Bad Signs

by R.J. Ellory

  Elliott Danziger ditched the sheriff’s black-and-white eight miles away from Marana. He was not that far from Oro Valley, coincidentally, though Oro Valley was on the I-19 and he was on the Tucson road. Laurette Tannahill had done little more than sob quietly, seated there beside him in her blood-spattered cotton print dress and matching sweater. She was all of twenty-five years old, brunette, delicately featured, and Digger knew that at some point he was going to have to do something with her. First and foremost, there was business to attend to, and that meant a new car, a change of clothes, perhaps the acquisition of some more weapons. He had enough money to be getting on with, all of seven hundred and forty-three dollars, but that was beside the point if he didn’t get control of his own emotions. He gripped the wheel to stop her seeing how much his hands were shaking. He said nothing so as to avoid showing the fear in his voice. Now he was in deep. Too deep. He would swim or drown, that was the truth, and the only way to swim was forward. He could not go back. He was an accomplice to however many counts of murder. He was a bank robber. He was like John Dillinger, worse than John Dillinger. And he had his own hostage now. Strange how the tables turned. The hostage had become the kidnapper. White had become black. Day had become night. He was damned if he was going to give himself up. This was not his fault. He had been an unwitting accomplice, but they wouldn’t listen to him. He could pretty much guarantee that they would shoot him down in the street like a dog. All they would care about was the money and the girl. Not him. They wouldn’t even give him a fair trial. Earl had been right about that for sure. There were some people who weren’t even given a fair shake of the dice. Not ever. Maybe now it was time to turn things around for himself, and if he had to do it with a gun, then so be it. Why should everything go right for other people? Why should he be left behind?

  Everything that had happened … hell, everything that had happened had come at him like a whirlwind. He was choked up in his chest. He knew he was supposed to be feeling something, but he didn’t know what it was. Guilt? Shame? A sense of responsibility for the position he was in? He had a stolen car and a hostage and a gun. Earl was back there outside the bank. Earl was no longer directing the play. Earl couldn’t show him what to do next. He had to make his own decisions. It was a simple choice: Turn round and give himself up, or carry on. It gave him pause, but not for long. His mind had been infected with a virus, and it was too easy to succumb to that virus.

  The house that caught Digger’s eye was set back from the edge of the highway a good two hundred yards. He could see the pickup from the get-go, and it was a good one. Looked pretty new, all clean and white and ready for the road. Digger took the left turn down a wheel-rutted path that ran directly to the property, and he shared a few words with his passenger.

  “Now, don’t you worry your pretty little head, sweetheart. We’re just gonna get ourselves another vehicle, and then we’ll be on our way. I’m gonna go on in there and have a few words with the owner here and we’re going to come to an arrangement. I’m gonna take the car keys with me, and you can run all you like, but I’m gonna be out again in just a moment and I’ll see you wherever you are. Cooperate and I’ll let you out a few miles down the road. Run away and I will kill you stone-dead. We understand each other?”

  He knew he could no more kill her than he could have killed Clay, but he had to sound mean, he had to sound like he meant business, and the only way he could do that was to imagine what Earl would have said. That was what he would have to do. He would have to be Earl, even though such a thing was a crazy idea. It was like a game, a game of pretend and making stuff up. He would be Earl Sheridan, if only for a little while, if only until he figured out who the hell he really was and how he was going to survive this mess.

  Laurette managed an awkward hitching acknowledgment, and Digger pulled to a stop ahead of the house. Before he got out he hunted around in the dash and the foot wells. He found a cloth, maybe for cleaning the windows or some such, and he tied it around the lower half of his face. He carried his gun down by his side and Laurette believed he wasn’t going to be making a deal with anyone. What she didn’t know was that Digger’s heart was racing fit to burst. He didn’t know what he was doing. He was both scared and excited. He had never been on his own. Not like this. Not where he was the one in charge, the only one who needed to be consulted. It felt good. It also felt bad. Whatever might have been going on in his mind, he knew that doing nothing was no answer.

