by Blake Crouch
Over the course of two thousand miles, it was bound to happen.
Tuesday morning, I’d passed the exits for Red Desert, Table Rock, Bitter Creek, and Point of Rocks, when thirty miles east of Rock Springs, I heard the whine of a siren — a Highway Patrol SUV crowded my bumper. With my Glock wedged into the pouch behind the passenger seat, I pulled over into the emergency lane, reassuring myself, Why would he want to search the car? Orson’s unconscious. I’ve got the proper license and registration. Ricki’s may not have even happened. I’m golden.
The officer tapped on my window. I lowered it.
"License and registration," he said in that austere, authoritative tone, and removing the papers from the glove compartment, I smiled and handed them through the window.
He walked bowlegged back to his hunter green Bronco and climbed inside.
The clock in the dashboard read 10:15, but it felt later. The prairie had turned arid. Across the northwestern horizon, a chain of tan hills rose out of the flatland. Gray clouds massed beyond.
I noticed the sweater and jeans I’d worn into Ricki’s lying on the floorboard on the passenger side. It happened. They were stained with Luther’s blood, and I regretted not having thrown them out last night at the gas station in Cheyenne. I started to scoop them up, but the gravelly crunch of the officer’s footsteps stopped me.
I righted myself and looked back through the open window into his face. The officer was my age. He reminded me of a lawman in a movie, though I couldn’t recall which one.
"Know why I stopped you, Mr. Parker?" he asked, handing back Orson’s license and registration. I placed them on the passenger seat.
"No sir, officer."
He removed his reflective sunglasses and stared down at me through hard, pale eyes.
"You were swerving all over the goddamn road."
"I was?"
"Are you drunk?" A gust of wind lifted his hat, which he caught and shelved under his arm. He had unruly blond hair, the variety that, if allowed to grow out, might bush into an Afro. The image of the officer with a blond Afro lightened my heart, and I chortled.
"What’s funny?"
"Nothing, sir. I’m not drunk. I’m tired. I’ve been driving for the past two days."
"From Vermont?"
"Yes, sir."
He glanced at the suitcases in the backseat. "Traveling alone?"
"Yes, sir."
"Which one of them suitcases is yours?"
How sly.
"Both of them."
He nodded. "And you only been on the road since Sunday?"
"Yes, sir."
"Must be in some kind of hurry."
"No, not really. I just wanted to see how fast I could cross the country."
I thought he might grin at my ambition, but he remained as stolid as ever.
"Where you headed?" he asked.
"California."
"Whereabouts in California?"
"L.A."
"Eighty don’t go to L.A. Eighty goes to San Francisco."
"I know, but I wanted to drive through Wyoming, seeing as how I’ve never seen this part of the country. It’s beautiful."
"It’s fuckin’ shitland." I gazed into the gold badge above his green breast pocket, filled with the presentiment that he was on the verge of ordering me out of the vehicle.
"Well, you ought to know that you’re heading into one hell of a storm," he said.
"Snowstorm?"
"Yep. Forecast says it’s supposed to get real bad."
"Thanks for the warning. I hadn’t heard."
"Might want to find a motel to hole up in. Maybe in Rock Springs, or Salt Lake, if you make it that far."
"I’ll consider that."
He looked askance at my face; he’d noticed my fading bruises. "Someone hit you?"
"Yes, sir."
"When did that happen?"
"At a bar this past weekend."
"Must’ve been one hell of a fight."
Everything was one hell of a something with this guy. I was definitely putting him in a book.
"Looks like you took a few knocks there," he said.
"Yeah, but you should see the other guy." That threadbare cliché got him. He cracked a smile and, looking off across the wasteland, reckoned that he’d better get going. Peering into the rearview mirror, I watched him saunter back to the Bronco.
Cool fucking cucumber. And I meant me.
Rock Springs was an ugly brown town, dedicated to the extraction of coal, oil, and a mineral called trona from deep beneath the surrounding hills. It was larger and more industrial than I’d anticipated, and I wondered what twenty thousand people did for fun in this northeast boundary of the Great Basin Desert.
I pulled into the congested parking lot of a supermarket. It had been raining and snowing for the last half hour, the flakes sticking to the desert but melting on the sun-warmed pavement. Jogging through the windblown snow toward the entrance, I feared that at any moment the roads would accept the ice, and then we’d never reach the cabin.
The supermarket was an entropic battlefield — frenzied shoppers compulsively stripping the shelves of bread, milk, and eggs. Because I didn’t know what Orson had stocked at the cabin, I grabbed a bit of everything — canned food, fruit, cereal, loaves of white bread, even several bottles of the best wines they had (though they were quite unexceptional). The checkout lines stretched halfway down the aisles, and I’d started to roll my shopping cart to the back of one, when I realized I’d have to wait for an hour just to pay. Fuck this. You’ve done a hell of a lot worse than steal.
