“Why me?” Charley asked. “I’m not in very good shape, little brother, as you can see.”
“It’ll take two people,” Brian said. “And Eve won’t let me go. The thing with Kim Sanders—you know. The cops would blame me for this too, and the fucking media would crucify me.”
“What the devil happened? What’d you do to her?”
“Nothing, man! What do you think? We had sex and I went to sleep. Maybe she thought she was taking downers. I don’t know.”
“Where is she?”
“In a room I rented downstairs.”
“How’d you get in here?”
Brian looked disgusted. “Who the hell cares? I got a key at the desk, okay?”
“Whatever.”
Charley stood shaking and groaning as Brian helped him put on a sweater, jeans, loafers. Then Brian led him out onto the walkway and downstairs, to a room at the far end. Inside, Charley peered through the open bathroom door at Eve in jeans and a pullover, trying to work with Belinda, who was sitting naked on the toilet seat. Her forehead was bleeding and there were fresh red scratches on her face and breasts and thighs. Even now, though Eve was holding her by the wrists, the girl’s long-nailed fingers still raked at her body. And the words tumbled out of her, shrill and meaningless.
“Oh no, don’t sleep … Oh, please, no, don’t ever … No, no, I can’t, I really can’t…”
Her body quivered with tension, a condition that perversely—for Charley anyway—made her look even sexier, hard and lean instead of soft and cuddly. But it was a feeling that quickly died as his gorge rose again, this time irresistibly. Making a dive for the bathtub, he retched into it repeatedly, managing finally to bring up only a skein of vile-tasting mucus. He turned on the cold water tap and washed it down, then thrust his head into the stream long enough to feel as if he too were going down the drain. Shuddering and gasping, he got back on his feet and toweled off while Eve and Brian helped Belinda out of the bathroom and into a robe of Eve’s. All the while the girl kept jabbering and jerking, as if an electric current were being fed into her body.
As Charley followed them out of the bathroom, Brian gave him a worried look. “Feel any better?” he asked. “Can you do it?”
For the first time, Charley noticed how ragged and scared Eve looked. “I’ll be okay,” he said, wondering just how he was going to manage it.
Eve looked at him. “Let’s go then. Help me with her.”
As they were leaving, Brian kept giving them instructions: that Eve should drive and Charley should hold the girl between them; that they should take the freeway south, because there was a hospital a few miles in that direction; and that Eve should do all the talking, should give the hospital a phony name and address.
“Above all, get out as fast as you can. You don’t want any reporters getting to you.”
Nodding impatiently, Eve hurried the girl out onto the walkway, with Charley holding on more than anything else. In the parking lot, they helped her into Brian’s pickup and then got in themselves, on each side of her. As they headed for the freeway, Charley asked how the girl had hurt her forehead.
“Who knows? Ask Brian,” Eve said.
“You blame him for this?”
She laughed coldly. “Who else? We weren’t the ones with her. We didn’t fuck her, did we?”
“No, I think I’d remember that.”
Eve gave him a withering look. In between them, Belinda began to squirm and whimper. And when her hands went for her face again, Charley pulled her onto his lap and held her there, pinning her arms. At the same time a new wave of nausea hit him and he broke into a heavy sweat. He leaned his head against her shoulder and choked down the bile rising in his throat.
As they sped onto the freeway he looked out at the headlights of the oncoming cars and found them skittering sideways, multiplying. He closed his eyes and tightened his grip on the girl, grateful that he had something solid to hold onto. But she began to cry and buck against him, and suddenly she lunged toward the side and accidentally hit the passenger door handle, causing the door to pop open. Struggling to keep her from falling out, Charley shouted for Eve to pull over and stop. But Belinda went on lunging and squirming, and within a few seconds all he had a grip on was her robe, Eve’s green velour, slick as grease in his sweating hands. He held on with all his strength and finally they were on the grassy shoulder of the road, bouncing along, slowing, the girl drooping further into the open doorway, like a huge green sack.
