“Yes, we do, baby. We need money! Sharon didn’t give us enough! Five hundred dollars? How far are we going to get on that? Not far. We need more, baby. Just one more stop. Besides…he owes me.” His jaw clenches, and he grips the steering wheel till his knuckles whiten.
“Who owes you?”
“Eddie.”
“Oh my God, John! No! He’s gonna kill you! That’s the last place we should go!”
John’s face drains visibly pale in the dark interior of the car, and his voice lowers to a gravelly mumble. “I know…but…I got a plan.”
“Plan? What kind of plan, John? He’s got contracts on you! He wants to kill you!”
“I know; I know. But listen! I need you to back me on this. He knows by now that I didn’t rat him out, that I didn’t give the police any incriminating evidence.”
“Yeah! And he’s gonna make sure you don’t either, John! He’ll shoot you!”
“No. Listen! Not if I bluff him.”
“Bluff him? How?”
“Now listen. Here’s the plan. I’m gonna ask him for a couple thousand dollars. I know he’s got that much handy. I’m gonna tell him that if I’m not back in half an hour, that I have someone holding three letters. These letters…addressed to Van de Kamp, Lange, and the Los Angeles Police Department, have enough evidence—I mean everything—to put him away for life. They’ll be dropped in the mail if I’m not back in half an hour.”
“Oh my God, John! He’s not going to do this. He’s gonna kill you. Let’s just go now! Please!”
“No! He owes me for saving his ass, and he knows it. I didn’t rat on him—and now, by leaving town, I’m saving his ass again! Besides, I got the letters and you. He knows I got you for proof!”
I can’t believe this. John is playing this like a bluff on a bum poker hand with absolutely nothing up his sleeve.
We pull into the DuPar’s Coffee Shop parking lot at the bottom of Ventura and Laurel Canyon. John throws the car in park. His hands run habitually through his hair, and he remembers suddenly it has been cut off and is black now. He checks to see if his hand is stained and, trying to muster some kind of confidence, lets out a long breath.
Inside, he guides me to an orange checkered booth near the pay phone.
“Order us some coffee, babe. I’m gonna make a call.”
I sit trembling, convinced this is a deadly idea, until John returns from the phone. Please don’t let this happen, I pray.
“Well, what did he say?”
“He said to come up.” He stirs cream and sugar into his coffee, then takes a giant gulp, draining the entire cup. “I’ll be back in no more than half an hour. But if an hour goes by…call the police.” He bends to give me a hard kiss on the lips. “I love you, Dawn. Wish me luck.”
The hands on the clock move painfully slowly. With dread, I watch every second tick by. Eddie will be more pissed off than grateful! I yell in my head to no one. What is he thinking? Suspicious eyes keep track of me as I nurse my coffee and jump at every movement and noise. The thirty minutes have passed. John has not returned. Thirty-five minutes pass…no sign. Then forty minutes…forty-five…and a battered-looking John returns. Shaking, he slides into the booth across from me and holds my hands.
“John? What happened?” I grip his hands hard to hold him still.
He can’t speak at first and raises a finger signaling me to give him a minute to gain his composure. “He made me get on my knees,” John finally hisses, then swallows half a cup of coffee hard.
“Did you tell him about the letters?”
“Diles was there. He had him hold a gun to my head. Asked why he shouldn’t just kill me—and my family. He asked me why he should believe I didn’t tell the cops anything. ‘Why should I trust you?’ he asked me.”
“What did you say?”
“I said, ‘If I’m not back in exactly thirty minutes, the letters will be dropped in the mail.’ He didn’t believe me. He made me beg—beg him not to put a bullet through my head. And then…he let me go.”
“Are you all right? Did he give you the money?”
John’s eyelids crease as if he will cry. “He said he would think about it. He said to come back in an hour and check the mailbox.”
“Oh my God. We can’t go back! No! No! Let’s just leave, John. Don’t go. A bomb, a sniper—something—will be waiting, but it won’t be the money. Don’t believe him!” Fear consumes me like millions of bees stinging my skin. Eddie is mad. I want to run as fast as I can, as far as I can, and never come back.