So I pushed the cart right on through the automatic doors, back out into the storm. The parking lot was frosted now, blanching as the snow swept down in torrents. Behind the strip mall, red cliffs stood out sharply against the white, and it occurred to me that I’d never seen a desert snowfall.
Upon reaching the Lexus, I opened the back door and began shoveling groceries on top of my suitcase and Walter’s. Orson was making a racket. I told him to shut up, said we were almost home. The parking space beside mine was empty, so I left the cart there and opened the driver’s door.
"Excuse me, sir?" An obese woman bundled up in a puffy pink parka, which did not flatter her proportions, stared at me quizzically from the trunk of the Lexus.
"What?"
"What’s that sound?" She tapped on the trunk.
"I don’t know what you’re talking about."
"I think there’s someone in your trunk."
I heard it, too, Orson shouting again, his voice muffled but audible. He was saying something about killing me if I didn’t give him a drink of water.
"There’s nothing in there," I said. "Excuse me."
"Is it a dog?"
I sighed. "No. Actually, I’m a hit man. There’s someone in my trunk, and I’m taking them out into the desert to shoot them in the head and bury them. Wanna come along?"
She laughed, her face rumpling. "Oh my, that’s rich! Very rich!" she said, chuckling maniacally.
She walked away, and I climbed into the Lexus and backed out of the parking space. The pavement was becoming icy, so I drove tentatively out of the parking lot and back onto Highway 191, as nervous as a southerner on wheels in a snowstorm.
31
WIND blasted the car. The road had disappeared.
I’d been following a single set of tire tracks for the last forty miles. Leaving Rock Springs, almost four hours ago, they’d cut down to the pavement. But as I plowed north up the mind-numbingly straight trajectory of Highway 191, the contrast between the blacktop and the snow had dissipated. Now, looking through the furious windshield wipers, I strained to see the faintest indentation in the snow. It would soon be too deep to negotiate. Even now, I felt the tires slide at the slightest pressure on the accelerator or the brake. Aside from a hurricane that came inland into the Piedmont of North Carolina seven years ago, this was the worst weather I’d ever seen.
Precisely seventy miles north of Rock Springs
, I stopped the car in the middle of the abandoned highway. Sitting for a moment in the warm leather seat, I stared through the glass at snow that fell as hard and fast as rain. Beyond one hundred feet, the white was inscrutable, and still the visibility continued to diminish. A violent downdraft joggled the car and whisked the fallen snow off the road. With the pavement revealed, I saw that the tires straddled the dotted line.
I turned off the engine and, grasping the keys, opened the door and stepped into the storm. Driving snow filled my eyes, and, shielding my face against the side of my arm, I struggled toward the trunk. Three inches had already accumulated on the road, more upon the desert. Once the snow depth exceeded all shrubbery except the tallest sagebrush and greasewood, we would have no point of reference by which to follow the road. But we have time, I thought, unlocking the trunk and bracing against another icy gust. This storm is just beginning.
Orson was conscious, and his dark, swollen eyes widened when he saw the snow. It collected in his hair. There were red lines across his face from hours of sleeping on the carpet, and his lips were parched and split.
"We might be in trouble," I said. "I want you to put your hands behind your back, ’cause I’m gonna undo your feet. Put ’em up here." He hung his legs out of the trunk, and I removed the bicycle lock from his ankles. Tossing it back into a corner of the trunk, I helped my brother climb out and told him to go around to the passenger door. By the time I’d returned to my seat and adjusted the vents to their maximum output, my clothes were soaked from the snow. I opened the passenger door and Orson got in. Leaving his hands cuffed behind his back, I reached across his lap and shut the door.
We sat there for a moment without speaking. I turned off the windshield wipers. The snow fell and melted on the heated glass. The grayness darkened.
"We’re exactly seventy miles north of Rock Springs," I said. Orson stared out the windshield. "We near the dirt road?"
"Probably within a half mile. But when it’s like this, it might as well be a hundred."
"The cabin’s on that side, right?" I pointed out my window.
"Yeah. Somewhere out there."
"What do you mean? You can’t find it?"
"Not in this." Concern had tensed his jaw and reduced the gleam in his blue eyes.
"Let’s try," I said. "It’s better than —"
"Look. About five miles that way into the desert" — he nodded at the swirling grayness out my window — "there’s a ridge. You probably remember it."
"Yeah. So?"
"If I can’t see that ridge, I have no way of knowing where we are in relation to the cabin. Hell, we could drive that way, but it’d be a shot in the dark, and we’d probably get stuck."
"Shit." I turned off the engine. "I should’ve stopped in Rock Springs for the night."
"Probably so. But you didn’t know it’d be like this."
"No, I didn’t." I wiped the snowmelt from my sleek bald head.
"You look like me," Orson said. "What’s that about?"
"You thirsty?"
"Yeah."
I fed him a full bottle of tepid water.
"Orson," I said. "You try anything. One thing. I’ll kill you."
"I believe it."
The dashboard clock read 4:07. I watched it turn to 4:08, then 4:09.
