No Man's Land

by G. M. Ford

  “And then?”

  “Leave the door unlocked. They’ll have to consult. I’ll get in while they’re figuring out what to do next.”

  “What if they see you sneaking in?”

  “Then I get a ride downtown. And you go on your way.”

  “Why don’t you just see what it is they want?”

  “They had me in custody all day yesterday. This is something new. With this kind of manpower expenditure, whatever it is can’t be good.”

  “They’ll follow us.”

  “Yes, they will,” Corso said. “For a while.” He paused.

  “About the time you get on the freeway and start following the signs to L.A., they’re gonna lose interest in a big hurry. Six hours of desert isn’t what they’ve got in mind.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then you have me all to yourself, all the way to L.A.”

  “And you’ll answer my questions? Not give me that snotty stuff you usually throw at the press.”

  He held up two fingers. “Scout’s honor.”

  She grabbed his fingers. “You’re the least likely Boy Scout on the planet.”

  He shrugged. Left his fingers locked in hers. “What do you say?”

  She didn’t hesitate. “It’s a deal,” she said, letting go of his hand. Corso got to his feet. “I’ll meet you outside.”

  Melanie took a last sip of her coffee and stood up. “At some point, I’m going to need to get some video.”

  “When we get to L.A. I promise.”

  “Ooooh,” she mocked. “I can’t believe it. That elusive heartthrob, Frank Corso, baring his soul on American Manhunt. We’ll pull a twenty share.”

  “You don’t know how disappointing it is to hear my charms reduced to mere numbers.”

  She laughed again. “Somehow, Mr. Corso, I think you’ll get over it.”

  Corso threw twenty bucks on the table for the waiter and opened door on the right.

  Melanie passed by close enough for him to smell her scent. Some version of Chanel. He was sure of it. Coco maybe. She never looked back as she sashayed across the dining room, turning heads all the way, and disappeared from view. Corso turned left and walked quickly through the door to the kitchen. A pink-cheeked specimen in a spotless white uniform nodded politely and pointed the way. Corso returned the nod and followed the finger through the bustling kitchen, out past the freezers to the loading dock and finally to the staff parking lot behind the main building. By the time he made his way to where they’d parked the trailer, the fireworks were mostly over. Melanie was standing in the doorway hands on hips. Corso couldn’t hear what was being said, but the body language told him the FBI agents were in full apology mode. Corso watched from behind a palm tree, forty yards away as they made their way around the back of the RV and disappeared.

  He didn’t hesitate. The minute they were out of view, he went skipping through the shrubbery and tropical flowers, moving quickly from tree to tree. Melanie saw him coming and stepped aside. He jumped up and stayed low, duck-walking beneath the windows all the way to the back. She closed the door and locked it. They waited.

  Corso sat on the floor with his back against the bathroom door. Melanie bent over and peered out the side window.

  “They’re sitting in a burgundy Ford about four rows down,” she announced. “One of them’s talking into his collar.”

  “Let’s go,” Corso said.

  Melanie walked up front and belted herself into the driver’s seat.

  “L.A., here we come,” she said.

  33

  On the TV a man in a white apron was showing folks how to stick a turkey into some kinda little oven that collected the grease in the bottom as it turned the bird round and round. “Just set it and forget it,” he kept saying every time he stuffed something else into the contraption. Got the audience to shout it along with him too. Never seen anybody so damn happy about cookin’ something. Guy had a grin on him, you’d think he won the damn lottery or something. Heidi wished she could change the channel, maybe find some cartoons, except she couldn’t be sure whether what’shisname was watching or not. He was sure enough staring at the screen, but with this guy that didn’t necessarily mean he was taking any of it in. Whatever his name was had his own inner TV set he looked at most of the time. Rolled his eyes back into his head and went off to wherever the hell it was he went to. All he did was sit there and play with his guns. Taking them apart and putting them together over and over. Didn’t have to look at them neither. He could do it from memory and the feel in his hands. Scary.

  She’d tried her best to get his attention. Washed out her pissy undies and dress in the sink, then threw ’em on the radiator to dry. No Man’s Land She’d spent the past four hours parading around the motel room in a towel not much bigger than a washcloth and he never so much as twitched an eyeball in her direction. First man she ever met wasn’t the least bit interested in seeing her naked. If he hadn’t been so damned crazy it would have hurt her feelings for sure. She was trying to decide whether to discard the towel altogether, change the channel, or more likely, both, when the channel up and changed itself to a public service bulletin. Blond-haired woman standing behind one of those wooden speech-making things. Half a dozen men in suits stood behind her on the platform. The graphic read FBI SPECIAL AGENT LINDA WESTERMAN. She was goin’ on about how the various cops were all cooperating together like one big happy family when the pictures appeared at the bottom of the screen. Harry and her and Kehoe and Captainman, right there on the TV screen big as life. She hated her picture. Made her look like she had no upper lip. His picture didn’t look much like him neither, but if you used a little imagination, you could see him in it. The label said his name was Timothy Driver. Used to be some kinda Trident submarine captain. Said he was sentenced to double forever for offing his wife and her lover nine years ago. Said he was armed and dangerous. She almost laughed out loud. Armed and dangerous? Hell . . . they didn’t know the half of it.

