Paradox Bound

by Peter Clines

  “That was my fault, Officer,” interrupted Eli. He looked over and bent his head to make easy eye contact. “We’re a little punchy from driving. I bet her she could outrun your Charger for a mile.”

  The officer bent slightly to meet Eli’s eyes. “That’s extremely stupid. When an officer gives you a command, you do as he says.”

  “I know,” said Eli. “I realized that pretty quick.”

  “Not quick enough,” said Foster with a snort.

  “I hope the bet was worth it,” said the other officer. He shifted and the glare vanished from his name tag for a moment. Eli saw what looked like LAZNEY written on the little tile.

  Eli looked at Harry with what he hoped was a proper mix of regret and naughtiness. “It would’ve been.”

  Foster snorted again.

  Lazney’s hand came off his pistol and he turned his attention back to Harry. “License and registration, ma’am.”

  Harry adjusted herself and tried to reach inside her coat and around to her back pockets. Eli pictured her pulling out one of her own pistols and shooting the policeman point-blank. The officer must’ve thought of it too, because he tensed and set his hand back on his pistol.

  But her hand came back empty and moved to reach into the coat at chest height. She blinked twice. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, my.”

  Lazney stared down at her.

  She switched hands and reached for the other side of the coat. Her eyes flitted to Eli. “Dearest,” she said, “have you seen my billfold?”

  “I…your wallet? You don’t have it?”

  “No, I can’t find it anywhere.” It was a good performance. Better than his. She patted herself down again.

  “It was on the nightstand at the motel,” said Eli.

  Her eyes widened. She looked back out at Lazney. “My apologies, officer,” she said. “I believe I’ve left it behind at the…the motel.”

  Lazney’s mouth was a flat line. “Registration?”

  “Also in my billfold. Wallet.”

  “You keep your car registration in your wallet?” Foster didn’t bother to hide the sneer in his voice. Lazney shot him a look that confirmed Eli’s suspicions about the other officer.

  “It’s a classic,” said Harry. She reached out to pat the small dash and then gestured at all the open space between Eli’s legs and the windshield. “There’s no glove compartment.”

  Lazney blew some air out of his nose. “And if I was to ask for proof of insurance, ma’am?”

  She put up her hands and shrugged. “Also in the wallet. I’m so sorry.”

  The officer leaned back on his heels. The flat line of his mouth sank into a frown. He glanced at Eli. “What about you?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Got any ID? Or d’you leave your wallet at the hotel too?”

  Harry caught Eli’s eye just before he reached for his back pocket. “Sorry, no,” he said. “I don’t bring my license when she drives.”

  “That so?”

  “To be honest,” said Eli, “I can’t even drive this thing. It’s her baby.”

  “What’s with the Civil War outfit?” asked Foster.

  Eli stopped himself from rolling his eyes. “Revolutionary War, actually,” he said.

  “So what’s with it?”

  “Car shows,” said Eli. “That’s where we’re going. Lots of people dress up to go with their car.”

  “How’s a Revolutionary War outfit go with a Model T?” asked Lazney.

  “I just like the outfit,” Harry said. “Besides, frock coats are always fashionable.”

  Lazney blew more air out of his nose. His trigger finger slid down and tapped the side of his leg just in front of his holster. “Where are you headed?”

  “Like I said,” Eli answered, “a car show.”

  “Where?”

  “Las Vegas,” he said, hoping they were aimed somewhat at Las Vegas.

  “But first we’ll have to double back to get my wallet,” said Harry. “We’re lucky you stopped us, Officer. We might’ve been stranded in Las Vegas with no money and no identification.”

  Lazney raised his head to look over the car at Foster. Eli guessed they were mouthing words to each other. Harry caught Eli’s eye and gave a small shake of her head

  Lazney tapped the Model A’s roof twice. “Wait here,” he said to them.

  “Don’t even think about starting the car,” added Foster.

  “As I said before,” Harry chimed, “I can’t start it without getting out to turn the crank.”

