Triple Threat

by Jeffery Deaver

  For Christsake, you might've ducked at least.

  The fist had glanced off bone and hadn't caused any serious damage, though it loosened a tooth and laid open some skin.

  Six other patrons--two older couples and two single Cat-capped workers--watched with straight-faced amusement.

  "She got you good," offered the medic, in a low voice, so the sheriff didn't hear.

  "It was the wreck, stuff flying everywhere." He looked out the window at the damaged Winnebago. The medic looked, too. And, okay, it didn't seem all that damaged. "Things flew around."

  "Uhn," he grunted.

  "A boom box." He decided not to mention the beer bottles.

  "We're trained to look for certain contusions and abrasions. Like, for domestic situations."

  She barely tapped me, Pellam thought and wobbled the tooth again.

  The driver stood with her arms crossed. The hat was back on. The brown was set off by a small green feather. She gazed back as she spoke to the sheriff; the beige-uniformed man towered over her and his weight, not insignificant, was a high percentage muscle. Probably the only peace officer in whatever town this was; Pellam had passed a welcome-to sign but that had been just as the emergency brake pad had pungently melted and he hadn't had the inclination to check out the name and population of the place where he was about to die. He guessed it was maybe a thousand souls.

  As the sheriff jotted in a small notebook Pellam studied the woman. She was calm now and he thought again how beautiful she looked.

  Pale eyes, dark eyebrows.

  Two red knuckles on her right hand.

  She and the sheriff stood next to the cash register, an old-time hand-crank model. The diner itself was a real relic, too. Aluminum trim, paint-spatter Formica countertops, black-and-white linoleum diamonds on the floor. Arterial blood red for the vinyl upholstery--booth and stool.

  The man who'd been in the passenger seat of the Ford stepped out of the washroom, still wearing a cautious smile. He was dressed in dark, baggy clothes--the sort you'd see in TriBeCa or on Melrose in West Hollywood. Pellam--for whom the line between movies and reality was always a little hazy--thought immediately that he could have stepped right out of a Quentin Tarantino or Robert Rodriguez flick. He wore no-nonsense hiking boots. Clutching his backpack, he laughed nervously again. To Pellam he nodded a rueful glance--the sort soldiers might exchange when they've just survived their first firefight. His hair was cut flat on the top, short on the sides--the kind of cut Pellam associated with characters in the comic books of his childhood; he mentally dubbed the man Butch.

  Was she his wife? Girlfriend, sister? She wore a wedding ring but was easily ten years older. Not that that meant anything nowadays--if it ever had. Pellam was experienced, but not particularly successful, in the esoterica of romance. His job didn't allow much room for relationships.

  Or that's what he told himself.

  The medic pressed a bandage on his jaw. "You're good to go. Keep your guard up."

  "It was a--"

  "Then against dangerous entertainment devices." The man nodded a farewell to the sheriff, shoved a chaw in his mouth and left with his fix-'em-up bag.

  Pellam rose unsteadily and walked toward the driver and sheriff, who said, "Everybody, pull out some tickets for me, if you would."

  Butch said evenly, "Yessir. Here you go." A moment's pause as he dug through his wallet, which was thick with scraps of paper. Pellam noted his license was Illinois. Taylor was his real name. Pellam was somehow disappointed at this.

  "Don't look much like you," the sheriff said, examining the license.

  "I didn't have a beard then." Pointing to the picture. "Or short hair."

  "Can see that. I ain't blind. Still don't look like you."

  "Well..." Taylor offered, for no particular purpose.

  "This your current residence? Chicago?"

  "For the time being. Where I get my mail."

  The sheriff took Pellam's license, too, which contained a picture that did look like him. Still, the sheriff frowned slightly, perhaps at the word on the top, California. You saw a lot of Californians in Telluride and Vail and Aspen. Probably not a lot down here in this neck of the woods.

  The door opened and a woman walked in. She looked around. "Hey, Sheriff. Everybody all right?"

  Pellam squinted. It was the bicyclist they'd nearly squashed. Frizzy blond hair, massive curls. The helmet was gone. She was short and stocky. The bicycle latex revealed serious thighs. She'd taken off her sunglasses and was scanning them all with green eyes--Pellam in particular, probably because of the bandage. A spattering of sun-enhanced freckles dusted her face.

  Somebody had come to pick her up. The bike was racked on the roof of an old battered car, a man in the driver's seat. Short hair, lightish colored, but Pellam couldn't make out any details of the driver. He was preoccupied with something else--the camper, it seemed.

