“Long story.”
“Seems to me, we got a while.”
No, I thought, we don’t. But what I said was, “You remember the bug back at the mortuary?” My Ms sounded like Bs. My Gs rattled like phlegm in the back of my throat.
“Yeah?”
“I just tangled with a few thousand of his friends.”
“Wait —you’re telling me bugs did this to you?”
“More like a bug monster, but yeah.”
“A bug monster? As in, a monster made of bugs?”
“Pretty much.”
“Shit.” He looked stricken, and cast a furtive glance from side to side. “This bug monster —you think it’s comin’ back?”
“If we don’t track down what Danny took, and soon, you can count on it.”
He swallowed hard, and did his best to put on a brave face. It wasn’t terribly convincing. “Guess it’s a good thing I patched you up then. You gotta be in tip-top shape so you can kick its insect ass the second time around.”
I laughed. It hurt.
“Listen,” he said, “speaking of patching you up, I got some good news and I got some bad news.”
“OK,” I said, wary. “What’s the bad news?” The way I was talking, it sounded more like Wazzabanooze?
“The bad news is the trip through the windshield broke your nose. I was hoping when you came to that you’d be able to muddle through as is, but to be honest, you don’t sound so good. Which means I’m gonna hafta straighten it —and that is gonna smart like hell.”
“Then what the hell’s the good news?”
“The good news is, you ain’t gonna be conscious long to feel it.”
Before I could reply, he grabbed my head in both hands, his thumbs on either side of my nose. Then he jerked them to one side. I heard a sickening crunch, and let out a wail. Then, for a while, I didn’t hear anything at all.
When I next came to, the sun was getting high overhead, and I was surprised to find myself peering through an unmarred windshield at a good acre of gleaming candy-apple red. A quick look around, and I realized I was sitting in the passenger seat of a classic Cadillac convertible —’58 or ’59, I think —complete with red leather interior, sparkly paint-job, and chromed-out tailfins. The ragtop was down, but the old girl wasn’t going anywhere; she was just sitting in what, apparently, was a mostly empty strip club parking lot. (Sorry, gentleman’s club, according to the awning over the front door —though if the airbrushed mural of a pair of legs extending outward on either side of the entryway was any indication, it didn’t look like the sort of place in which a gentleman had ever actually set foot.) Gio was trying his best to rectify that —he’d popped the steering column with the Fiesta’s tire iron, and was currently trying to strip a couple wires with his teeth. The mangled heap of the Fiesta sat beneath the strip club’s darkened neon sign a good twenty spots to my right. Every once and a while, Gio glanced over at it, as one might toward a jungle cat on the verge of pouncing.
“Gio,” I said, noting as I did that my voice had lost some of its thick, wet quality of earlier this morning, “you want to tell me what the hell you think you’re doing?”
“What’s it look like I’m doing? When you had your little tangle with the bug monster, the Fiesta took a fucking beating. Now, that don’t really bother me none, on account of she ain’t mine, and she was a piece of shit to begin with. But if I had to guess, I’d say our good pal Ethan’s probably reported her stolen by now, which means we gotta steer clear of any legal entanglements —and it seems to me a giant fucking hole in our windshield is the sort of thing the five-oh might notice. Bottom line is, you wanna make it to Las Cruces, you and me are gonna need another ride.”
“Yeah,” I said, eyeing the Caddy’s sparkle and shine and eye-catching lines, “it’d suck to attract any undue attention to ourselves.”
“Look, make your smart-ass jokes all you want. But it’s almost nine in the morning, and this place’s been closed for hours. Which means whoever owns this beauty was drunk enough he probably cabbed it home. I bet he spends half the day sleeping off his hangover. That gives us plenty of time to get the hell outta Dodge ’fore he wakes up. By the time he realizes this baby’s missing, we ain’t even gonna be in the same state. And you gotta admit, Sam —this Caddy is a work of art. We’d be nuts not to take it.”
“Gio, no. This car’s too damn pretty not to be missed, and too rare not to be noticed. Pick something else —like maybe that nice, nondescript Civic over there.”
