WEST ON 66

by James H. Cobb

  After a while, I put my back to the cool, stony surface of the tepee and let myself slide down the sloping face to a sitting position on the ground, looking up at the steel-splinter stars in

  the sky.

  I'd bought a fresh pack of Luckys back at the roadhouse. I snubbed out the last one as the first peach shading came into the sky to the east.

  CALIFORNIA

  It is a region of memorable desolation and shimmering heat, yet after its occasional rains the floor of the desert is dotted with flowers.

  Give my friend Don Blair credit; when he puts a car together, he puts it together bulletproof. As soon as I had daylight enough to work by, I brought the '57 over in front of our unit and went over her from bumper to bumper. I found that bar­ring some loose fittings and a burst shock absorber, she'd come through yesterday's thrill show intact and healthy. She'd need a brake job and some new tires before long, but I could let that ride until we got home to LA.

  Granted, of course, we made it that far. My last exchange with Jack kept hanging in the back of my mind.

  "Good morning." Lisette stood in the doorway of our unit, wearing my commandeered shirt again. I figure I might as well just surrender possession of it to her permanently. Her hair flowed loose around her shoulders, and she was brushing out a backlog of tangles.

  "Morning, Princess. How you doing?" She still had her wry smile. "Lousy. But if I can feel this bad, it must mean that I'm still alive."

  "Let's make that our beautiful thought for the day." I tucked a screwdriver back into its loops in my tool roll and leaned across the hood "Now, for real, how you doing?"

  The stroking of her brush faltered, and she reflected for a moment. "I think the crying is over," she said finally. "But I hope I get the chance to go off somewhere someday and really sort out what I feel about my father. Even knowing what I do now, I'd still like to be able to love him. That's funny, isn't

  it?"

  It was my turn to think for a second. "No, not particularly. Any man, anyone, isn't just one thing. We're all a lot of dif­ferent pieces put together in a lot of different ways. I guess you could love some of the pieces of someone, even when you might hate the rest of him. Like you said, it's something you'll have to sort out."

  "Thank you for the piece of him you gave back to me last

  night."

  There wasn't any answer I could give beyond a shrug of my

  shoulders. "There wasn't anything to give back. It was just

  something you forgot you had for a minute." "Then thank you for reminding me about it." Lisette tossed her' brush back onto the bed in the unit and

  removed the polished copper barrette from her shirt pocket.

  Gathering back her thick brown mane, she deftly clipped the barrette in place, settling her fall of hair with an unconsciously graceful toss of her head. Glancing around to make sure there wasn't anyone else up to notice her rather casual state of dress, she padded barefoot over to the car.

  "How's your baby today?" she inquired, hopping up to sit on the fender next to me.

  "Everything looks good except for a busted shock. We'll have to find an open gas station and put her up on the rack to get it replaced. That shouldn't take too long, and then we're set to go."

  "That's good," she replied, looking down and idly swinging her bare legs. "Kev, there's something else I need to ask about."

  "Sure. Shoot."

  "Yesterday, when we were with the Clasters, you said that Calvin Reece had been killed. That wasn't something you made up, was it?"

  I fumbled for a minute with the ties on my tool roll before answering. "No, it wasn't, Princess. They got him."

  "How did you find out?"

  "An old army buddy of mine who works on a newspaper in Saint Louis." The lie didn't taste good in my throat. "I was worried about what might have happened back there after we left, so I gave him a call. The police say they don't have any leads on who Reece's killers are, but it's easy enough to figure."

  "It is. Why didn't you tell me?"

  "I only found out yesterday morning. I was waiting for the right time when . . . things sort of got busy."

  She didn't lift her eyes. "I'm sorry," she whispered to some­one who wasn't there. "I didn't mean for that to happen."

  I rested my hand on her thigh for a second. "It's not your fault, Princess."

  He head jerked up angrily. "Oh, yes, it is! If I hadn't started this thing, Calvin Reece would still be alive."