  The officer grunted. The two men took a few steps back behind the car and started talking.

  Eli leaned in to whisper but Harry held up a finger. She turned her head, aiming her ear back. Her eyes closed. Eli glanced at the two officers through the rear window and tried to catch their words.

  “—ole thing stinks,” said Lazney.

  Foster muttered something Eli half heard, half lip read as It’s Zen.

  Lazney said something about probable cause and warrants.

  Foster shook his head again and spoke loud and clear. “They match the description.”

  Harry’s eyes snapped open. She flicked two switches on the dashboard. The engine burped once and turned over.

  “Hey!” shouted Lazney.

  Eli glanced back as Harry floored it. The officer was in midstride toward them. Foster already had his pistol out and was moving to get a clear shot.

  The Model A lunged forward. The first gunshot missed, but Eli shrank down as the second one thunked into the car. A low gurgle came from the back. “Damnation,” swore Harry. “He’s hit the reserve.”

  Then they were over a rise and out of sight. She worked the gears again and the Model A accelerated even more. Eli guessed they were close to top speed.

  She glanced at him crouching in the leg space. “While you’re down there, Mr. Teague,” she said, “there’s a small package in the door’s side panel you could grab. Brown paper, red string.”

  He blinked and twisted around. What he’d thought was just a mass of crumpled paper for insulation turned out to be four or five small parcels with color-coded string. There were two with red string, each the size of a hardcover book. “Does it matter which one?”

  Harry glanced in the side mirror and shook her head. “Quickly, please.” The siren grew loud behind them.

  He pulled the packet free of the door and sat up. It shifted and bent in his hands, as if loose chain links filled the paper bundle, or a few of the cast-iron bar puzzles that showed up now and then at the tavern across from the bank. “What do I do with it?”

  “Throw it up on the roof!”

  “What?” he looked over his shoulder. The police cruiser was two hundred yards away, tops, and gaining fast.

  “Throw it onto the roof!”

  He reached up through the window with the package, balancing it on one hand. The wind whipped at his sleeve. The bag shifted on his fingers.

  She slapped his leg. “Throw it!”

  Eli tried to judge speed and height and then heaved the parcel into the air. It vanished from sight for an instant and then he saw it through the back window, tumbling away behind them. “Dammit!”

  “Perfect,” said Harry.

  The packet exploded on the pavement, already a good thirty feet behind them. Eli saw what looked like black crosses bounce and tumble on the road. Sunlight glinted on some of them.

  Then the Charger ran over them and its front tires exploded. A moment later the driver’s side sagged in the back. The rims chewed through the rubber rags and sparked off the highway. Lazney or Foster, whoever was behind the wheel, steered into the slide like a pro. The police car crossed the far lane and came to a halt on the opposite shoulder in a cloud of dirt and dust.

  And then the Model A was over a rise and the police vanished from sight.

  Eli settled back onto the bench and took a deep breath. “Oh, fuck.”

  “Nicely done,” Harry said.

  “What was that thing? The pack
age.”

  “Just a bag of sixteen-penny nails. A blacksmith bent them all at right angles, and a shipbuilder welded pairs of them into stars so they’d land with a point up.”

  “There’s a word for those,” Eli said. “Those spike things that blow out tires.”

  She nodded. “There is. I’ve forgotten it.”

  “Me too,” said Eli. He looked over his shoulder. “Why didn’t we use them before?”

  “Before?”

  “When the faceless men were chasing us.”

  Harry snorted. “There’d be no point. They’d just dodge them.”

  “You can’t dodge a hundred spikes on the road. Not in a car.”

  “They have certainty, Mr. Teague. You would be truly amazed at what it lets them do.”

  He shook his head and glanced back again as the Model A crested another low slope. He caught a glimpse of the distant police car and a stick figure moving around it. “We should probably get off the road. Maybe lay low for a while. They’re probably on the radio right now, setting up a roadblock or something.” He waited for a reaction. “It means they can talk to other officers who are a long dist—”

  “I know what a radio is, Mr. Teague.”

