face blanched and the armpits of his T-shirt soaked through with nervous sweat.
Sten went silently through the list of crimes — Being Mexican; Driving a New Ford XLT; Buying Too Many Groceries; Acting Suspicious — but he was already signaling, already looking up the road for the next left so he could turn round and head home. It was one-twenty in the afternoon. The meat was rotted, the milk gone sour. And the eggs. Nothing worse than the smell of rotten eggs. He turned to Carey, Carey with his bouncing knee and too much white in his eyes, Carey in his jogging togs, Carey the vigilante. “Just tell them they were brandishing a weapon,” he said. “That ought to do it.”
PART V The Noyo
15
“DOESN’T HE SCARE YOU?”
She was in the kitchen of the house on the banks of the Noyo, a weak sun sifting through the trees, and Christabel, who didn’t even know him and who was probably jealous — definitely jealous — had called to see how she was getting along in exile.
“No,” she said, “not at all.” And that was the truth. Adam could be as strange as strange got, no doubt about that, but what Christabel didn’t understand was that underneath there was an essential sweetness to him, a boyishness, an innocence you didn’t find in the types that took up space in the bars and stomped up and down the aisles of the hardware store with the oh-so-pleased-with-themselves smirks on their faces, which, sadly, seemed to be the only types available to women like her and Christabel. Plus, he was young. And handsome. A whole lot handsomer than her ex, Roger, who’d let himself go till he wasn’t much more than a belly with pants on it — or anybody she’d dated since. And built. She told Christabel that, as if she needed any justification, because who she dated was nobody’s business but hers, not even her best friend’s.
“He’s like a rock. I don’t know what he does — I don’t see him lifting weights or anything — but he’s hard all over.”
“Don’t get dirty on me now.”
She laughed. “I’m not. Really, I’m not. Just stating the facts.”
There was a long exhalation on the other end of the line, Christabel blowing out the smoke of her cigarette, and she could picture it, the way she threw her head back and pursed her lips as if she were channeling the smoke through an imaginary portal in the sky and sending it right on up to heaven, to God Himself, who, after all, was the one who invented nicotine. “You’re just a cougar, that’s all.”
She didn’t deny it. In fact, it brought a smile to her lips. “Who me?” she said, and they both laughed. Then she said, “I thought you gave up smoking?”
“I did.”
“So what’s that puffing I hear?”
“Just having a little taste to see what I’m missing. Isn’t that what you’re doing — with Adam? Because don’t tell me you’re serious—”
It had been a week since she’d moved in and if he hadn’t been around much, that was all right. He was mysterious, always out in the woods, and when he wasn’t he was lying supine on the couch in a clutter of books and notepads or just staring into the gray void of the TV, which looked as if it hadn’t worked in years. If he had anything to say at all it was about Colter — Colter this and Colter that, the same story, over and over. And the cops, the cops really lit him up. Ditto the Chinese. Colter, the cops and the Chinese, those were his themes. When he was talking, that is, which wasn’t much. He disappeared early each morning, before she was up, but he was always there for dinner and always glad to see the food dished out on the plate, whether it was meat loaf or mac and cheese or bean burritos. Glad for the sex too. She’d never known anybody like him — it was as if he’d been locked up in a cage his whole life. He wanted it. He needed it. He was hungry for it. And so was she. She’d been abstinent so long she’d forgotten what it was like to have your blood quicken just thinking about somebody, to feast on the smell of him, to find yourself getting wet even before he had his clothes off, even before he touched you.
“You want to meet him? See for yourself?” A pause. “He’s sweet. He really is.”
Christabel said something back, but it was garbled, hampered by the connection, the signal weak out here in the woods, and there was no landline — Adam had ripped it out. And why? He claimed the phone had been listening to him, spying on him, and if she doubted that — CIA, FBI, his mother, the Chinese — she couldn’t fault his paranoia. Or was it even paranoia — or just wariness, just being hip to reality? They were listening in on everybody and tracking their e-mails too, and that was a fact.
“You’re breaking up,” she said. “It’s me. Wait a minute”—and she stepped out the back door—“is this better?”
“I said, after what you’ve been telling me, he sounds pretty strange. Even if he is a stud.”
“What’s strange? Everybody’s strange. You’re strange. I’m strange.”
“You can say that again.”
“No, seriously, you want to come for dinner?”
“When?”
“I don’t know, tonight?” It was a Saturday, the day they usually got together for dinner someplace and then the whole hopeless charade of bar-hopping, singles night out, as if there’d be any male in any of those places who would be of interest to either of them, every last one too old, too young, too stupid or too married.
“Come early. We’ll have cocktails. Four-thirty? Four, even?”
A silence, as if Christabel were weighing all the stacked-up options of her glittering social life, and then she said, “I don’t even know how to get there, like what road, it’s not even marked, right? And that’s another thing — it’s just crazy what you’re doing. You can’t hide out forever—”
“A week isn’t forever.”
“What then — you going to stay the full thirty days till the dog’s out of quarantine? You think that’s going to satisfy them? You can’t just — why don’t you at least take him to the vet and have the vet give him a shot or some kind of certificate or something?”
It was as if somebody had laid a cold hand on her back — or no, an ice pack. All her fear and hate gusted through her like an Arctic wind and froze her right there in place, her boots stuck fast in the dirt, her frame as rigid as the cinder-block wall and the trees that stood motionless all around her. Christabel was right: she couldn’t stay here forever, plus Sten was closing on the place and there’d be a new owner soon. And where did that leave her? She couldn’t go back to her own house because they’d be looking for her there, at least till the quarantine was up, and Christabel’s apartment was the size of your average cell at the House of Detention and she wouldn’t have her anyway because she couldn’t risk harboring a fugitive. And that was just how she’d put it, Christabel, the coward, the wuss: harboring a fugitive. Bow down and kiss their asses, why don’t you? I could lose my job, she’d said.
The fact was, Sara had already taken the dog to the vet and already mailed the proof of rabies/parvo vaccination to the court, knowing it most likely wouldn’t fly since Kutya had bitten the cop before he was vaccinated. But it was better than nothing. At least she was trying, though they had no right in any of this except the right of might, the right of their fraudulent and blatantly unconstitutional laws and their storm troopers in the shiny taxpayer-bought cars. And the judges and the courts and the DMV and all the rest of the parasitic bureaucracy they’d imposed on the American public. It was a house of cards just waiting for somebody to blow it all away. The leeches. The bloodsuckers.