Then, just as they were pulling to a stop, she for some reason twisted in the opposite direction and unraveled herself from the robe, not unlike Cleopatra coming out of her rug, and for a moment Charley sat there with the empty, useless garment, looking down and back at the girl tumbling naked through the grass. He caught himself then and jumped out too, tripping and almost falling, not wanting to believe his eyes as he saw her dart around the back of the truck and head out across the freeway, right into the path of blazing headlights. There was a howl of car horns and skidding tires, and Charley gripped the edge of the truck bed, trying not to fall, staring past the hurtling traffic at the flash of her white legs against the darkness of the median strip. And still she ran, only now straight into the path of the cars coming from the opposite direction, these too already braking and fish-tailing, adding to the terrible din.
But this time there another sound too, that of breaking glass, metal, and flesh as the lead car skidded directly into Belinda and her body did a grotesque cartwheel across the hood of the vehicle before dropping out of sight into the high grass beyond. And still more cars kept coming, horns and tires screaming as they slammed into the vehicles that were already stopped. Then Charley realized that Eve was screaming too, at him.
“Get back in! Charley! Come on!”
Sick and dazed, he did as he was told, thinking that she planned to drive across the median strip and pull up in front of the accident site, so they could more easily get the girl back into the truck and continue on to the hospital. But Eve merely swung out in front of the slowing traffic and gunned the engine, heading south, away from the accident.
“What the hell you doing?” he cried. “We’ve got to help her!”
Eve did not look at him. “We will. This exit ahead, I’ll cross over and come back.”
“It’ll take too long! Come on, turn back!”
But she had already swerved onto the exit ramp, and now they roared up it at a good fifty miles an hour. At the top, she turned left and took the bridge back over the freeway. Looking down at the accident scene, Charley could feel his heart walloping his chest.
“Jesus, did you see her!” he got out. “She ran right in front of the cars! They couldn’t stop!”
“Fucking idiot!” Eve said. “We were only trying to help her.”
They had come to the traffic light on the other side of the freeway, but instead of getting into the turn lane, so they could enter the freeway’s northbound lanes, Eve accelerated past the intersection. For a few moments, Charley did not understand what was happening, then he took hold of the steering wheel and reached over with his left foot and pushed hard on the brake pedal. Eve struggled against him for a few seconds, then gave in and pulled over to the side of the street, which was lined with gas stations and car washes and fast-food stores, a few of which were still open at this late, predawn hour. Charley roughly took her by the arm and pulled her across his body so he could slide in behind the wheel. After he had U-turned and was heading back toward the freeway, she began to cry, softly, shaking her head.
“I want to help her too, Charley,” she got out. “I really do. But it’s too late. Can’t you see that?”
“We’ve got to go back.”
“And do what? Make sure we incriminate Brian? Make sure he never gets out of prison?”
“Eve, we can’t just leave her there, for Christ’s sake.”
“Leave her? Charley, there are dozens of cars there already! And probably the police by now too! You want to explain i
t all to them? You want to take a breathalyzer test?”
And indeed, as he approached the entrance ramp, he could see the red-and-blue flashing lights of a police car already on the scene, apparently having driven in from the north and crossed over the median. So he drove on past the ramp and stopped the pickup on the bridge, where they could see more clearly in both directions. To the south, weaving through the stopped traffic, was the red flasher of an ambulance. Back at the accident site, a policeman on foot was directing traffic with a lighted baton, trying to keep a single line of cars moving past.
“Have you seen enough?” Eve asked. “Do we go on back to the motel, or does your sense of duty require that we go down there and ruin our lives?”
Charley put the truck in gear and started on over the freeway again, thinking that they would have to find another way back to the motel now.
“Yes, I’ve seen enough,” he said. “And I’ve heard enough too.”