  He bit back his first response. “Of course you do. Sorry.”

  She glanced at him. “They can’t tell other cars about us because it would attract attention. I’d wager they were told to avoid attention.” She dipped her head back over her shoulder. “One of them probably walked in, flashed his badge, and just gave instructions to whoever was on duty.”

  “One of them,” Eli repeated. “By which you mean…”

  “You know who I mean.”

  He sucked another deep breath in between his teeth. “What the hell are they?”

  Harry adjusted her fingers on the steering wheel. An orange light flickered twice on the dashboard and then lit up. Just below it a small gauge bobbed up and down, back and forth between ¼ and 0. It settled closer to 0. “I’ll need fuel soon,” she said. She glanced at Eli.

  “Okay,” he said. “Do you need me to chip in or something?”

  “No.”

  “Do you need gasoline in the car to tell me about the faceless men?”

  “The car doesn’t run on gasoline.”

  “That’s not really an answer.”

  She bit back a sigh. “It’s not a question that offers simple answers, Mr. Teague.”

  “Maybe a quick summary?”

  She glanced at him. “It’s complicated.”

  He waved at the freeway ahead of them. “We’ve got time to kill.”

  “Very complicated.”

  Eli snorted.

  She looked ahead. “Let me find a safe place to refuel,” she said, “and I’ll tell you what I know.”

  11

  The Model A ate up another mile or two of desert highway. To Eli’s eyes, most of the small signs seemed to be random numbers. Mile markers, he supposed. Local highway designations.

  The town clung low to the ground, like heat shimmering on pavement. At first, when it came into view in the distance, Eli mistook it for scattered slabs of rock covering the plain. As the Model A got closer and details accumulated, many of the buildings looked like mobile homes that had been converted into oblong cottages. Here and there he spotted two trailers fused together. Low ranch-style houses and a few one-story brick buildings made up the rest of the town, maybe fifty structures in all, laid out in a crooked grid with a decent amount of space around them.

  The sun had bleached every building to whites, grays, and faded tans. As the town drew closer Eli could see the skeletal remains of half a dozen or so structures, like the remains of a bomb testing site or some half-forgotten war zone. The phone poles stood apart with no cables connecting them. One close to the freeway had a distinct lean to it.

  “Where are we?”

  “Unless I’m mistaken,” Harry said, “that’s the Nevada state line right over there.” She pointed at the far side of the plain, where a distant, billboard-sized sign stood near the highway. “If you’re asking about the town, I’m afraid I don’t know its name off the top of my head.”

  The Model A crossed over a low bridge. Eli wouldn’t have even noticed it except for the sign telling him he was crossing a river with a name he couldn’t wrap his tongue around. At least half a dozen holes punctured the sign, the same kind of holes he saw all the time through the isolated signs of his own small town. He turned back and saw a thin stream of water a foot or two lower than the highway. It ran through a wide drainpipe under the pavement.

  The road bent and Eli felt a shift. Momentum tugged his stomach to the left. A lifetime of New England winters made him tense as the wheels spun on the pavement for a few seconds. Harry twisted the steering wheel into the skid, and Eli felt the wheels grab, slip, and grab again. Then the Model A seized the road and continued toward the town.

  Eli twisted around to look at the road behind them. “What’d we hit?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No, I mean, what was on the road?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing.”

  He sighed and settled back on the rumble seat. The pavement on this stretch looked dark and new. Lines hadn’t even been painted on it yet. An oil patch would be almost invisible against the fresh asphalt.

  A few more details appeared as they closed in on the town. A small diner-style restaurant sat near the main road. A gas station stood next to it, still displaying the older red-orange circle logo with GULF in dark blue letters. A moment later he picked out a wooden sign that read MARKET on one of the brick buildings. Another one had a bright-white mailbox out front.

