WEST ON 66

by James H. Cobb

  I was dreading the answer I might get for this next question. "Does he know about this new plan of yours?"

  She nodded again. "I'm afraid so," she replied quietly. "One night, while he was standing over the bed, I screamed it right in his face."

  Fan . . . damn . . . tastic! And if Spanno knew this girl at all, he'd know that she meant it. When someone like Lisette says that she's going to kill you with that kind of intensity, you'd better start picking out your casket lining.

  The big man wasn't just greedy. He was scared.

  "Who is he, Princess? What the hell is he to you?" I had to ask it.

  "No!" She shook her head decisively, her ponytail brushing lightly against my arm. "Don't ask me that, Kevin. When Mace Spanno dies, a whole part of my life dies with him. It will be gone and no one is ever going to be able to remind me of it again."

  Time passed, the evening darkened, the neon buzzed, and the standoff continued.

  "We can't stay here forever, Kev," Lisette said, "and if we try to leave, they'll be right behind us. I hope you have some kind of plan to get us out of here."

  "I do, and it's in full swing even as we speak."

  "Excuse me, Mr. Pulaski, but you don't seem to be doing anything."

  "That just goes to show you how appearances can be de­ceiving. I happen to be sitting here awaiting developments . . . and here comes one up the street right now."

  My development took the form of a black-and-white Ford Fairlane sedan with a set of flashers on its roof and an Oklahoma City Police badge on its door. Twenty minutes be fore, I'd seen it make a pass west on the arterial. Now it was sweeping back in the other direction.

  Only this time, as it approached the parked 300-C it slowed down. I couldn't see into the shadows beneath the Ford's roof, but I could tell that the cruiser crew was giving the Chrysler

  the eye.

  "Ha!" I slapped the '57's steering wheel. "God, I am proud of myself! Stand by; we're going to be taking off in just a min­ute."

  I kicked over the engine, warming it up.

  The police cruiser was back. Circling the block, it made an­other slow run past the 300-C. This time I could make out the cruiser's observer speaking into his radio mike.

  So could some other people. As soon as the police car was clear, smoke jetted from the Chrysler's exhausts and its head­lights flicked on. Signaling, Spanno's car sedately pulled out into traffic, rolling east well below the speed limit. The Oklahoma City cruiser went to the curb to let the black coupe pass, then pulled back out again, trailing the 300 down the

  street.

  The second they were out of sight, I switched on my head­lights and honked the horn, calling for a fast tray pickup.

  Totally lost, Lisette watched the brief automotive ballet. "What did I miss?" she demanded. "What just happened?"

  "Just what I knew was going to happen, eventually, when I pulled in here," I replied, backing us out. "It's a Friday evening and this place is popular with the local kids. I noticed the hot rods turning in here as we came up the street. The local beat cops always keep an eye out for trouble at joints like this on a

  weekend."

  "But Mace and his people were just sitting there. They

  weren't doing anything."

  "Three older men in an out-of-state car loitering around a teenagers' hangout at night? That would spell trouble to any street cop in the world. It's too much to hope for that Spanno might have any wants and warrants out on his personal wheels, but I bet that cruiser will stay on his tail clear to the edge of its patrol sector. By the time Mace and his boys get back here, we'll be long gone."

  But not on the highway.

  One of our problems was that we were stuck with being linear. Everywhere we needed to go and everything we needed to know was strung out along Route 66 like a string of beads. Spanno obviously knew this and could use it. No matter how often we might shake him off, he could either just catch up to us or blow past and wait for us to catch up with him.

  Tonight, though, we might be able to do an end-round.

  I took us out on a northbound Oklahoma City arterial, riding it beyond the city limits until it became a county road, crossing over the 66-bypass loop and the Santa Fe tracks that paralleled them. Only then did I start looking for a turn west.