Chapter Four
Eve waited only long enough for Charley to close the door behind them before she told Brian about the accident, her voice breaking. At first, Brian looked as if he didn’t believe her. He just stood there staring at her and then he looked over at Charley, apparently hoping for some sort of disclaimer: a wink, a smile, anything that might give the lie to what he’d just heard. But all Charley could do was shake his head and force out a few words of his own, no less terrible than Eve’s.
“It’s true, Brian. The girl popped the door open, and all I had a grip on was this goddamn thing.” Still carrying the robe at that point, he tossed it onto one of the beds. “She slipped out of it somehow and took off running across the freeway. A north-bound car hit her.”
“Oh Jesus, no.” Brian turned visibly pale. “No, this is too much.”
Charley agreed. “It sure as hell is.”
“Well, how is she?” Brian asked. “Did you check on her?”
Charley looked over at Eve, who had dropped into a wingback chair across the room, in front of the drapes. Since it had been her decision, he decided to let her explain it.
“It happened just this side of Fillmore. So I took the exit there and crossed back over the freeway, to get on the northbound lanes, where she’d been hit. But there was too much traffic. By the time we reached the other side, the police were already on the scene—you know how they patrol the freeway. So we came on home.”
“So you came on home.” Brian sagged onto the edge of the nearest bed.
“She could be dead, for all we know,” Charley said. “And no ID, a Jane Doe.”
Eve’s eyes had filled. “Oh, they’ll find out soon enough, won’t they? I mean, who she is.”
“You bet they will.” Charley went between the beds and picked up the phone, a move that galvanized his brother.
Lunging across the bed, Brian depressed the cradle switch before Charley could punch in the number. “Not just yet, okay?” he said, taking the phone away, placing it back on the cradle.
Charley felt confusion more than anger. “Well, we’ve got to call the police, Brian,” he said. “We can’t just leave it this way.”
Getting up, Brian put his hand on Charley’s shoulder and gently guided him out from between the beds, away from the phone, “Just a little while, okay, man?” he said. “Before we call, we’ve got to think this thing through.”
Charley looked at him in disbelief. “Think what through? I told you she didn’t have any ID. The police have to know who she is. Her brother has to be told what happened.”
“I know that. All I’m asking for is a little time.”
“It’s all going to come out in the end anyway. So why wait?”
Brian looked as if he were teetering between rage and tears. “Why? You want to know why, Charley? Because I didn’t give the goddamn girl so much as an aspirin, that’s why. Yet I’ll be the one they blame, you know that, don’t you? I’m the one who’ll have to take the fall for it. The fucking media will see to that. This is just too neat to pass up. They’ll say it’s just like with Kim Sanders—that I gave Belinda her drugs the same as Kim. And when I’m tried for the bulldozing, I won’t have a leg to stand on. I’ll already be Doctor Death or something like that. Something real cute like that.”
Charley sat back on one of the beds, his head in his hands. He was feeling so exhausted, so hungover still, that he could barely think, let alone speak. But he knew he couldn’t just leave things the way they were. “You’re forgetting, Brian—Eve and I were driving the girl. We left the scene of an accident, and that’s a felony. The longer we wait, the harder it will go for us.”
“No way,” Brian said. “As far as I’m concerned, you and Eve are totally out of the picture. All you were trying to do was help me, and I won’t let you suffer because of that. So it was only me and Belinda in the pickup, not you two. I promise—you’re both out of it.”
Charley was not convinced. “Well, you might promise, but reality has a way of muscling in. People on the freeway must have seen us. At the very least, they saw two people—two heads, anyway—when we drove off and left her.”
Brian gave a bleak laugh. “A naked Belinda is running across the freeway, and you think anyone was looking at the pickup?”
Charley felt as if he were in the last mile of a marathon. The task of arguing with his brother was one hill too many. Yet he kept going. “All right, let’s say no one saw us and we’re in the clear. Still, what the hell can you do now, Brian? You can’t change what happened. People saw you with Belinda at the bar. Rick Whatshisname came right to the table. And then there’s Chester. Little Chester knows you were with her. And if she survives …”
“She’ll be lucky if she remembers her name, after that kind of trauma. As for Chester, he’s the one I want to talk with now. I know guys like him. I’ve worked with them. Just give me a couple hours, Charley. Please.”