“No, baby. We have to. We just don’t have enough money, and—and I think he’s gonna do it. Finish your coffee. We gotta get out of here.”
We drive around for an eternity in our newly painted car. After circling Studio City several nerve-racking times, John finally winds up the steep road to Laurel Canyon toward Eddie’s.
Is this to be our death ride? I wonder in despair. My gut twists in knots, and I cannot comprehend that I am in a car driving up to the home of the drug lord who has contracts out on our lives. I get down low out of habit as we approach Eddie Nash’s house on Dona Lola Drive.
Listening intently, I hear every footstep John’s boots make up the brick walkway, then the creaking of the mailbox opening and closing shut. I hunch my shoulders down, bracing myself for a blast or gunshot, but instead hear the heavy thud of John’s footsteps running back to the car.
At the bottom of the Canyon road, he rips open the end of an envelope with his teeth and looks inside. “Fucking bastard!” He flings the shredded envelope to the floor.
“What?”
“He only gave me half! Son of a bitch!” John’s fist hits the steering wheel, and veins bulge in his neck as he punches on the gas pedal, peeling onto the freeway to head out of town.
Half. That’s Eddie’s thing, isn’t it? The understanding leaves a bad taste in my mouth. But with every mile farther and farther from this wretched place, this place of broken dreams and pain, I feel lighter and less oppressed. John reaches over to hold my hand tightly as we near the desert…and our new beginning.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
No!
From behind the shadowy ridge of hills in the east, the desert sun rises, magical hues of pink and gray thrown across a barren desert highway. Memories of the wonder I had in my heart when I traveled cross-country with my dad to California almost six years ago entertain the silent hours as the miles slip behind us.
I lift my head from John’s lap to look at him and smile.
“Hey, baby. Sleep good?” His voice is like a soft, sweet song in my ear.
“Mmmm. Where are we?”
“Almost to Vegas.” He brushes my hair from my face.
“Where are we headed, John?”
“Montana. We’ll go to my sister Anne’s in Billings. She’ll let us hang out for a while till we can figure something out. If we like it enough, we might even settle down there.”
“Yeah. That sounds good.” I snuggle up next to him and rest my head on his shoulder. Spinning the dials on the radio, John finds only country music and then shuts it off, content to listen to the engine whirr through the desolate plains. Thor’s warm, four-pound body fits perfectly in the crease of my leg under the scratchy, orange polyester comforter.
The moment is peaceful for once. We’re alone in the desert, secure in the thought of leaving the city. It’s just John and I and the fading stars.
WHAM! A large feathered bird smacks the windshield dead-on.
“What was that?”
Color drains from John’s face. It’s as if he has seen a ghost.
“What, John? What is it?”
He swallows. “A hawk.” His tone is low and sad.
“Wow! That was huge!”
“It’s bad.”
“What do you mean ‘bad'?”
“It’s a bad omen for a hunter to kill a hawk…real bad.” John squeezes my hand, and I tense with the familiar apprehension of dread at the prophecy that fell from the sky. N
ow the fear of an unknown future is real again and as big as the sharpening outline of the mountains in the distance. I am afraid.
Gripping my hand tightly enough to crush my knuckles painfully into each other, John summons the strength to face the road ahead.
The car’s reduced speed and the stifling heat wake me. The parking lot at the Las Vegas Stardust Hotel is sporadically lined with cars, the air a blast of hot oven wind.
“Shhh. Take Thor for a pee, will ya?” John asks before I have a chance to say anything.
“What are you doing, John?” I ask, annoyed at seeing the casino.
“Just fifteen minutes, baby. I just want to place one bet on aught double aught. You know, and my lucky numbers…to see if we can double our money.”
John is already out the door before I can argue. “Hurry up, John. I got a bad feeling here. This place is too public.”
He blows me a kiss for luck and walks off, yanking at the back of his jeans, smoothing his wrinkled T-shirt.