“Hey, you got to pick the last one, remember? And if you got a thing for penny racers, that’s your deal. But I barely fit into that fucking thing, so there’s no way I’m gonna help you steal another one exactly like it —not when there’s a ride this cherry just sittin’ here waiting to be picked.”
“Seriously, Gio —stop this, now.”
But Gio didn’t listen. He just glanced over at the Fiesta yet again, and redoubled his efforts to get the Caddy running.
“Did you hear me? You are not to boost this car!”
“Damn it, Sam, I ain’t your fucking sidekick, OK? Truth is, you need me, and I say this Caddy is ours! The way I see it, any douchebag who’ll leave a ride this fine sitting in a strip club parking lot is askin’ to be taken down a peg. And it ain’t like it’s gonna kill you to loosen up and live a little —hell, you’re the one who told me I should enjoy what little time I had left. So if you want my help on this little revenge-trip of yours, you’re gonna hafta shut up a sec so I can concentrate!”
“I think you misunderstand the nature of our relationship,” I said, unintentionally echoing the creature’s words to me last night. I opened the Caddy’s massive door and stepped unsteadily out onto the blacktop of the parking lot. “You don’t get to call the shots. You want to go it alone, maybe steal yourself a shiny ride, hole up somewhere, and wait to see if hell forgets to hunt you down, that’s your business —and I promise you it won’t end well. But if you want to come with me and make the guy who killed you pay, you’ll do as I say and pick another fucking car.”
I leveled my gaze at Gio, trying to imbue it with as much bad-ass as I could muster. At the time, I was pretty pleased with the result, because he was staring back at me in wide-eyed terror. Of course, I didn’t realize it then, but that terror had nothing whatsoever to do with me.
“Look, Sam, I get what you’re saying —really, I do. But this really ain’t the time to discuss it. How ’bout you get in the car, and we can talk about it on the road?”
“Are you even listening to me? That’s the last place we’re going to talk about it! Get it through your fucking head —I am not leaving this parking lot until you pick another car!”
“You won’t be saying that in a minute,” he mumbled, more to himself than to me.
Something clicked with me then. His jangled nerves. His furtive glances. His sudden desire to leave. At first, I’d chalked it up to the rush of stealing such a cherry ride, but it was something more than that.
“Gio,” I said, “what’d you do?”
“Look, can we just go?”
“Not until you tell me what you did.”
“Well, I figured we can’t ditch the Fiesta without people taking notice —it’s all beat to hell and fulla blood. The cops are bound to think some serious shit went down, and we don’t need that kind of attention. So I handled it.”
“Handled it? Handled it how?”
But before Gio could answer, the morning calm was torn apart by an explosion that set the Fiesta soaring skyward, and threw me ass-over-teakettle into the waiting Cadillac. I wound up wedged headfirst into the passenger-side footwell, my torso pinned between the seat and dash. It was hell on my ribs, but at least it kept my face from scraping against the floor mat. I tried in vain to catch my breath, but the force of the blast had knocked the wind from my chest and left me gasping like a fish on a trawler’s deck. I must’ve been flopping like one too, as I struggled to right myself —but at that, at least, I had some success. After a
moment’s thrashing about, I wound up sitting sideways across the bench seat, one foot braced against Gio’s pudgy face, and my back against the passenger door. You’d think a shoe against your cheek is the kind of thing you might take notice of, but if Gio did, he didn’t show it. He was too busy staring at the pillar of thick black smoke that spiraled skyward from the twisted remains of Ethan’s Fiesta.
Charred bits of scrap and glass rained down upon us from above, but still, Gio just sat there, stunned. Through sheer force of will, I drew a breath —as hot and thick as tar —and barked a single, desperate syllable.
“GO!”
My voice sounded tinny and far away to my ears, which still rang from the crack of the blast, but that single syllable was enough to goad Gio into action. He sparked the ignition to life and threw the Caddy into gear. Then he laid on the gas and we squealed out of the parking lot, the scent of our tires against the blacktop lost in the charred stench of the twisted wreck we left behind.
15.
We were twenty minutes from Las Cruces when I realized we were not alone.