  "Yeah, and you'd be back in Gary, chained to Spanno's bed and dying by inches! Is that some kind of a goddamn solution?

  I don't even think Reece would have gone for that. You have the right to live, too."

  "Not if other people have to pay the price for it! That would make me no better than Mace!"

  Abruptly she slipped down off the car and went back into the unit.

  It's a good thing the '57 is built out of tough stuff. The punch I landed on her fender might have left a dent otherwise.

  For the third time in two days, we traversed the stretch of 66 between Holbrook and Flagstaff. Out at the Peerless junction we saw a couple of Arizona Highway Patrol cars and a State Forestry deuce and a half pulled off to the side of the highway, the latter loaded with grimy fire fighters. Beyond them we could see a big patch of burn-off where the flames of the dying ghost town had spread into the desert.

  My stomach cinched up at the sight of the patrol cruisers. Jack could really screw me over if he wanted by putting out a false APB on me. Heck, he didn't have to even do that. He could blow me out of the water with Lisette just by having them pull me over and politely ask that I contact my superiors at the LA County Hall of Justice.

  He'd be doing it entirely in my best interests, too. Jack would never admit it, but he sweats blood when I'm working a deep-cover job. That's what a good contact man for an un­dercover cop does. He's the guy who has to sense if things are going screwy for the operative he's covering. He's the guy who has to call in the cavalry if he thinks his man is in trouble. And he's the guy who's supposed to maintain a sense of perspective about the job in case the hot dog out in the field starts thinking he's Superman.

  In pushing this run the way I was, I was asking the Bear to violate every one of those principles of good police work. It was a shitty thing to do to a good partner and a friend. When I saw him again, he'd have every right in the world to kick me in the ass and tell me to go to hell.

  The Arizona Staters paid me no mind. Jack was still keeping the faith with me.

  Beyond the Peerless turnoff, we started to encounter trees again. At first they were just the usual scrubby desert cedar. But soon, as we started our steeper climb toward Flagstaff, they segued into real trees, yellow pine, tall, straight, and slender.

  We passed new villages and ancient ones. Toonerville, Wi­nona, and Walnut Canyon State Park, where prehistoric cliff dwellings cling to the sides of a rocky gorge. Then came Flag­staff, the city that might have become Hollywood if a blizzard hadn't been blowing when Cecil B. DeMille had passed through looking for a place to build a motion picture studio.

  After such a long stretch in the dry country, it was nice to drive through a corridor of ranked green with a cooler blue sky overhead. There was even the faintest skiff of fresh snow up on the crests of the San Franciscos, the coming winter's notice of intent to occupy.

  It couldn't last, though. We crested the Arizona Divide at 7,300 feet and started down again. Down and out of the pines. Down through the juniper and scrub cedar. Down through the sagebrush and shortgrass. Down toward the cholla and Joshua trees.

  Let's do some semantics here. Up to this point on our jour­ney, we'd crossed several large, flat, and arid areas that, for convenience sake, were referred to as "desert." Now, however, we were heading into the real thing. The genuine, sand-burning, buzzard-flapping, prospector-frying article.

  Out here, we call it the Mojave.

  It was a quiet drive. Lisette spoke in monosyllables when she spoke at all. She sa
t close at my side, almost as if she were afraid to get beyond touch. She seemed most content on the long straight stretches when I could slip my arm around her shoulders and gather her in. Even then, I occasionally felt her shiver despite the warmth of my body and the heat of the day. We stopped for our afternoon break in Seligman. It's a little town that hasn't changed all that much since the days of the Arizona rangers, right down to the hitching rails and board sidewalks on Main Street. The intrusion of the twentieth cen­tury was limited to the paving on 66 and one weird little drive-in with the out-of-place name of the Snow Cap. The exuberant young Latino guy running the place managed to comment on the weather, compliment me on my car and my girl, and tell a pretty good joke all in the time it took to pop for a couple of Cokes.