  “Hello there!” he called out as he entered through the screen door and stepped into the hallway.

  “Hello!” he called again.

  The sound of footsteps across the upper landing.

  Digger backed up a step toward the front door, Wheland’s revolver down by his side. He waited for the sound of footsteps on the stairwell, and then he called out again.

  “Sorry to be intruding like this, but I have some car trouble out here and I wondered if I could make a telephone call or somethin’?”

  “Who is that down there?” a voice called. The voice of a man.

  “My name is Charlie, sir. Charlie Wintergreen. I ain’t no one in particular. I’m not from these parts … just me and my good wife passin’ through here and got ourselves an ornery vehicle.” Digger was nervous, on fire, and he could hear the sense of uncertainty in his own voice. He stood still, knew that if he moved the man might see that his hands were actually shaking.

  The man was smiling. The smile disappeared when he saw Digger standing there, gun in his hand, a kerchief tied across his face. He was dark-haired, broad in the shoulder, a kindly face. He’d anticipated no trouble. Trouble didn’t really happen in these parts, at least nothing to speak of.

  “I ain’t after no trouble, son,” he said. “What do you need? Money? A car? You don’t need that gun there. My name’s Gil Webster—”

  Digger raised the gun. Something came over him. It was like the shadow of a tree as you walked through sunshine. He felt momentarily cooler. He felt taller, wider, stronger, faster. He didn’t know what it was, but it was good. It was the gun that did it, no doubt about it. The gun gave him power, gave him self-control, gave him Earl’s spirit.

  Digger tightened his finger on the trigger. He still didn’t know if he’d be capable of pulling it, of actually killing someone, but the feeling of that thing in his hand was mighty reassuring. “And my name is whatever the fuck you want it to be,” he said.

  Gil Webster lowered his head ever so slowly. He took on a crestfallen expression, something of disbelief in his eyes. He shook his head slowly. “I ain’t got much of anythin’ that’d be of use to you here, son,” he said.

  “Like you said, you got some money and you got a car, that’s enough for sure.”

  “The car you can have, and I got maybe ten or fifteen dollars in the house—”

  “You alone here?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Who else lives here?”

  Gil Webster hesitated. He had a wife. Her name was Marilyn. She was up north in Lake Havasu City visiting with her mother. They’d been married so long he couldn’t think a thought without her. He’d already decided not to tell Charlie Wintergreen anything. If this went the way he hoped it wouldn’t, then this crazy son of a bitch might just be crazy enough to drive up there and kill her too. They say it took a full turn of the calendar to reconcile yourself to the loss of a loved one. You had to weather each anniversary once—one birthday, one Christmas, just one of every special occasion. If you made it that far then the odds were you’d make it all the way. Gil didn’t reckon Marilyn would do it. She wouldn’t take her own life. She wasn’t that kind of person. She’d just lay down and go to sleep and never wake up like them native Indian fellers could do. And then he stopped and wondered why he was thinking these thoughts. He was scared, that was all. This kid didn’t want anything but whatever money he had and the keys to the car. The car could go. It was insured. Such things were never worth fighting for.

  “I can get all the money I have
in the house,” Gil said, “and you can have the keys to the car.”

  “Good ’nough,” Digger said. “Well, let’s get busy, eh?”

  Digger followed Gil Webster through the house. He emptied his pocketbook, a coffeepot on a shelf in the kitchen with a handful of dollar bills in it. He even checked the bureau drawers and found another five bucks. All told there was twenty-three dollars, and he handed it over to Digger with the keys to the pickup.

  “You got a root cellar?” Digger asked.

  “Sure have.”

  “Show me.”

  Gil Webster crossed the room and stepped into the kitchen. In back there was a door that led down to the cellar. The key was in the lock.

  “Down you go,” Digger said. “I’m gonna lock you down there and you’re gonna keep your fucking mouth shut for at least an hour, and then you can do whatever the hell you like. I’m gonna be up here for a while, and if I hear you making any fucking noise I’m gonna come down there and shoot you in the head. You understand me?”