The strip club was a good half hour behind us, though between the heated bickering, the withering silences, and the bouts of justifiable paranoia that flared up with every speed trap that we’d passed, it felt like twice that long. It was a good thing Gio got the Caddy running when he did —a fire engine and a couple of squad cars went screaming past us in the oncoming lane before we’d gone four blocks from the strip club parking lot, and by the time we reached the highway, a column of smoke a mile high cleaved the morning sky and no doubt drew the attention of every law-enforcement type the city over.
I’ll admit, as near as I could tell from the passenger seat, the Cadillac handled like a dream, and as the sun crested overhead, sending the temperature into the seventies, cruising with the top down was a little slice of heaven. The stretch of highway leading upward from West Texas to Las Cruces runs alongside the Mesilla Valley —a fertile floodplain four miles wide, blanketed with lush green farmland and dotted here and there with fragrant pecan groves. It was a pleasant respite from the hostile no man’s land we’d been driving through, but I was so damn furious at Gio for the attention he’d drawn our way —and so damn worried about getting snagged by the cops before we managed to track down Varela’s soul —I couldn’t properly enjoy it. So instead, I sat there needling him, oblivious to the danger lurking a couple feet behind us.
“Seriously, Gio, what the hell were you thinking?”
Gio said nothing. He just grit his teeth and drove, his fingers white-knuckled on the wheel. I wasn’t surprised; I’d asked him that at least a dozen times in the past half hour.
“What, you’re not talking now? Come on, Smart Guy —I’d love for you to fill me in on your master plan.”
At that, he wheeled toward me, his eyes glinting with anger. “Fuck you, Sam. If it wasn’t for me, you’d be bleeding to death in the fucking desert right now. And has it even occurred to you that if you hadn’t decided to hold your impromptu little Q-andA back there instead of letting me do my thing, we’da been long gone by the time the Fiesta blew? So don’t go crapping on my plan —you’re the one who went and screwed it up.”
“You think the fact that we were there when it happened was the only flaw in your otherwise genius plan? You’re even dumber than I thought. Unless you somehow managed to vaporize the Fiesta, they’re going to eventually get the VIN off of it, which means they’ll be able to track it back to Ethan and to Illinois. Ethan’s no doubt smart enough to leave out the whole walking-dead angle, but you can be damn sure he’ll give them our descriptions, and once they know we crossed state lines, the Feds’ll get involved. Next thing you know, every cop from here to California’s got eyes out for us. And here we are, cruising around in a bright red stolen car the size of a fucking aircraft carrier. You know what? My bad. In retrospect, it was an awesome plan.”
Gio’s borrowed face went red with rage, and he lobbed back a profanity-laced retort, but I didn’t pay him any mind. I was preoccupied by the strangest sensation at the nape of my neck —a sudden niggling intuition that something was not quite right.
At first, I had trouble putting my finger on exactly what it was. Not a tingle, to be sure, and not a sudden chill. But as a Collector, I’ve learned to trust my instincts, and in that moment, my instincts were insisting we were not alone. And in retrospect, that insistence felt not unlike a cowboy boot to the back of the head.
When the kick connected, I pitched forward, and smacked my face into the dash. It hurt like hell, and my vision went spotty, but at least I remained conscious, and my nose stayed where Gio’d put it.
I saw a blur of snake skin out of the corner of my eye, this time heading in Gio’s direction. He yelped, and the Cadillac swerved left. Beside us, a car horn blared.
Gio tried to correct, and went too far. We barreled toward the barbed wire fence that separated the dirt shoulder from the green-tinged farmland beyond. Shit, I thought —two cars in one day? You’ve got to be kidding me.
But this time, it wasn’t meant to be. I heard a string of curses, delivered in a drawn-out Texan twang, and then an arm shot out from the back seat and grabbed the wheel, yanking it to the left. Our bumper missed the fence post by scant inches, and then Gio slammed the brakes, bringing the Caddy to a skidding halt on the shoulder.
“Jesus H. Christ, that was a close one! I mean, shit, I didn’t want that bitch to take ol’ Bertha here away from me, but that don’t mean I want to go and wreck her!”