After watering Thor, I kick back on the shaded backseat, my feet sticking out the window as I pick at a leftover glazed doughnut. The sun glares off the parked cars, and each minute that ticks by grows hotter.
Abruptly, a quickly moving figure rushes toward me through the bright glare of the sun. It is John. Shirt collar pulled up to his ears and head ducked down, he slides into the driver’s seat. “Get down,” he orders.
“What is it?”
In swift movements, he turns the ignition and slides the gear arm into reverse. A trail of dust gathers behind him.
“John? What?”
“A hit man.”
“Eddie’s?”
“No!” He is visibly trembling, his hand fumbling on the dashboard for a cigarette.
“Did he see you?”
John ignores me, pulls in a lungful of smoke, and steps on the gas.
Get out of here. Get out of here. Get out of here, I think, real danger suffocating me like the terrible desert heat. It is what the police told us. There are many…many contracts out on us. They are everywhere.
Then I remember the hawk.
It is good to be out of Nevada. After crossing through the red colors of Utah, we hit the plains of Wyoming and head up to Montana with a detour at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. John wants to stop and walk through the gravestones that mark Custer’s last stand. Cowboy drips out of him in the way he talks and walks. It’s as if he has changed into a favorite old pair of jeans, and I remember how much he loves John Wayne.
It is beautiful—the countryside of America—and it has a calming effect, one that irons out the static of our fear. Soon we are laughing and playing around as we did in the old days. With no drugs around, John is his old lighthearted self. It’s the first time in so many years that I feel kind of happy again.
Billings, Montana, seems like a town with ancient history. Redbrick buildings line either side of downtown, and the trees grow thick and tall. With plenty of space and light, their branches stretch up to the sky in bountiful twists and curls.
John’s sister, Anne, lives in an older, one-bedroom brown-stone. When we arrive, she welcomes us at the door in her faded pocket housecoat.
John slides into a down-home country accent, a little more childlike than his John Wayne drawl. He and his sister laugh and joke and genuinely enjoy each other’s company.
Anne is a plain, pear-shaped woman in her late thirties with long mousy-brown hair parted down the middle, reminding me of the style John likes me to wear. I can see a resemblance to her mother in the long oval shape of her face and her small brown eyes. Soft-spoken and shy, she doesn’t mention Mary except to ask John if he has talked to her since he left California. John pretends not to hear her question. She offers us the pullout couch to sleep on for as long as we are in town.
John doesn’t tell Anne the full story of what happened to us in LA. I don’t think she wants to know. I’m burning with curiosity about what her mother may have told her about me, but I don’t ask.
Our lives are simple again for the first time after so long. John and I are romantic, taking lazy summer walks, holding hands under the full shade of the trees, and browsing through antique and secondhand stores. Our meals are filled with laughter, fried chicken, beans, and a sense of home, making it easy to forget the terror of the past, until…
When the phone rings incessantly all day about a month into our stay, I get frantic. Anne is at work, and John and I have made a pact that while we’re in her house we will never answer the phone. We don’t want to give away our whereabouts, just in case. The continuous, foreboding ringing unnerves us, though.
As soon as Anne walks through the door, the phone shrills predictably again. She sees the fear on our faces, sets her grocery bags on the floor, and takes a resolved step to the phone.
“It’s Mom,” she says to John. A doe-eyed blank expression pales her summer tan. “She needs to talk to you.”
The call is brief. John doesn’t want to be on the telephone line for any length of time in case it’s tapped. He rakes his fingers through his hair, nervously setting his survival mode thinking into motion, and begins in a monotone: “The FBI was at my family’s in Ohio this morning. There’s a warrant out for both of us, and we’re on the FBI’s most wanted list. The FBI is involved because we crossed state lines. First they wanted me for failure to appear in court for the stolen computer in Huntington Beach, but now they want to charge me for the murders again.” He doesn’t blink. “We’re considered armed and drug-crazed.”