  Gil nodded. Looked like he was going to come through this. He kept thinking of Marilyn. He kept thinking of the moment the police caught up with this son of a bitch and threw him in lockup. Probably give him a good hiding for his trouble.

  He walked to the cellar door and opened it. He took a couple of risers down and then looked back at the young man.

  It was in the moment—the moment he looked back and saw Charlie Wintergreen looking down at him—that he knew there was some other agenda. There was a flash in the boy’s eyes, something dark. Hard to describe—a dark light?—but that was the only way he could describe it. There was a dark light in the boy’s eyes, and that light said there was something wicked in his thoughts.

  Gil Webster stood there for a moment, and he felt something indescribable. It was mental, emotional, physiological, even spiritual. It was beyond anything. He had looked death in the face and survived it.

  “Go,” Digger said, and Gil Webster went on down the stairwell. He heard the door lock behind him, and he resigned himself to sitting quietly for an hour. Maybe he’d make it two or three just to be sure.

  As Digger closed the door he stopped. Something arrived in his thoughts. Something real. So terribly, terribly real. He knew then, as well as he knew his own name, that Earl was dead. That neck wound, the amount of blood that he’d lost, the poor son of a bitch wouldn’t have survived. Not out there, not in the middle of damned nowhere. Digger closed his eyes for a second, and he felt something, and it was like a religious thing, an overwhelming thing. Like them preacher fellers who talked about being filled to bursting by the love of Jesus and all that shit. Well, this was like that, but better. This was like being overcome by the spirit of Earl Sheridan, and Digger knew that everything he did from this point forward would not only be for himself, but for Earl as well.

  A moment later, his gun and the kerchief in one pocket, the money and the car keys in the other, he was out front again. He got into the sheriff’s black-and-white and pulled it around behind the house. There was a shed there, big enough to park the car inside, and the doors were unlocked. It didn’t take more than a minute to get the vehicle hidden inside, and then he took the girl by the hand and walked her back to the house.

  She didn’t know about Gil Webster. Perhaps best. She might have gone all hysterical, screaming for him to come on out and save her. Digger took her upstairs, showed her into Gil and Marilyn’s bedroom, and stood there for a moment looking at her.

  “I reckon I’m going to do some stuff to you now,” he said. His voice was calm and measured. “I ain’t done this before so I don’t know how it goes, but I got a pretty good idea. You can either cooperate or you can resist. If you cooperate then everything’s gonna be fine. I’m gonna leave you here and be on my way. If you resist then I’m gonna do what I want to you anyways and then shoot you in the head.”

  He paused, looked at her closely. “You hear me?”

  Laurette Tannahill didn’t say a word. She looked back at him, fierce defiance in her eyes. She’d known this was coming. She’d tried to prepare herself for it. She’d kidded herself into thinking that this was something she could do. Truth was, if this went the way she thought it was going to go then she might never be able to deal with it. She’d heard one time of a girl in Payson who was raped by some feller, and the girl was so traumatized she ended up taking a whole handful of pills. She didn’t die, but something snapped in her mind and she was never the same again, and now she lived in a place for crazy folk somewhere near that meteor crater south of Flagstaff.

  “You done this before?” Digger asked her.

  She nodded.

  “Well, good ’nough. Then it ain’t gonna be a new experience for both of us. Now git your clothes off before I tear ’em off you.”

  Laurette stood there for a moment. There was no choice. If she did this she might make it through. She might not, but she had to increase the odds as best she could. If she didn’t do it then she was history. She knew that for sure. She could have run, but how far would she have got? Nowhere at all. This place was a desert. There was nowhere to hide, no one to go to. Hell, she’d just sat there in the car terrified and frozen and disbelieving of everything that had happened. This morning she’d woken up and it had been a normal day. If someone had told her …

  “Get a move on!” Digger said.