  Driver set the shotgun on the bed, felt around and came up with the remote control and turned up the volume. The Westerman woman said they figured the fugitives . . . that’s what she called them, fugitives . . . were headed for Canada ’cause Canada wouldn’t send nobody back to the U.S. to be executed. Asked everybody to be on the lookout and to call the number at the bottom of the screen if they had anything to report. And that was that. Next thing you know she’s legging it off the stage and they’re back with that grinning yahoo stuffing a pork roast into that same dumb-ass machine.

  “When it gets dark, I’ll be leaving,” he said. The words felt like somebody dragged a rusty nail down her spine. She made like she didn’t understand. “You mean like us . . . right?”

  “I have to go alone. It’s my calling.”

  “Oh please,” she said quickly. “Don’t leave me alone. I’m not good about being left alone. I’ve got issues.”

  “We’re born alone. We die alone,” he said solemnly.

  “But not here . . . not now,” she said. “Right?”

  When he didn’t answer, she leaned closer to him, allowing the top of the towel to fall into her lap. For the first time, he dropped his gaze from her face and looked at her breasts. She watched his Adam’s apple bob up and down . . . suppressed a smile. “My mama left us when I was five. Her name was Rose and she was very beautiful. School sent me to counseling over it. Everybody said it wasn’t my fault. Said it was between her and my daddy. Wasn’t nothing I coulda done about it.” She shrugged. “It’s probably true,” she said. “For somebody somewhere’s else.” She paused and looked him in the eye for the first time. His eyes were black and cold as a pair of rivets. “For me though . . . I still figure it musta been something I done . . . or something I shoulda done and that maybe . . . if one little thing had been different . . . if maybe we hadn’t found just one thing we coulda done to make her life a little better . . . then you know maybe she woulda stayed.”

  His steel gaze seemed to bore a hole ri
ght through her skull. Almost against her will, she began talking. “You know . . . like a short story I read back in high school, where they had like a time machine. And about these white hunter guys who paid a lot of money to go on a safari back to dinosaur times. Except they had to be careful not to touch anything while they were back in the past lest . . . you know . . . they screw things up or something.”

  She became more animated, waving her hands around as she spoke. “And like somebody, by mistake, steps on a butterfly . . . just like one tiny butterfly . . . and when they get back everything is different . . . different government . . . different everything . . . all because of just one little butterfly that got stepped on way back when.”

  He was looking at her now. His gaze was empty and pitiless.

  “You know what I’m talking about?” she asked. “I’m talking about abandonment issues here.”

  “You can’t mess with the river,” he said in a low voice. “The river goes on with you or without you. It doesn’t care. It just goes on being a river.”

  “Not rivers, man . . . butterflies.”

  “It’s the same,” he said. “Everything’s on its way back to where it came from. Some of it makes it all the way to the ocean. Some of it falls along the way.”

  She jumped to her feet and stamped a foot. The violent movement sent the towel to the floor. She felt a rush of blood in her cheeks. Then watched the ghost of desire wash across his face. She squared her shoulders and took a step forward, nearly putting her pubis in his face. “You can’t just leave me here,” she whined in her best little girl voice. “I don’t even know where we are.” She edged even closer. “I could make things good for you,” she whispered.

  “Really I . . .” For a moment, it seemed as if he was reaching for her. As if he might plant a kiss right in the middle of her thatch. She shivered at the thought. Instead, he picked the towel from the floor.

  “Cover yourself,” he said.

  34

  Melanie Harris checked the side mirror again and smiled. The burgundy Ford Taurus had been hanging three or four cars back ever since they’d left Scottsdale half an hour before. Now, the turn signal was on. She watched in the mirror as they motored up the exit ramp, made a couple of left turns and headed back the way they’d come.

  “Looks like you were right,” she said. “Our federal friends seem to have had enough of our company.”

  Corso was sitting on the floor at the rear of the coach. He’d removed his black leather jacket and was leaning back against the bathroom door, one long leg up, the other stretched out along the floor. She watched as he got to his feet, flicking her attention back and forth between the mirror and the road ahead as he made his way to the passenger seat, pushed it all the way back to accommodate his long legs and strapped himself in. “Six-hour jaunts across the desert aren’t in the federal job description,” he said.

  “They’re not generally part of mine either. I always fly back home when we do a remote.”

  “But for a good story . . .” He let it hang.

  “Neither rain nor snow nor dead of night . . .”

  Yesterday’s clouds had scattered, leaving the sky a shade of azure blue only seen in Arizona Highways magazine.

  “You want anything?” she asked.

  He gave her a shy smile. “Like what?”

  “Like water or pop.”

  “I’m good.”

  She returned the smile. “If you change your mind, feel free to help yourself from the fridge.”

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “So tell me about this guy Timothy Driver.”

  “Which one? The one I wrote the book about or the one they’re chasing all over the place right now?”