Nobody looks at each other for a long time, not wanting to project any negative energy to jinx us. We have no drugs. We have no weapons. We aren’t like that. I’m not like that, I think. I just want to get away and start over with my boyfriend.
John doesn’t mention why they want me too, but I remember the warnings of Detectives Lange and Tomlinson while we were in protective custody. They’ll be after you as long as you’re with him, Dawn. Instantly I worry about my family in Oregon. A dull awareness of anger toward John surfaces in my consciousness, suppressed over and over again almost like swallowing a surge of bile, for putting me in this situation. Again, I swallow the bitter taste back down. This is too much. Bewildered, I look at John, pleading once again for him to tell me what we should do next.
“We gotta leave. Right now!”
I know he is right and, without letting in any more emotions, zombielike, I gather and pack our things in just a few short minutes while John busies negotiating with Anne to borrow some money.
“Where will you go?” she asks him.
“Florida. Dawn is from Florida, and it’s far enough away from California. I think we’ll be safe.” John knows his sister won’t tell the cops about us, not for a while at least. His family wants him safe, of course, but they have no idea what that could cost them and I can imagine that they won’t protect him for long. Anne only nods at her brother, watching him change from that down-home good guy she grew up with in rural Ohio to an FBI fugitive, and she says good-bye. We leave our monthlong reprieve and, like a movie in fast-forward, escape from a rapidly approaching past to enter another looming, unsure future.
The highway reaches out endlessly before us, and John’s foot hits the gas as if he’s attempting to catch up with it. We are now in a mad rush to get out of Montana, where we know the authorities will be coming for us next. John’s focus is straight ahead, his speed lightning fast. The landscape is an elongated blur—seventy-five, eighty, eight-five. The Malibu strains with a constant high-pitched pinging noise, leaving miles of blessed freedom between us—until the red and blue lights of a highway patrol car blink haphazard signals for us to pull over.
“We’re caught!” I choke, feeling as if I have tripped just before the finish line in the 600-yard race.
“Shhh! Just stay calm and let me handle this.” John gathers his composure.
“Afternoon. Driver’s license, registration, please.” The officer’s voice booms with authority.
“The speed limit on Montana rural highways is fifty-five, Mr. Holmes. This isn’t California, you know.”
“Oh, it is? Why, no, sir. I didn’t know that, sir. It’s seventy-five in California and I, uh, thought…”
“What’s your business here in Montana, sir?”
“My sister lives in Billings. We were visiting for a few weeks. Summer vacation, you know, and now we’re headed home.” John tries to keep his story simple and close to the truth.
“I’ll be right back.” The officer walks back to run John’s license and car tags.
Every second we wait for the patrolman to return, John rhythmically digs his thumb into my palm enough to peel the skin off and, although I feel the pain, I don’t stop him. The sweat from my brow drips pearl-sized beads down my cheeks and rolls cool between my breasts. I look over at John and panic at the sight of his blond roots pushing out from underneath the dark hair dye, and I envision us sent back to California in handcuffs. I know the warrants for our arrest will show up on the police screen somehow. When the cop slowly, carefully returns to our car, checking out the paint job, I am positive he is taking us in.
“Well, uh, Mr. Holmes. I’m not finding any priors…so I’m gonna let you off with a warning this time. From now on, keep to the speed limit and make sure you get this young lady home safely.” He throws a smile my way.
I can’t believe our luck. I smile—a plastic, phony, innocent grin.
“Why, uh, yes, sir. I promise. Sorry ‘bout that.” John’s hillbilly tone is thick with appreciation. We wait for the officer to drive off ahead of us, pretending to let Thor out on the side of the road to pee. John waves, releasing his long-held breath. “That was close…real close!” John whispers without moving his lips.
Why John’s name didn’t come up when the officer radioed it in, I don’t know, but we learn from the stroke of luck. We are on the run from the law now. Not only the law, but the FBI…and this had been a narrow escape. John won’t make the mistake of bringing attention to himself again. Not for driving, anyway.
The Road Through Wonderland: Surviving John Holmes Page 41