  We were out on the true prairie now. The only trees that remained either grew along the stream banks or clumped pro­tectively around the scattering of homesteads. Grazing land and fall-turned fields stretched out toward a widening horizon. This was farming and ranching country, and there's always a set of back roads. Maybe they aren't detailed on any map, but they'll get you to where you're going. You just have to be a little patient and not mind doing some winding around.

  It was beyond sundown as we went on our way. At first on pavement, then on gravel, and then just on graded blood-colored dirt. The red dust in the hard-packed ruts of the road muffled the rumble of the '57's tires. Swirled up by our passage, it glowed double scarlet in the ruddy flare of our taillights.

  Ahead, an occasional rabbit scurried across the tunnel blasted in the darkness by our headlights. And once, a coyote crouched in the dried grass beyond the ditch, its eyes burning golden.

  I navigated by my dashboard compass, occasionally having to divert and cast along a north-south cross road until I could find another stretch heading west again. To the south we could occasionally make out the cars on Route 66 or the big headlamp of a train running on the rails beside it.

  Eventually, though, our course angled us away from the in­terstate, leaving only the lights of an occasional farmhouse to remind us that we weren't alone under the black and empty sky.

  After a while, we ran out of farmhouses, too,

  The only radio stations we could pick up were the big "skip" stations that cranked up their power after sunset. Meant for the long-haul truckers and other such lonely travelers in the night, they were country western mostly. Bonnie Guitar's cool con­tralto serenaded us on our way with "Dark Moon."

  On toward midnight, a solid line of cottonwoods cut across our path, marking the flow of the North Canadian River. We swung north, running parallel to its course. After a while, I found a trace of a turnoff leading down toward the water. Slowly, I eased the '57 into the overgrown ruts and we bumped into the deeper shadows: beneath the trees.

  Our headlights swept over the leaning and overgrown ruin of what had been a small house and a collapsed pile of lumber that might have been aa barn. Someone had tried to make a stand here once, some farm family with a dream of making it on a place of their own. Likely they hadn't been able to make it through that grim time back in the 1930s when the skies and the banks both had dried up. They'd been dusted out, and no one had ever come back to try again. All that was left was this little clearing, marked by the tire tracks of the occasional local who used it as a turnaround or a fishing access.

  I shut Car down and clicked off her lights. Silence except for the ticking of the engine as it started to cool and the chuckle of the North Canadian flowing beyond the tree line.

  "Why are we stopping?" Lisette asked, her voice instinc­tively going to a whisper.

  "To spend the night.," I said, popping my door open. "Here? You're kidding?"

  "That's just the way I hope old Mace is thinking at the moment," I replied, climbing out of the car. "He's a city boy, and he thinks town. Right now, I'm betting that he's either back there taking Oklahoma City apart looking for us or tear-aissing up 66 on what he thinks is our tail. The one place I doubt he'll look is out here in the boondocks. Even if he did, there ain't no way in hell he's going to find us."

  Just to make sure, though, I took my old crook-tubed army flashlight out from under the seat and walked back up to the road. From the turnout I played the light toward where we'd parked, checking for any glint of chrome or glass that might be visible through the brush. There wasn't any.

  I was willing to bet that it was impossible for anyone to have followed us here. I hadn't seen a set of
headlights behind us for the past ten miles. On the other hand, sometimes it pays to make sure that the impossible really can't happen. I took one more Long last look back along the road. Just in case.

  When I returned to the car, Lisette was standing beside it, gazing up at the sky. "Oh, look at all the stars!" she said with all the awe: of a little kid at her first fireworks display.

  I glanced up as I came to stand beside her. "Yeah, that is somethin'. But wait until we get a little farther west on the high desert. You won't believe it. Sometimes, when we're running time trials out at El Mirage, we sleep beside our cars out on the dry lake bed. You look up and you don't think that there's a number big enough for all the stars you can see."

  That brought Lisette's attention back to more immediate concerns. "Uh, where are we going to sleep?" she asked cau­tiously, crossing her arms and looking around. "There's only one sleeping bag, isn't there?"