  "Lis," the sheriff said, glancing their way. "Fine. More or less. That Chris with you?" A nod toward the car.

  "That's right."

  She explained that she was a witness, not mentioning that she'd nearly been run down. "Happy to give a statement if you want."

  "Good of you to come forward," Werther said. "Most people wouldn't've."

  "I figured you'd track me down sooner or later. Didn't want to be leaving the scene of an accident."

  "Go ahead. Tell me what you saw."

  She gave a pretty accurate description. He jotted a few notes, every fifth or sixth word, it seemed. This was apparently the investigation of the year.

  "That's helpful, Lis. Thanks. And why don'tcha give them one of our cards. For their insurance companies."

  A little hesitation, as if she hadn't counted on this level of attention.

  She dug into a massive purse, found some cards and gave them out. Lis and Chris were the codirectors of the Southeastern Colorado Ecological Center. Seemed a little odd that such a group was based here, since vegetation was sparse and the human footprint minimal.

  "Scared the you know what out of me."

  "I'm sure," Pellam said. "Sorry about that."

  The driver was silent. She didn't seem to care. She pulled a cell phone from her pocket, looked at the screen. Pellam was impressed. Hers was one of those new fancy ones where you didn't need to tug the antenna up.

  She put the phone back.

  "Thought you guys were racing at first, but then I saw what happened. Brakes went?"

  "Mine, yeah," Pellam said.

  "Good thing there was nobody in the oncoming lane."

  That was sure true. Though there hadn't been much traffic going in any direction on barren State Route 14. Not here, where it was close to a hundred miles to any kind of town.

  Lis was cute and maternal. Pellam guessed her first reason for coming here was in fact to see if anyone was hurt, rather than cover her ass about leaving the scene.

  "Thanks to you. And Chris," the sheriff said, looking out the door toward the old car, a Toyota. Had to be twenty years old. The gloss was gone from the paint entirely.

  Pellam played out a scenario that the group had been threatened because they protested land use or something or because they were hippies and Sheriff Werther had stood up for them.

  It would have made a bad scene in a movie and it was surely not true. But that was the way Pellam's mind worked. He wrung stories from dry rocks.

  The earth-mother left, climbed in the car and they sped away, she and Chris.

  Without a word the sheriff stepped outside to write down VINs and to radio in the details and see who was who and what was what.

  The driver got a coffee, not asking if anybody else wanted any. She paid with steady hands. "Look," she said softly. "I'm sorry I hit you. I wasn't thinking... The pickup was a birthday present. Just last week. It's got eight hundred miles on it."

  Pellam thought about making a joke that out here that meant two trips to the grocery store and one to Blockbuster.

  But he didn't, mostly becau
se she didn't sound particularly sorry she'd slugged him.

  " 'S'okay," he said automatically as his tongue poked a loose tooth. "I didn't really get the impression you were out for blood."

  Though he happened to be tasting some at that moment.

  He added, "It was a boom box hit me. That's what happened." He nodded toward the sheriff.

  "Thanks. I get carried away sometimes."

  The pain was starting now. Probably more than boom box pain.

  Then the issue of assault was gone and she looked impatiently at her watch.

  It seemed an appropriate time for intros. Her name turned out to be Hannah Billings. "With an 'h.' "

  A back-end h. "I'm John Pellam. This isn't a line--but I have to say I've never met a Hannah before. Pretty name."

  It conjured up a heroine in a World War II film, a resistance fighter, wearing a tight frock, whatever a frock might be.

  Taylor brushed his butch hair and said, "It's a palindrome. Her name."

  "A...?"

  "A word that's spelled the same backward and forward. 'Madam, I'm Adam,' " he said. "I wrote an entire poem in palindromes once."

  Poem...

  Hannah said, "And this is Taylor..."

  The poet filled in, "Duke."

  More relationship mystery.

  "As in the Duke. Being out here makes you think of old-time Westerns, doesn't it?"

  Hannah had no clue what he was talking about.

  How could somebody not know John Wayne?

  "So everybody okay?" Taylor asked. "That was freaky, I mean. Seeing the road doing that turn, what's it called? A...?"

  "Switchback," Hannah offered and dumped sugar into her coffee. "Yeah, I'm fine. I've had worse." As if Pellam were an afterthought. "You?"

  "I used to be a stuntman. I've had worse."

  "Stuntman." She was curious.

  Taylor, too: "Wow. Hollywood?"

  "Yep."

  "Fascinating." He dug into his massive backpack for a notebook and wrote something down on the stained, limp pages.

  Hannah muttered to him, "Didn't quite work out the way you'd hoped, looks like."

