No Man's Land

by G. M. Ford

  “We’ve got state and locals in a seven-state area on the lookout for a nineteen seventy-nine Ford pickup truck with a Caveman cab-over-camper. Oregon plate number AET874. We believe the vehicle was stolen from the service yard of Desert Distributing, down the street here in Pauling, Arizona. The yard security man was reported missing by his wife. The truck is missing from the yard. Luminal shows traces of blood on the guard shack floor.”

  Rosen began to rifle through the morass of paperwork spread about the table. “Where’ve I heard that before? Desert Distributing.” He dropped one pile and picked up another. “Here,” he said.

  “The cons let six locals and their delivery trucks go unharmed.”

  He began to read. “Mesa Laundry and Uniforms, United Grocers, Arizona Linen Supply.” He tapped the page with his fingernail. “Desert Distributing.”

  The room was silent. “Gotta be how they rode out,” Rosen declared. “Find that truck. Comb every inch of it.”

  The state cop was already halfway to the door when Rosen’s voice brought him to a halt. “Inside and out,” Rosen added.

  “Check inside those damn tankers.”

  Brownsuit got to his feet and straightened his jacket. “The press?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” Rosen said. “Investigation in progress. Pursuing a number of leads. Nationwide manhunt. That’s it.”

  27

  Corso held his breath and inched his head around. He’d always been a guy who looked the other way when the doctor gave him a shot, so he sure as hell didn’t want to catch the glint of the blade as it started toward its journey for his heart. As a guy who didn’t figure to die in bed, he’d often imagined his final moment. The second in which he knew it had gone to shit and the jig was all the way up. Penetration seemed to be the constant motif, be it a bullet plunging its way to his heart or an ice pick through the eye; the imagined final nanosecond of his consciousness always began with the tearing of his flesh and always ended with a sudden shudder and a final fade to black.

  Black as the hand on his shoulder. Seemed like everybody in this town had a pinky ring. Corso moved his eyes up the arm until he was looking into as hostile a pair of brown orbs as he had ever seen. “You been bothering Mrs. Gravley?” the voice asked.

  “What?”

  “You been bothering Mrs. Gravley?”

  The hand on his shoulder turned Corso to the left. That’s when he saw her. The old woman. The one who’d been sitting at the slot machine. Still holding a blue Maxwell House coffee can G.M. Ford half-full of quarters. “That’s him,” she said, pointing at Corso.

  “Guy was all over me like a cheap suit.”

  “I stumbled,” Corso said. “I fell into her.”

  “He groped me,” the old woman said. “Grabbed my knockers.”

  “I fell into her. That was it.”

  When the death grip on his shoulder eased. Corso stepped out from under the hand. The guy wore a greasy red sport coat with a badge attached to the front pocket. Casino security. He brought his face close to Corso’s and sniffed a couple of times, then leaned away. “I’ll take it from here Mrs. Gravley,” he said. “You go on back to your machine. I’ll come round and check on you later.”

  “Somebody probably got my machine by now.”

  “They’s lots of machines, Mrs. Gravley.”

  He listened patiently as she launched into a tirade about how the machine was just about to pay off. How she was going to have to start all over again on some accursed new machine, which would surely suck her dry.

  They stood amid the clang and clamor of the casino and watched her waddle away.

  “Used to be a showgirl in one of the big casinos. Years ago. Way back when,” the guard said. “These days she gets a little bit too much caffeine and all of a sudden every man who passes by is trying to get into her pants.” He shook his big head in amusement. “Probably was a time when it was true.”

  “Time flies,” Corso said.

  “Ain’t it the truth,” the guy said with a chuckle.

  “I was hoping maybe you could do me a favor.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Call the FBI.”

  Gone were the shoulder-length brown hair, the Fu Manchu mustache and the perpetual Harley-Davidson scowl. Kehoe now stood clean-shaven in front of the beauty shop mirror, using the palm of his hand to test the collection of short black spikes rising from the top of his head. “Cut yourself on this shit,” he offered with a grin.

