I aimed at his head.
He immediately dropped to his knees and glared at me. I grinned at him.
“A man’s got to know his limitations,” I said. “You can thank me for showing you yours. Start crawling.”
He turned around and began to crawl towards the bathrooms, his butt facing me. “You better hope I never see you again, motherfucker.”
I ran up and kicked him in the stomach, and when he hit the ground on his side, I kicked him twice in the head. He went limp and lolled on his back. I wasn’t sure if he was faking it until I heard his bladder empty against the inside of his pants. I was certain he was unconscious then. No one goes that far to be convincing.
I pushed him onto his stomach, rushed to my car, and got out the roll of duct tape. I hog-tied him with the tape, checked his pulse to make sure I hadn’t killed him (though I don’t know what I would have done if I had), and left him there with his stolen goods. If he didn’t get arrested, and somehow managed to get away, he would certainly think twice about robbing someone else at a deserted rest stop.
“You’ll rue the night you met Dirty Harvey,” I hissed at him. It was the first time I’d ever said rue to anybody, whether they were conscious to hear it or not.
I picked up his car keys and his knife and drove off in a hurry.
A half-mile away, I tossed his things out the window and smiled to myself, a smile that lasted for the next two hours.
I considered the experience at the rest stop good practice for the day I’d meet Arlo Pelz again, a day I hoped would come very soon.
***
I arrived in Spokane at daybreak. It didn’t impress me much as a city. If it was worth visiting, somebody would have set a TV series there by now.
It struck me as the kind of place where everybody drove a pickup with a camper shell and owned at least one pair of overalls. There were plenty of old buildings downtown, but I was never interested much in architecture.
I followed I-90 through the city and then drove up Division Street, a row of fast-food franchises that would become the northbound 395 and take me to Deerlick.
As I drove past Riverfront Park, I could see the skeletal remains of the big tent that was the centerpiece of the 1974 World’s Fair. It was certainly no Space Needle. That should tell you something about the city’s character.
I guess they built a big tent as their enduring landmark, instead of a huge camper shell, because they didn’t have the money to erect the giant Ford pickup to go with it.
I only had one set of clothes left after the fire, and I’d just spent the night in them. So I stopped at a Wal-Mart and bought a few shirts, some underwear and socks, and two pairs of pants. I also bought a denim, letterman-style jacket to hide my gun and holster, some toiletries, a nylon gym bag, and a fresh Ace bandage for my ribs.
After making my purchases, I stopped at a Shell station and used the restroom to clean up, put on my new bandages, and change my clothes. I dumped my old clothes and bandages in the trash bin and hit the road.
I felt like a new man.
In fact, I know that I was.
It didn’t take long to put Spokane behind me and find myself winding through big stretches of farmland under bright, morning sun. As I passed places like Denison and Clayton and Jump Off Joe, I discovered it didn’t require much in Washington State to declare a patch of dirt a town, just a couple gas pumps and a burger place.
By the time I got to Deerlick, I wasn’t expecting much and I wasn’t disappointed. The turn-off took me down a narrow road past a trailer park, a small cemetery, and an old brick schoolhouse.
The center of the town was dominated by a ‘60s-era supermarket that might once have been the wreckage of a flying saucer before somebody got the bright idea of building a parking lot around it and selling groceries. The original bright colors of the supermarket had long since faded into shades of gray, the big windows fogged by countless layers of transparent tape used to hang posters for the last forty years.
The supermarket was bordered by Main Street, A Street, and Broadway, which were lined with old storefronts, most of them empty. There was a diner, a beauty salon, a barber shop, a drugstore, a tackle shop, and a post office.
I kept driving down the street, past the town center. There were a few car and boat repair shops, a gas station, and a bar; then the road took you behind the trailer park and around to the highway again.
I made a U-turn and headed back into town, took a right on A Street, and found myself in the residential section. The houses were fifty or sixty years old, the kind with porches and basements and detached garages. Almost all of them had some kind of beaten-up boat on a trailer in the driveway. There were bicycles and kids’ toys on the lawns and GM cars parked on the street. I wondered what kind of people lived there and what they did for a living and what would happen to the first person on the block who bought a Japanese car.
I turned around, parked in front of the supermarket, and got out of the car. I was immediately overwhelmed by the smell of sizzling bacon. A hunger I didn’t know I had suddenly asserted itself big time.
Like a drooling dog, I followed the scent of bacon to the diner across the street.
***
The Chuck Wagon was the kind of ‘50s diner that people in LA buy to renovate into authentic ‘50s diners.
You lose the real place, with history you can read in the sedimentary layers of grease on the walls, and end up with Johnny Rockets or the Denny’s in Camarillo, full of sparkling chrome and shiny, colored tile and a jukebox playing Chuck Berry songs. You end up with a diner the way people think they should have looked, not the way they actually did.
There was nothing shiny about the Chuck Wagon and there was no jukebox. The red-vinyl upholstery in the booths was torn. The linoleum counters and floors were scuffed and chipped. The wood-paneled walls were yellowed by sunlight and steam. There were store-bought bottles of catsup and jars of mustard at every table. The windows had ratty drapes and the ceiling fan twirled lazily.
It was my kind of place.
The Chuck Wagon was about half-full, and just about all the customers were deeply-tanned men wearing faded jeans, faded shirts, and sweat-stained baseball caps that advertised outboard motors or farm equipment. The Evinrudes and Chris Crafts and John Deeres looked at me in my new shirt, new jacket, and new slacks as if I were some kind of alien being the likes of which they hadn’t seen since the supermarket landed from outer space in 1962.
I smiled feebly and took a seat at the counter. I snatched the one-page, laminated menu from the napkin holder and gave it a quick look.
There were less than a dozen items on the menu: combinations of eggs, pancakes, hamburgers, and steaks. On the back there was a list of four homemade pies (apple, pecan, chocolate, and banana cream) and two kinds of ice cream, chocolate or vanilla, to choose from. The prices were covered with white tape and written over by hand in ballpoint pen. There wasn’t anything over six bucks. I wanted to try everything.
“What’ll it be, sir?” the waitress asked wearily.
I looked up and saw a tired woman in her forties, stuffed into a too-tight, stained white uniform, her hair pinned into a bun. She wore a bra that made her breasts look like airplane engines, her name stitched in script across one of them.
I ordered the Rancher’s Breakfast of eggs, steak, bacon, pancakes, and hash browns, and asked Georgette for an extra-thick chocolate shake to wash it down with.
While I waited for my meal, I watched the short-order cook move piles of hash browns and stacks of bacon strips around the grill, making room for the eggs and pancakes and steaks he was preparing. In between all that, he ladled oil onto the grill and used an ice cream scooper to dig butter out of a bucket, dropping the gobs into his frying pans. It was excruciating, gastronomical foreplay.
By the time Georgette set my plate down in front of me, I was so hungry I was nearly slobbering. I wolfed the hot meal down in about ten minutes and immediately ordered another shake.
It may have been the best breakfast I ever had in my life.
When she brought me the shake, with a dollop of whipped cream sprayed on top, I was sated and finally ready to get to work.