  A black car with huge tail fins pulled into the gas station ahead of them. Eli tried to get a better look at the front, because the rear window and taillights made him think it might be a 1959 Cadillac coupe in gorgeous condition. He knew old cars lasted better in drier climates, but the Caddy looked amazing. “You just passed the gas station.”

  “I am aware of that.”

  “Do you think there’ll be another one in a town this size?”

  “Help me find a church,” said Harry, ignoring the question. “Or maybe a house that looks like no one’s home.”

  His gaze drifted up an approaching phone pole. Three wires stretched across the arms at the top, mere threads against the blue sky. He glanced back, couldn’t spot the leaning pole, and wrote it off as an optical illusion caused by the surrounding hills.

  The town made a much better impression up close than it did at a distance. About thirty or forty years out of date, but it still looked pretty nice. It probably wasn’t that different from Sanders, Eli realized. There were people on the streets. A few carried bags. One had a briefcase. Most of them glanced at the Model A as it drove by, but it held the attention of only a few, and even those for just a few seconds.

  A powder-blue car passed them, and Eli craned his head to follow it. The driver noticed and gave a polite smile and nod. “I think that was a ’58 Edsel Corsair,” Eli said.

  “Focus, Mr. Teague.”

  He cleared his throat. “We’re looking for a church?”

  “Please.”

  “Do you remember the time we met at the church, back in Sanders?”

  “Of course I do,” she said. “It wasn’t that long ago for me. Barely two months.”

  Eli gestured out at the Model A’s hood. “You were working on the engine.”

  “And you were looking down my shirt.”

  “Well, I…” His tongue fumbled in his mouth. “I didn’t mean to. I was thirteen and I didn’t even know you were a girl. A woman.”

  She shook her head. “Oh, Mr. Teague, you silver-tongued devil.”

  He sighed and shook his head. “You told me the car ran on water. That it had a Garrett carburetor.”

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  “Yes, that’s what you said?”

  “Yes to all of it.”

  Eli shook his head again. “The Garrett carburetor’
s an urban legend.”

  “An urban legend with a US patent.”

  “The patent doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “His design doesn’t work.”

  “Well, then, I guess Eleanor doesn’t work either.”

  “The car’s name is Eleanor?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s what…her original owner named her. He saw it in a motion picture.”

  “So how does Eleanor have a working Garrett carburetor?”

  Harry pointed at a house that looked like a poor man’s attempt to copy a Craftsman home. “No one’s cut that lawn in almost a month,” she said. “Almost a dozen newspapers between the porch and driveway. Someone’s out of town.”

  “Or lazy.”

  Harry smirked. “I’ve done this once or thrice before. You get a feel for lazy over absent.”

  She circled the block, but when they came up on the house again there was a man in a white hat and retro cardigan walking a small dog. They drove past, and the terrier crouched on the front lawn between two tall dandelions. The man yawned and looked at his watch.

  “Definitely no one home,” Harry said as they circled the block again. “Might even be a bad house.”

  “Maybe he just hates his neighbor.”

  Harry shook her head. “If he thought he was getting away with something, he’d be watching out to make sure he does get away with it. He didn’t even notice this fine automobile driving by.”

  “Yeah,” murmured Eli. His eyes stayed on the 1959 Dodge Lancer parked in the driveway next door.

  They circled around a third time. The man with the dog was at the far end of the block. A woman across the street and two houses down emptied a mailbox. Harry’s chin dipped approvingly and she pulled into the driveway.

  She was out of the car before the engine stopped rattling. “Open the tank for me, please, Mr. Teague,” she called over her shoulder. Her coat fluttered behind her as she strode over to the loose coil of rubber. “Dust and cobwebs,” she said, pointing at the hose. “It’s a bad house, as I said.”

  Eli opened the door. “And that’s…good?” He slid out the door and reached across the hood for the gas cap. It popped off in his hand and he glanced at the rubber seal. Definitely aftermarket.