“What will you say to him?”
“Just leave that to me. All you have to know is that you and Eve are out of it. I promise, man. I’m the one who got you into this mess, so let me be the one to get you out. Okay? Just a couple of hours, Charley. That’s all I ask. You lie down and sleep, okay? You look like shit.”
“No kidding.” Looking over at Eve, Charley shrugged in defeat and exhaustion, as if they were a couple of grownups trying to deal with an impossible child. Wearily he turned back to his brother. “Okay, you’ve got two hours. Then I call the police.”
“Fair enough,” Brian said. “Now let’s get you to your room.”
Charley waved him off. “I’m not dead yet. I may look it, but I’m not quite there yet.”
An hour later Eve was feeling too exhausted to speak. She was sitting on a couch in the waiting area at one end of a long hospital corridor. Midway there was a nurses’ station and beyond that, the Intensive Care Unit, to which a doctor had just escorted Chester Einhorn, hoping the little man could identify the brutally injured, comatose young woman brought in around three that morning. Near Eve, Brian stood at a tall window looking out as dawn gathered in the east, pearl gray above the hard-scrabble plain. Incredibly, he looked relaxed and thoughtful, as if he had just enjoyed a long night of restful sleep.
Back at the motel, after Charley had dragged himself off to his room, Brian had gone straight for the local phone directory. First, he called Penrose Hospital to see if they had taken in “the girl hit on the freeway.”
After a momentary pause, he asked if she was alive. Then he began to shake his head. “No, I don’t know her,” he said, quickly hanging up.
Then, after looking up another number, he phoned and asked if Chester Einhorn was staying there.
“Yes, I know what time it is,” he said. “But this is an emergency. Please put me through.”
Covering the speaker, he turned to Eve. “Motel Six. Real folksy people.”
When Chester came on, Brian told him that he had just received a call from a man who wouldn’t give his name. “He said that the girl I was with at the Purple Sage has been in s
ome kind of accident and is at Penrose Hospital now.” He paused a few seconds, listening, then went on. “No, I have no idea. We separated after you left. Some guy came by and invited us to a party. She wanted to go, and I didn’t. She left with them, and that’s the last I saw of her.” Again he broke off, then finished. “Yeah, Penrose Hospital—you know where it is? Good. We’ll meet you there.”
After he had hung up, Eve said almost nothing. She was so taken aback, so appalled at her lover’s brass-balled stupidity, that there was not much to say except the obvious. “And when the girl pulls through and tells what really happened, what then? What do you say? ‘Oh, I was just kidding.’”
He had not bothered to answer. On the way to the hospital, though, he apparently had found her silence troubling.
“Just don’t worry about this,” he’d told her. “I know what I’m doing. But the less you know about it, the better off you’ll be.”
“Well, that sure gives a girl confidence,” she’d said. “Nothing to worry about there.”
“Just stuff that, okay?” he’d snapped. “I don’t need that kind of shit right now.”
“Whatever you say.”
Now, down the long corridor, Eve saw Chester and the doctor come out of the ICU. The doctor stopped at the nurses’ station, but little Chester kept coming, walking as if it were a new experience for him, his arms held out from his sides slightly, his cowboy hat somehow not even swinging in his hand. As far away as he was, he still looked so relentlessly self-conscious that Eve looked away, figuring that would put him more at ease.
“Here he comes,” she said.
“Yeah, I see.” Brian walked across the waiting area, toward the little cowboy, who was shaking his head in sorrow and anger.
“It’s her, all right,” he said. “It’s Belinda. And she shore is banged up. Got a fractured skull and broke legs and broke hip and internal stuff too. But the doc says she’s real strong and her coma—how’d he put it?—he says it’s a shallow one, like maybe it won’t last long.”
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