  She took off her sweater. She kicked off her shoes, and when she looked down at them she saw that they were spattered with blood, as were her stockings, as was the lower hem of her dress. She wondered whose blood it was.

  Bile rose in her throat.

  She reached under her skirt and unclipped her stockings. She rolled them down and took them off. Now she had on nothing but her dress and her bra beneath. This was it. This was where it got nasty.

  She reached behind her back and tried to get the zip. She struggled.

  “Here, let me do that,” Digger said.

  The moment his hand touched her she shuddered. That was the thing that did it. That was the thing that kicked everything into focus and made her realize where she was, who she was with, what had happened, what was about to happen …

  She let out a cry. She started to sob. Her breath came up short and she coughed.

  Digger yanked down the zip, and then he grabbed the shoulder straps and pulled them down. The dress fell in a single drop and bunched around her feet.

  Instinctively Laurette covered herself with her hands.

  Digger reached up and grabbed the front of her bra. He tugged it roughly and it hurt her.

  “Off,” he said.

  Laurette hesitated. Digger raised his hand to slap her, and realized he could not. He felt stupid then. He felt ugly and stupid and ignorant. This was not him. This was not the way he thought about women. This was Earl Sheridan.

  Laurette flinched as he raised his hand, but she didn’t make a sound. Tears filled her eyes and the color rose in her cheeks. Her breathing was swift and shallow, and for a moment Digger hated what he had done to her, hated what he had made her feel. He felt sorry for her, and then he felt angry at himself for being so weak.

  Laurette looked back at the bed. She noticed the beautiful cushions there. Looked like every one of them had been hand-stitched. She’d had sex twice before, once with Lenny Bisbee, another time with Charlie Gibson. They were still dating, she and Charlie, and she figured it might go all the way to them getting engaged. Maybe not. Maybe he was the kind of guy who …

  She felt his hand on her shoulder, and though Digger’s thought was to comfort her, perhaps to even tell her he was sorry, to explain that he had in fact hurt no one, Laurette took that gesture as one of threat. He was going to push her back toward the mattress, and he was going to put his hand between her legs, and then he was going to undo the button on his waistband …

  She twisted suddenly, pushed him away, took a step toward him.

  “God damn you!” he said. “I was only—”

  “God damn you back!�
�� she shouted.

  Digger stood there for a moment. He felt nothing. He had been trying to get aroused. The girl was there, most of her clothes on the floor, and he knew what to do, but damn it if he couldn’t get a hard-on. “Son of a bitch!” he said. “Goddamn son of a bitch!” It wasn’t him, it was the girl. That was the problem. The girl was the fucking problem. He looked at her, the white skin, her fat ass, the way she glared back at him. He looked at the stupid pillows, the names embroidered on them—Marilyn and Gil, another one—Five Years of Happiness Together, and the whole thing just made him mad.

  Frustrated, angry, upset with himself, the girl, the situation, he reached back and took Wheland’s gun from his back pocket.

  It was then that she slapped him. He hadn’t expected that. She just let fly and slapped him, and he felt that sudden rush of blood to his face. He stood there with the gun in his hand and he didn’t know what to do.

  For a second he hesitated, and then he said, “Get back on the bed! Get back on the fucking bed!”

  “Or what?” she said, and in her tone was such defiance that Digger was taken aback.

  “Or what?” he echoed. “Or I’ll fucking shoot you—”

  “Do it,” she said. “Do it! Just fucking shoot me, why don’t you? Shoot me right now, because you ain’t doing this to me.”

  Digger was stunned into silence. He took a step back. The gun felt too heavy in his hand.

  The girl shifted forward. Pretty much naked though she was, she seemed suddenly terrifying. She took another step toward him and he backed away farther.

  Digger raised the gun again. “Sit d-down,” he said, and he felt his voice crack.

  “You sit down,” she said. “You can say what the hell you like. You are not going to rape me. You can kill me, but you are not going to rape me.”