  “You’re a new man,” Driver said. “Even your own mother wouldn’t recognize you.”

  “She’d kick my ass she saw me like this.”

  The beautician slid out from behind the counter and handed Kehoe his change and an electric blue jar of hair gel. “You look great, honey. Gals gonna be all over you like ugly on an ape.”

  Driver was unable to satisfy himself as to the specifics of the beautician’s gender. A creature with outsized breasts and a five o’clock shadow was heretofore beyond his experience and was causing him a great deal of confusion. Although he had never considered the matter prior to that afternoon, he had come to realize that gender was one of the first things with which his nervous system came to grips when confronted by an unknown fellow creature and that an inability to classify a fellow Homo sapiens according to gender seriously unhinged his basic manner of dealing with people, leaving him addled and unable to proceed.

  Driver’s head was shaved bald and polished to a shine. A week’s worth of scruffy beard was trimmed to look intentional. The effect was dramatic. Like Kehoe, he bore scant resemblance to the photo on TV.

  “Where you boys headed?” she/he wanted to know.

  “Around,” Driver said. “Gonna bring it all around.”

  She/he gave her gum a quick crack. “Well drop me a line when you get there.” The idea set her/him off laughing. She/he bent at the waist and cackled. “. . . Lemme know when you get there,”

  she/he howled.

  Kehoe’s hand was on the way to his pocket when Driver took him by the arm and started him toward the door.

  “Thanks for everything,” Driver said over his shoulder as they slipped out the door.

  “That motherfucker a boy or a girl?” Kehoe asked, jerking his arm free of Driver’s grasp.

  “What’s it matter?” Driver asked.

  “I don’t kill women,” Kehoe said.

  Driver laughed. “Nice to meet a man with standards.”

  “Gotta draw the line somewhere.”

  Driver stifled a strong desire to laugh. “Has it ever occurred to you that murder may not be an acceptable problem-solving technique?”

  “It’s always worked for me, man.”

  Driver kept moving toward the car; Kehoe reluctantly followed along. A fierce desert sun had taken over the sky, painting the winter air with a faint coat of warmth and scattering the clouds like frightened sheep.

  Driver popped the locks and they both got in. Kehoe belted himself into the passenger seat, threw one last scowl at the House of Hair and looked over at Driver.

  “Where in hell are we headed anyway?” he demanded. Before Driver could respond, he went on. “And don’t be givin’ me any more of that circle shit neither. I’m talkin’ about a direction or a place or somethin’ real like that.”

  Driver started the silent engine and dropped the car into drive.

  “North.”

  “What for?”

  Driver wheeled the car out into traffic. “I gotta see my mother one last time.”

  “And she’s like where?”

  “North.”

  Kehoe nodded his understanding to discretion. “She write you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Cause they gonna sit on anybody you been in touch with.”

  “I know.”

  “They’re probably there already.”

  Driver managed the thinnest of smiles. “Not a chance.”

  Kehoe studied him. “You sure . . . ain’t you?”

  “Yeah,” he sai
d. “I’m sure.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Probably best I keep that to myself.”

  “Probably is.”

  “What about you?”

  Kehoe thought it over. “We get that far, I’m thinking about trying to get my ass into Canada.”

  “Why’s that?”

  Kehoe’s laugh was short and brittle. “ ’Cause they’re for sure gonna find some way to burn us for those guards, Captainman. They’ll make it a federal rap or something. They’ll make shit up if they gotta. They gonna want to off our asses for good.”

  “And Canada won’t send you back unless the feds agree not to give you the death penalty.”

  “That’s it, baby.”

  Driver began to sing in a rich baritone. “North to Alaska. Go north, the rush is on . . .”

  28

  “We through?” Corso asked.