"It’ll be dark out there soon," I said. Sweat trilled down my chest and my legs. Orson leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes. He smelled of urine. His robe was soiled, and I felt ashamed I hadn’t let him use the bathroom properly since Vermont.
The seconds ticked on: 4:10. 4:11. 4:12.
"I can’t stand this," I said, and I started the car.
"What are you doing?"
"I’m gonna find that dirt road."
"Andy. Andy!" I’d shifted the car into drive, and with my foot on the accelerator, I looked over at Orson. "Quit being stupid," he said calmly. "You aren’t gonna find the road. You aren’t gonna find the cabin. This is a full-fledged blizzard, and if you get us stuck off this highway, we are fucked. Now, we aren’t leaving this car anytime soon. That’s a given. So let’s wait it out here, in the middle of a highway, where we at least know where we are. If you try to find that dirt road, you’re gonna put us in the middle of a desert in a whiteout."
"All we have to do is go straight. The cabin’s that way. We’ll go straight for —"
"Which way’s straight? That way? That way? That way? It all looks straight to me!"
I punched the gas, and the tail end of the Lexus fishtailed. Letting off, I pressed more gently, and the tires found the pavement and gave us solid forward momentum. At forty miles an hour, I turned into the desert. The tires sank into the powder, and our speed slowed to thirty. The snow was twice as deep as on the road, and though I felt we might lose traction at any second, I maintained control. Steering between sagebrush, I squinted through the windshield, looking for that long, straight swath of white that would be unmarred by vegetation. It would extend westward, a thin white ribbon in the snow, and we’d follow it and find the cabin.
Orson gaped at me.
"You see anything?" I asked. "You looking?" The engine labored to keep the wheels turning, and the speedometer needle jigged between twenty and twenty-five. I watched it uneasily.
"Circle back," he said. "Do it now and we might reach the highway. But if you let this car stop out here, we don’t have a prayer."
"Look for the dirt road," I said.
"Andy —"
"Look for the fucking road!"
Four minutes passed before I realized he was right. I couldn’t see farther than fifty feet beyond the hood of the car, and with the needle hovering at ten, I doubted if we had had the velocity to return to the highway.
"We’ll go back," I said, easing the steering wheel to the right.
The back end jinked left and the tires instantly lost traction. Panicking, I stomped the gas, and the car spun 360 degrees. By the time I’d backed off the accelerator, our speed had dropped under five miles an hour, and there was nothing I could do to regain it. The Lexus came to rest against a shrub of sagebrush.
"It’s fine," I said. "Don’t say anything."
Touching the gas gingerly, the tires spun, but they didn’t achieve traction. I clenched the steering wheel and pushed the pedal into the floor. The engine roared and the tires spewed up a load of snow, and, for a second, dirt. The Lexus surged forward into fresh snow, and I shoved my foot harder into the pedal until the rpm indicator red-lined, and I could smell the engine cooking. But the tires never met the ground again, and after I’d overheated the engine, I turned off the car and jerked the keys from the ignition.
I opened my door and ran out into the storm. At fifty miles an hour, snowflakes become cold needles, and they relentlessly pricked my face. I bent down and scraped through six inches of powder, thinking, Maybe I’m standing on the dirt road. My hands ached as I clawed through the snow, and I reached the dirt finally, but it was too loose to be a road.
Staring up into the raging white fog, I screamed until my throat burned. My face stung from the cold, and the snow seeped through my sneakers. This isn’t happening, I thought, the dread of being stranded out here with him beginning to suffocate me. This cannot be real.
32
I climbed back into the Lexus and shed my wet clothes. Throwing them onto the floorboard of the backseat, I opened my suitcase and put on a clean pair of underwear, a sweatsuit I’d packed to sleep in, and two pairs of socks.
"Should I turn the car on?" I asked. "Will that run down the battery?"
"It shouldn’t. But leave it off for now, at least till it’s pitch-black out there. We’ll need it to run all night for the heat." He leaned against the window, still haggard and sluggish from the drug. "How are we on gas?"
"Half a tank."
Orson brought his legs up into the seat and turned over on his side, his back to me.
"You cold?" I asked.
"A little."
From Walter’s suitcase, I grabbed
a pair of sweatpants, wool socks, and a gray sweatshirt featuring the UNC insignia in Carolina blue. Placing them across Orson’s lap, I picked up the Glock, which had been at my feet, and took the handcuff key from my pocket.
"I’m gonna uncuff you so you can get out of that nasty robe," I said. "Then they’re going right back on." I unlocked the handcuffs and removed them from his wrists. Disrobing, he dropped the bathrobe at his feet and bundled up in Walter’s clothes. I moved to put the cuffs back on him, but he said, "Hold on a second," and lowered his sweatpants so he could inspect the burn on his inner thigh. "It itches," he said, and after he’d scratched around the perimeter of the peppermint patty–size blister, he pulled his sweatpants back up, placed his hands behind his back, and allowed me to cuff him.