  "Yeah, and it's yours, And in return for that gentlemanly sacrifice, I'm claiming the backseat. Either you can take the front seat or I can put a tarp down on the ground beside the car and you can stretch out on that. The smart money for a good night's sleep would be the ground."

  I saw Lisette uneasily eye the seriously black shadows under the trees. "But aren't there snakes and stuff like that around here?" she asked.

  I had to nod. "That does sort of come with the territory, yeah."

  "I'll take the front seat."

  There followed the inevitable Three Stooges minus one rou­tine you get whenever two adult human beings try to bed down in a conventional automobile, for either sleep or recreation. It could have been worse, I guess. I only almost removed my kidney with the hammer spur of my pistol once, Lisette only got her foot caught in the horn ring of the wheel twice, and we only swore at each other three or four times apiece.

  It's only in situations like this that I ever seriously consider buying a Rambler.

  Finally, there was that last big mutual flump of positioning that indicates both parties have settled down into their least worst compromise for the night.

  For me, that was with my feet over in the floor well on the passenger side and with my head propped back in the corner of the rear seat and the side panel. My B-4 bag on the floor beside me widened things out a little, and Lisette's wadded-up car coat made a pillow. It wasn't the plushest bed I'd ever slept on, but then it was a long way from the worst, either.

  To make these kinds of accommodations work, you have to ignore the bad, like how my knees were already cramping up, and focus on the good, like the fresh prairie wind flowing in through the '57's half-open windows. I could smell the moist-ness of a dewfall starting. We wouldn't have to worry about rain tomorrow. And somewhere off in the distance, someone had gotten into an argument with a skunk.

  I positioned the Commander on the rear window shelf a short grab away and pulled my leather jacket over me.

  "Kev?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Will you be all right? Won't you get cold before morning?"

  "I'll be fine. I've been to Korea. Cold doesn't count until your toes start to fall off."

  "Oh, okay. Good night."

  "Night, Princess."

  I settled down to think myself to sleep. Okay, Pulaski, let's assume that we, or at least Lisette, do have a fix on the location of that money. What does that do for us?

  Not a whole hell of a lot, really.

  It was a major point on Lisette's agenda, but I couldn't see how it put me any closer to getting the goods on Spanno for Johnny Kingman's murder. Lisette had said that Spanno had never admitted in her presence that he had killed her father. She seemed to be running on instinct and circumstance, neither of which is worth a damn in a courtroom.

  Maybe she had more, though. There were a whole lot of connections missing here. Lisette and Spanno were tied to­gether in ways I didn't understand yet. She hated him for rea­sons way beyond just the death of her father. Maybe if I could only ask her the right questions I could get the right answers. The ones that would start Spanno on that last long walk to the gas chamber and stop Lisette from becoming a murderess in her own right.

  The problem was, that would mean breaking cover. But hell, I was going to have to do that eventually anyway to recover the money.

  Wasn't I?

  The car rocked a little on its springs as the girl shifted in the front seat. "Kev?"

  "Uh-huh?"

  "Why do you call me Princess?"

  "Because that's the first thing I thought of when I saw you back there at the Dixie. I'll knock it off if it bothers you."

  "No. That's all right. I like it."

  TEXAS

  260 mi. (113 mi.) Cross TEXAS-OKLAHOMA STATE LINE. At once the road improves and a deco­rative stone marker welcomes you to this vast state . . .

  The opening car door woke me. But a couple of quiet words from Lisette took the edge off the event, and I sprawled in a comfortably drowsy daze for a few minutes longer. Eventually, though, the sun in my face brought me fully back alive. Pulling myself upright in the backseat, I rubbed the grit out of my eyes and acknowledged the complaints being filed by assorted mus­cles and vertebrae.

  The sky was cloudless and the growing heat of the morning stewed a cooking jam scent out of the blackberry tangles. Back up in the cottonwoods, the songbirds were expressing a lot ot confidence in the new day.