  Special Agent Rosen abandoned his chair and walked over to the window. He stood with his hands on his hips gazing down at the city below. They’d spent the first two hours in a windowless interrogation room on the sixth floor of the Federal Building in downtown Phoenix. About the time Corso’s story began to check out . . . after they found the stolen truck in the casino parking lot where he’d said it would be . . . after they found the haz-mat suits floating around inside the tanker truck, found the hotel room and the casino security guard, they’d moved the show up two floors to the corner conference room where they were now. Rosen leaned back against the window and made heavy eye contact with Corso.

  “How’s your hand?” he asked Corso.

  “Better,” Corso said. “Thanks for the professional repair work.”

  “And you’ve got no idea where they may be headed.”

  “None,” Corso said. “Kehoe claims to be alone on the planet and Driver just rambles on and on about fish and grizzly bears and blowflies and whatever else crosses his mind.”

  “But he’s lucid some of the time.”

  “Whenever he needs to be.”

  “You think he’s faking it?”

  “He’s real hard to read. Maybe that’s what happens when you lock men up in white-tiled cells and leave the lights on twentyfour/seven.”

  “He ever mention his mother?”

  “Not when I was around.”

  Rosen ran it all through his circuits again. The younger agent picked at his cuticles. The stenographer kept her hands still and her face blank.

  After an anxious moment Rosen said, “You’re free to go, Mr. Corso.”

  Corso got to his feet. Rosen looked back over his shoulder at the ground below.

  “I hear you shun the press, Mr. Corso.”

  “Same way I shun hyenas and rattlesnakes,” Corso answered.

  “Well you best put on your sneakers then, because every reporter in the known world is downstairs waiting for you to come out.”

  Corso crossed the room to Rosen’s side. He looked down and heaved a sigh.

  “We could take you out through the garage.”

  Corso shook his head. “I’ve had my fill of government hospitality for the day.”

  They watched as Corso moved to the door in four long strides. He pulled open the door, stepped into the breach and fixed each of them with his gaze before disappearing from sight. Rosen picked up the phone receiver and poked out a code.

  “Mr. Corso’s been released,” he said. He listened for a moment, his gaze sweeping the carpet. “Send her in,” he said finally.

  “I figured you’d keep Corso for a couple of days,” said the younger agent.

  “Feels to me like he’s leveling with us.” He shrugged. “Anyway . . . we need him again, we’ll find him again.”

  The door opened. A young woman in a gray business suit entered the room, closing the door behind her. Despite the faint pinstripe and the fine tailoring, the suit was unable to hide the nimble vitality of her figure. She’d been a member of the U.S. bronze medal volleyball team during the last Olympics and the muscles in her long legs rippled beneath the fabric as she took a seat at the far end of the conference table.

  Rosen raised his eyebrows.

  “The Portland office has a bit of problem,” she said in an even voice.

  “Such as?”

  “Such as . . .” She sorted her words. “So far . . . it doesn’t seem, at this point in the investigation . . . it doesn’t seem as if Driver’s mother lives anywhere in or near Prineville, Oregon.”

  Rosen folded his arms and frowned. “Really?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Her letters are all postmarked from there.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “How big a place is it?”

  “Not very sir. It’s out in the high desert behind Bend. Folks out there either work in wood products or they mold rubber at the Les Schwab tire plant.”

  Rosen rolled a hand over his wrist. “And they’ve . . .”

  “They’ve got the locals and the staties involved.”

  “They check the private mailboxes?”

  “Forensics is examining every postmark meter within fifty miles, trying to find out which one stamped the envelopes.”

  “Are all the marks the same?”

  “Quantico says they are.”

  His thick eyebrows met in the center of his face. This was supposed to have been the slam dunk section of the manhunt.

  That’s why he’d assigned the task to Special Agent Westerman, hoping to create a bit of early career success for her and thus spur her on her way up the Bureau’s somewhat old-school promotion ladder. She was a capable and well-trained young woman who had endured the low-key sexism of the Phoenix Bureau Office with grace and good cheer and thus, as far as Rosen was concerned, was deserving of a career kick start.