  Lisette had taken a seat at an outdoor table on the shady side of the building. Her sketchbook was in her lap, and she was idly flipping through the pages. During all of the previous days of our journey, her drawing pad had constantly been ready at her side. Today, this was first the first time she'd had it out.

  Dropping down on the bench on the other side of the table, I parked her cup beside her. "Princess, we need to talk about something."

  "About what?" she replied noncommittally, not looking up. No way was she in a mood to talk, but I was running out of time and options.

  "Like about where we're going?"

  "What do you mean, Kev?"

  "I mean we've paid our visit to Peerless. We're back to hunt­ing for the money again. And we still don't have a clue to where your dad hid it."

  We were back to playing games about the lost war chest. It was the last pressure point I had to bring this case together, and I had to start pushing on it. I couldn't admit that I knew where the hiding place was, and Lisette wouldn't. One of us had to give.

  "I know. That has me worried, too." Lisette looked up, her voice perfectly controlled, perfectly casual, just the right touch of puzzled concern on her face. It was her eyes that gave her away. She wasn't looking at me. She was looking past me, keep­ing her point of vision diverted just a little bit, refusing to meet my gaze.

  I went on doggedly. "I was hoping we might find out some­thing from Claster, but if you pardon the expression, that's a dead end. What are we going to do now?"

  She looked back to her drawings. "I don't know. I guess we keep going west and hope we pick up on something."

  "Why west? Hell, girl, we could have already run past the place by half a thousand miles."

  "I don't think we have."

  "Why not?"

  "Because I just don't!"

  I let it lay. There was a brittle edge to Lisette's voice, and pushing her any further now would only trigger an explosion that we didn't need. She huddled into herself and flipped an­other page of the pad.

  "Could I have a look?" I asked.

  She looked up at me, really at me, this time. She gave me her first real Princess smile of the day for letting her off the hook. Relaxing a little, she passed the pad across the white­washed tabletop.

  "Why not?"

  I'd stolen my looks at her sketches before. It felt better en­tering her world with her permission. It was all there, our run down 66 caught in her bold, quirky artistic style. From the first sketch of the Dixie dining room to the last picture of Peerless here in Arizona, all the people, places, and things that we'd seen and that had marked us on our journey together.

  "Aw, Jesus! What's this?" I slammed the notebook shut.

  She laughed her first real Princess laugh of the day then, too. "What's the matter? Nude studies are a mainstay of classic art."

  "You did peek back there on the Canadian River."

  "Well, of course, silly. Didn't you?"

  "Never trust the female of the species. Why did you have to pick on me?"

  "Because you're beautiful," she replied matter-of-factly, cupping her chin in her palm.

  "Oh, jeez! I hope you don't go around saying that in pub­lic."

  She arched an eyebrow. "Don't worry; it's solely in the eye

  of the beholder."

  "Yeah, well, I think you need to take another look at me in a strong light." I pushed the sketch pad back across the table to her. "Barring that one exception, this is all really good stuff. You know what you're doing."

  For some reason, that phrase hurt. I saw the pain cross Li­sette's face, and she lost the lightness that she'd held for a moment. "No," she said, pushing the pad back to me. "I'm done with this now. You keep it. Please?"

  "If you want me to." I hesitated a second before picking up the sketchbook. "What's the matter, Princess? What's wrong?"

  "Nothing." She was looking past me again. "I guess I'm still a little tired is all. Could we stop early today?"

  "Sure. Wherever you'd like."

  "Needles," she replied, looking into nowhere. "I'd like to stop in Needles."

  Lisette was quieter than ever once we were back in the car. All that long day she'd been studying on something, thinking hard on some problem. But the thinking was over now. She'd come to some kind of a decision. Crawling over into the far corner of the seat like a wounded animal, she hugged a private misery to herself.

  As for me, I began to get that falling sensation again, like I'd had yesterday when we were doing that chickie run to the railroad crossing. That feeling that destiny was rearing back and getting ready to smash us in the face. The odometer kept ticking off the miles like the seconds on a bomb detonator.