  She thought it over. “The one you wrote the book about.”

  Corso laid it out for her. Took him fifteen minutes to come up with everything he could remember about Driver’s past. Finally, he took a deep breath, and said, “That Tim Driver was a good man who found himself in a bad situation. After twenty years of self-discipline and single-minded service to his country, he came home one day and found himself confronted with something completely outside his realm. Something there was no manual for. The idea that somebody could break their word to him like that. That somebody he loved could be mixing it up with somebody else in his own bed . . . it just wasn’t something he was prepared to deal with.”

  “Lotta people catch their spouses flying united and don’t kill anybody.”

  “Most of them don’t live by the same code of honor he did. We’re talking about a guy who had a couple of dozen nuclear weapons at his disposal. For him it was just the worst kind of betrayal imaginable. I think maybe it’s somehow tied in to the fact that his father deserted the family when he was a little kid. Like maybe the whole thing with his wife was just one straw too many for his psyche.”

  She checked the mirror and moved over one lane to the left, wheeling the RV around a lumbering flatbed truck awash in rusty machine parts.

  “What did he want with you?”

  Corso laughed. “Believe it or not, I’m still not real clear about that. I think he wanted me to be his Boswell or something. I think he wanted me on hand to document whatever he had in mind for a grand finale.” He shrugged off her disbelief. “When he’s talking like that he doesn’t make a lot of sense to anybody but himself. I think it’s what he thought about the whole time he was isolation. I think he tried to keep from going nuts and failed.”

  “So you think they drove him crazy.”

  “Either that or he’s got some progressive brain disease. Something that overcame him during this last phase of incarceration.”

  “Or he’s got bad genes. The father walked out. You said yourself that his mother was pretty far out there. Maybe he’s just the next generation of loony.”

  “Could be.”

  “But you don’t think so.”

  “No.”

  “You blame the state.”

  “It’s not the state. It’s the Randall Corporation.”

  “And you don’t approve?”

  “It’s like you have badly behaved kids, so you give them to the neighbors and move out of town. It’s just not right. Privatizing changes everything. Prisoners are suddenly part of the ‘profit motive’ equation. They lose their rights and become numbers on a board . . . a board with the only number that matters on a line at the bottom.”

  She threw him a quick look. “Anybody ever suggest you had a self-righteous streak about a yard wide?”

  “Just about everybody.”

  The air inside the camper began to rumble as a herd of Harley-Davidsons passed them on the left. Fringed and fitted out. Stripped down. In singles and in doubles, they roared past, twenty-five maybe, all decked out in the latest biker gear. Twenty years ago, they would surely have been a band of speed freak commandos, armed and dangerous and ready to rumble. Nowadays they might all be urologists.

  “You think they’re going let themselves be captured?”

  “No way. Not Driver. Not Kehoe. They’re not coming in alive.”

  “Any idea where they’re headed?”

  “Kehoe’s looking to get across the Canadian border. Just in case he gets caught, he figures that’s the only way he’s going to avoid the death chamber.”

  “And Driver?”

  “Sooner or later, Driver’s headed for his mother. I think that’s what he means when he’s always talking about getting back to where he started.”

  “The feds can’t find his mother,” Melanie said. “Turns out she doesn’t live where they thought she did.”

  A minute passed. When she looked over at Corso she found him deep in thought.

  “You know that for sure?” he asked finally.

  “It’s in the info Marty bought from somebody in the prison hierarchy. Her letters had been postmarked from the same little town in Oregon for as long as he’s been in Meza Azul. Turns out she doesn’t live there though.”

  “Oregon?”

&nb
sp; “Pineville . . . something like that.”

  “Prineville,” he corrected. He chuckled. “Well I’ll be damned.”

  “What am I missing here?”

  “At least now I know why the feds were looking so hard for me back in Scottsdale.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “They want to know where Driver’s mother lives.”

  Her foot came off the accelerator. The big RV began to slow.

  “Are you serious?”

  He nodded, sat back in the seat and folded his arms across his chest.

  Melanie Harris used her turn signal and slid the motor home off the highway and onto the shoulder. She set the parking brake and turned toward Corso.

  “They think you know where she is?”

  Again he nodded silently. Something in his facial expression alerted her.

  “Do you?”

  His eyes got all-of-a-sudden cagey. “Do I what?”

  “Don’t start with me, Corso. You know what I mean. Do you or don’t you know where his mother lives?”

  “Yeah,” he said after a minute.

  “How come you know what nobody else knows?”

  He shrugged and looked out the side window. “After he got sent to Meza Azul . . . Doris—that’s his mother’s name, Doris— the press were driving her crazy. She asked me if I knew anybody who could help her disappear for a little while. I turned her on to a guy I know specializes in helping people get lost. He snuck her out of Seattle. Set her up with a new address and a phony ID. Put together a mail drop for her so nobody could find her that way either.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Almost seven years.”

  “And you think she’s still where your friend put her?”

  “She’s still using the mail drop.”

  “I want to go there,” she said instantly.

  He raised a hand, waving the idea off. “No way,” he said.