  “So,” Rosen said, “what do you think?”

  “I’m thinking that maybe she’s very rural. Way out in the sticks somewhere, where she doesn’t have much contact with other people. I’m thinking that they’ll find her as they widen the circle.”

  “And if they don’t?”

  “Then we’ll have ourselves a mystery sir.”

  The crush of bodies brought out the worst in him. He made it halfway down the tunnel of cameras and microphones and tape recorders before somebody hit him in the face with a camera. From that point on things got ugly. He shoved the offending camera hard enough to bounce it off the face of the operator, breaking his glasses, sending him staggering backward into the melee, where he tripped and fell among the morass of feet and legs. His cries for help rose above the shouted questions and the crush of bodies.

  Corso cursed under his breath and continued to swim his way through the crowd. The plan had been to outwalk the media. He had long legs and liked to stretch them. News teams were set up to do their business within a confined area. They needed plugs and cords to operate. Out past the reach of technology, they were worse than useless.

  This, however, was going to be a problem. He’d exited the building at the back of a cul-de-sac, leaving him adrift in a sea of question-shouting, microphone-waving humanity, without hope of a cab or even the vagaries of evening traffic to use as a buffer. He pulled his chin up to avoid a handheld tape recorder. The evening sky was a deep blue. The lights of the city had swallowed the stars. The noise of men and their machines filled the air like a swarm of hornets. Corso bit down hard and pushed forward.

  He used his hands to move people out of the way. On the far side of the enclosure, parked between a pair of FBI forensics wagons, a huge brown-and-white motor home squatted along the curb with its front door hanging open.

  Corso recognized her right away. Melanie Somethingorother from the American Manhunt TV show. He’d done a segment five or six years back when he still needed to tour books. She crooked her arm and beckoned him her way. And then did it again, more urgently this time.

  Corso picked up his pace and dropped his shoulder. Like a bowling ball he ricocheted his way across the expanse of pavement. As he approached the motor home, she backed
inside, holding the door open as she slipped from view. Corso felt his weight rock the motor home on its springs. A clank of the door and the click of the lock and silence settled like a breeze. He looked around but failed to take anything in. Running both hands through his thick black hair, he took a deep breath.

  “That’s worse than a prison riot,” he said.

  She laughed. Rich and deep, the sound brought a smile to his face.

  “You’d be the guy to know,” she said.

  Corso moved to the center of the coach. Looked around.

  “Spiffy,” he said.

  Melanie shrugged. “It’s been sitting around the ABC lot for years,” she said. “My agent negotiated for it, but I’ve never really used it much before.”

  Corso bent at the waist and peered out from between the curtains.

  “Does this thing go? I mean, like is there a driver or something?”

  She wrinkled her creamy brow. “What do you mean driver? I’m the driver. What kind of thing is that to say? You’re gonna be like that, you can get back out, Mr.”

  Corso showed his palms. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to offend. I can be really dumb sometimes.”

  Her expression said she agreed. “Where do you want to go?”

  “Anyplace but here.”

  She moved the beige curtains, exposing the windshield and side windows, then slipped into the driver’s seat. “Airport?”

  Corso thought about it. She started the engine.

  “Howsabout Scottsdale?” he asked.

  “Where in Scottsdale?”

  She backed up until she felt a small thump of resistance, crimped the wheel hard to the right and eased away from the curb.

  “The Phoenician,” Corso said. “Take me to the Phoenician. It’s a resort on Scottsdale Road.”

  “I know where it is.”

  A dozen photographers backpedaled in front of the moving motor home, trying to take shots through the windshield. She tooted the horn and raced the engine. She accelerated. The paparazzi peeled off like ocean from the prow of a ship.

  “At least you’ve got good taste in hotels,” she said as they slid into southbound traffic. “You gonna hide out, that’s the place to be doing it.”