  We passed through Kingman, Arizona, also passing on any lame jokes about any possible relationship between Lisette's last name and the town. West of Kingman, as we headed out across the frying pan flats to the border, the terrain gave up its last pretense of habitability.

  What little that grew bristled with spines and spikes to fa­natically defend its few precious drops of hoarded moisture. What crawled in the sand carried a horny armor and spat poi­son. What hunted out in the wastes never tasted water from birth to death but quenched its thirst solely on the salt blood of what it killed. Lifting above it all were the lava ranges, rust red, glassily jagged, and naked in the heat shimmer and glaring sun. Skeleton mountains tearing at the sky.

  The Mojave is many things: humbling in its immensity, amazing in its alien uniqueness, awe-inspiring in its stark beauty.

  But it is not nice.

  Even with a new water pump and a freshly flushed radiator I normally wouldn't have crossed this stretch during the day. However, it was getting on in September and we'd picked up some mare's tail overcast, so it was merely as hot as hell instead of totally impossible.

  Even so, it was a relief to come down into the little belt of green that flanked the Colorado, that muddy and stubborn little river that insists on churning its way through places where all other more sensible bodies of water have long since given up the ghost and evaporated.

  We crossed the steel arch bridge at Topock and were in California. There was the inspection station to clear of course, that snobbish little feature unique to the Golden Bear State. At one time, back in the bad old days of the depression, there might have been a cadre of LA Police officers on duty here. Their orders were to turn back anyone not bringing living money with them into the state. Now there were only a couple of casual questions about agricultural products and a wave on our way.

  Needles was just a couple of miles farther upriver. Every­body knows about Needles. Every newspaper in the country that lists the hottest place in the United States mentions the little community with ominous regularity. It's the first town you hit on Route 66 coming in across the Arizona line and the last before you start across the heart of the desert. It's the jump­ing off point, the place you're nervous about leaving and the place you're relieved to reach. It's the last spot where the water doesn't have to be shipped in by railroad tank car.

  Needles was also the last real town before we reached the site of Johnny 32's hidden horde.

  I drove a security circuit around the place, checking for po­tential trouble before we shut down.
There had been no sign of Spanno since our confrontation the day before. The black Chrysler seemed to have an eerie knack of being able to dis­appear and reappear at will, like the spook lights back in Oklahoma. It was out there, though, somewhere close by. It had to be. I could feel its presence.

  We checked in at the appropriately named Trail's End Tourist Court at the southern tip of town, a tight little cluster of old-fashioned clapboard cabins at the Y intersection where 66 fed into the town's two main avenues. That night, I used the honeymooning couple line for the first time and got their big unit, complete with desert coolers, a separate bedroom, and a kitchenette.

  Things were still quiet after we settled in. Lisette sat at the little kitchen table for a long time, her face buried in her crossed arms. Finally I cracked. "Okay," I said, dropping into the chair across from her. "Come on! Talk to me! What's going on here?"

  "I've been holding out on you, Kev," she replied in a sad little muffled whisper. "I think I do know where my father's money is. I figured it out days ago. It's only a couple of hours' drive west of here. We'll be there tomorrow morning."

  She straightened in her chair and met my eyes. "And then, tomorrow night, we'll be in Los Angeles and it will be over."

  "What do you mean 'over,' Princess?"

  "Just that. This trip, us, everything, it all ends tomorrow. Whether we find the money or not, I go on alone from there. You can't help me anymore."

  "Don't I have anything to say about that?"

  "No!" She shook her head emphatically, her glossy fall of hair swirling. "No, you don't!"

  "Why?" I slammed my palm down on the tabletop. "Dam­mit, after everything we've been through, do I at least get to ask why?"

  "Can't you see? If we find the money, then I have to go back to Chicago to set up the hit on Mace. If you come with me, you become an accessory to first-degree murder. I can't let that happen. And if the money isn't there, then I have to lead Mace away from you. If we stay together, sooner or later he'll get at you and kill you. I can't let that happen, either."