  Lisette wasn't in sight, but her shoulder bag and drawing pad lay on the front seat beside the wadded mass of the sleeping bag. Just for the hell of it, I reached over the seat back and scooped up the pad, flipping through to her latest entries.

  Hm, she had fooled around with giving that suit a midthigh skirt. My, wouldn't that be an interesting development in the business world. But Lisette was right; women would never be that generous or men that lucky.

  I turned the next page. A quick Hank Carby. Hi, old-timer. Thanks for the help yesterday, and may God bless you and that carved-in-granite memory of yours.

  Lisette must have been awake for a while, because the next sketch was of the abandoned farmhouse across from us in the clearing. Its gaunt outline was shadowed heavily as it might have been seen in the early light of dawn.

  And finally there was another of her quick portrait s, a special one this time. I took a second to verify the identity ot the smiling man from the photograph in Lisette's purse.

  Hello, Johnny 32. I'm trying to take good care of your daughter, granted that's who she is. I hope you approve. I do wonder, though, why Lisette drew this row of question marks in under your picture.

  I returned the photo and pad to their places. I felt kind of funny going through Lisette's sketches that way. There were bits of her thoughts, dreams, and emotions locked up on that paper, a kind of graphic diary. The thing was that there might also be some clues to the stack of mysteries that kept piling up in front of me. This morning, though, there were no answers, just more questions.

  The intriguing sound of splashing started to come from down toward the river. Getting out of the car, I followed the sounds to their source.

  Finding a pretty girl's clothes lying discarded on the grass is one of the better ways to start your morning.

  The lazily flowing stream hooked around the grove where we had spent the night. Lisette was out in a deep pool, joyfully discovering the simple kid pleasures of skinny-dipping in the creek. She didn't notice she'd gained an audience. The same intense morning light that danced fire off the ripples around her made the shade back under the trees inpenetrable. I hooked my thumbs into the belt loops of my jeans and leaned against a Cottonwood trunk, savoring the chance to watch her as she played.

  Oddly enough, sex didn't come into it, at least not at first. It was just kind of nice seeing her be so—I guess the word is innocent—for a little while. For this one moment she wasn't having to think about running or killing or dying. She wasn't having to think at all. She could just be happy enjoying the feel of the warm sun and the cool water on her skin.

  Eventually, though, Lis
ette's casual nakedness began to catch up with me. The twinned curves of her pale, firm breasts as she stood waist-deep for a moment, the flash of her long, sweet legs as she dived forward, the flow of her dark wet hair down her back. Oh, yeah. The urge to stop watching and go down to her began to build fast, real fast.

  But I didn't.

  I was coming to realize that I'd started a strange and com­plicated dance with this girl. A number of different threads were getting tangled together here, and I had no idea where they all were leading yet or where they all would end. But I did know that I didn't want to risk a misstep. Not with her. Not for a lot of reasons.

  I walked back to the parked '57. I needed to touch its cool steel. I needed something I could get a grip on.

  I began to field-strip Car the same way I would my side arm. I checked all the fluid levels again, running the dipsticks between my fingers to feel for any traces of metal or gasket fragmentation, visually studying the oil for any hint of that chocolaty look that might mean coolant water contamination.

  I checked and tightened the battery cable and hose clamps. I checked the cables and hoses for weak spots and worn insu­lation. I used a scrub brush on the radiator, clearing away the bug accumulation of the past few hundred miles and I checked the levels in the oil bath air cleaners.

  Check the wheel lugs. Check the rubber for cuts or bulges. Check the brake cables and shift linkage and the suspension mounts. Check it all, brother, because we were going to the wars.

  I'd gotten sloppy the last day or so, lax about the threat Mace Spanno might represent. He'd taken me by surprise last night and I couldn't afford to let that happen again.

  A pair of slim ankles appeared at my eye level as I started to slide back out from under one of the wheel wells. "Is the car all right?" Lisette inquired, looking down at me.

  She looked damp and pleased with herself and about four­teen years old in her travel-grubby blouse and shorts.