I turned toward the source of the statement to find a paunchy, denim-clad sixty-something sprawled across the back seat and fanning himself with a sweat-stained Stetson. A thin cotton blanket that had until moments ago no doubt covered him sat discarded on the seat beside him. He had a shock of white hair atop his head, and a dusting of stubble to match. Gin blossoms colored his nose and cheeks, and his eyes were rimmed with red. As I watched, those eyes widened, and he suddenly twisted around, hanging his head over the side of the car and puking.
Normally, in my world, that’s a sure sign of possession, but if the smell coming off this dude was any indication, this time it was the result of way too much tequila. The odor of sick aside, I was relieved that the head-kicking portion of the program was apparently behind us. The shape our passenger was in, he didn’t pose much of an immediate threat, so while he was busy purging the contents of his stomach, I wheeled on Gio and tried my best to conjure death-rays with my eyes.
“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” I whispered. “You didn’t check to see if the car was empty before you boosted it?”
“How was I supposed to know he was sleeping it off in back? With that blanket on, he looked like a pile of junk.”
I touched my good hand to the back of my head. “That pile of junk almost took my fucking head off —and damn near got all three of us killed.”
“Yeah, but look on the bright side,” Gio said, smiling. “If he’s here, there ain’t nobody around gonna report this baby stolen.”
The bright side. Right.
This day kept getting better and better.
Eventually, our cowboy friend’s heaving ceased, and he flopped back onto the seat, wiping his mouth with his sleeve.
“Well, hell,” he said. “I guess you boys are going to have to take me back now, aintcha?”
“Come again?” I asked, flummoxed. I suppose the more well-behaved among you might not know this, but in my experience, carjackings don’t typically elicit such blasé responses.
The man saw my confusion and frowned. “Boy, I don’t want to tell you how to do your job, but ain’t you repo types just supposed to take the car? Jolene’s made it pretty clear she wants her half of what I got, but she sure don’t seem to want nothin’ to do with me.”
Gio opened his mouth to say something then, but I silenced him with a glance. Then I turned to our new friend and gave him my best not-a-car-thief smile. “Listen, Mr —I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”
“Of course, Mr McRae. Listen, Mr McRae, we’re sorry to have troubled you, but we were only doing our job. The agency led us to believe the car would be unattended.”
“You’re sorry to have troubled me.”
“Yes.”
“You were only after the car.”
“That’s right.”
“And you think taking the only thing that I got left in this world that brings me any joy wouldn’t have troubled me?”
“Sir,” said Gio, the word dropping unfamiliar from his lips, “if you don’t mind my asking, what the hell were you even doing back there?”
Roscoe looked at Gio like he was the kid in class you had to keep away from the paste. Then he shook his head and laughed. “You a car guy, son?”
“A little,” Gio admitted.
“Ain’t no little about it —either you is or you ain’t. Me, I been a gear-head since long before I could even reach the pedals, and I always told myself that when I made my fortune, I was gonna get myself a Cadillac —a real one, mind, not one of them silly SUVs all the NBA players cruise around in these days. Took me damn near forty years to manage it, too. So if you think I’d leave this beauty unattended in a strip club parking lot just ’cause I had a little too much to drink, you got another thing coming. Bertha here deserves better’n that —just like she deserves better’n getting auctioned off to the highest bidder so Jolene can buy herself another of them ugly stoles she never even wears. As if she ain’t got useless crap to spare now that she’s maxed out all my credit cards.”
Gio looked chastened. Me, I felt too shitty about the whole affair to bother gloating. I told you so is all well and good, but it wasn’t going to get us out of the predicament Gio’s dumb-ass call had put us in. “For what it’s worth,” I said to Roscoe, “I’m sorry.”
“Ah, hell, son, it ain’t your fault. You been nothin’ but nice to me since I woke up, and that’s even granting that I kicked you in the head. You’re so polite, it’s almost hard to believe someone went and beat the snot out of you.” Roscoe’s gaze slipped from my bruised and swollen face to the rocket-ship lines of his beloved Bertha, and his eyes shone wet with tears. “Almost.”
The Wrong Goodbye tc-2 Page 11