  He shrugged. "Not your fault." Taylor had a bulky presence but he seemed like a pretty soft-hearted guy.

  There was a formality between the two of them. Pellam just couldn't figure out their relationship. She had a Colorado license, he'd noted. And Taylor Illinois. Was he a distant relative?

  Taylor looked around, offering a faint laugh. "This place is something. A real diner. It oughta be in black and white. Like an old TV show."

  Pellam quoted. " 'You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas... You've just crossed over into... the Twilight Zone."

  "Controlling the vertical and the horizontal," Taylor replied. Pellam believed that was a different show. But nodded anyway.

  The woman completely ignored them. She took her coffee outside to make another cell phone call.

  Taylor, the film-and TV-loving poet, went for some coffee, too, sitting down at the counter. He smiled, more friendly than flirtatious, at one of the waitresses: the younger of the two, a slim woman in a white uniform, which was only slightly jelly-marred. Rita, if Pellam read the scripty typeface above her left breast correctly. Taylor ordered, adding, "How 'bout this diner, isn't it totally authentic?" And, "Man, a real piece of America." She glanced at him as if he'd told her he'd just seen Elvis mountain biking through the pines and went off silently to pour his coffee. It arrived in a chipped white mug that must've weighed close to a pound.

  Pellam watched Hannah smoking half a cigarette, quickly. She returned inside, waving her hand about her to shoo away the smoke, as if trying to get rid of the evidence. It told Pellam her husband or some other family member wanted her to give up the habit, and, while she was courteous about the practice, she wasn't going to stop.

  She seemed more impatient yet, staring out toward the sheriff, hunched over his cruiser calling the incident in to points unknown. Finally she joined Pellam.

  "I tried to get around you," he said.

  "I know, I saw." Again, studying the sheriff.

  Pellam reflected: Pale eyes but a great tan. Dark and rich, without a single crow's foot to show for it. Taylor was tan, too, but only hands, face, and part of his neck. The rest was pale as paper. It told Pellam he spent a lot of time outside but wearing most of his clothes.

  Ah, he deduced: hitchhiker. Made sense, that tan and the backpack. And those boots. Really serious boots.

  But would a single woman have picked up a man who outweighed her by seventy pounds or so?

  A woman with that right hook like she had was clearly somebody who could handle herself.

  And as for her tan--it seemed to be everywhere. Which was, to John Pellam, an interesting matter for imaginative speculation.

  The sheriff returned and looked over the threesome without suspicion or disdain. Still, he was a pro and there were questions to be asked. He asked Pellam, "You been drinking, sir?"

  Ah, welcome to Gurney.

  Pellam finally scored the name of the town; it was on the sheriff's shoulder.

  Hell of a name for a place. Wasn't that some kind of medical stretcher?

  "Brakes went."

  "So you say. Didn't answer my question."

  "Then the answer is: No. Last drink I had was a beer..."

  "Sure it wasn't two?" the law enforcer asked wryly.

  "How's that?"

  "S'all anybody ever drinks. Two beers. A fella'll tank down a fifth of Old Crow and when we pull him outa the wreck he says he's only had two beers. What they always say. Now, how many'd you really have?"

  This was pretty funny, Pellam thought. As a follower of COPS, it was true.

  "One beer and it was yesterday."

  "Yessir. We'll just have you breathe into our little magic box. You object to that?"

  "Not at all."

  "He hasn't been drinking," Taylor said. "You could tell."

  It was a Land's End knapsack he held. He kneaded it with long fingers that could have used a good scrubbing. The backs of his hands were tanned, the palms pink.

  "Doesn't really matter what he seemed to you, sir. We'll let science string him up. Or not. As the case may be."

  "Then let's do it," Pellam said agreeably.

  In the end the Sheriff settled for a little heel and toe walk, along the checkerboard of the diner floor, and the law enforcer was satisfied with the result. "I just don't want to see any empties in the front of a vehicle, you understand me? I--"

  "They--"

  "--even if they got themselves propelled there by the quote force of the impact."

  Pellam kind of liked this sheriff and--as a stranger in a lot of towns--he'd come under some scrutiny in his day.

  "And your jaw? How'd that happen?"

  Pellam looked him in the eye, "Boom box."

  "Rap?"

  "What?"

  "You were listening to rap on a boom box and you fell?"

  "You can listen to anything on a boom box. I was listening to country."

  "And...?" He pointed to the bandage.

  "It hit me in the face when we went off the road."

  "Okay." Said in the way that cops always say, "Okay." Like they don't exactly believe you and they don't exactly not believe you. Then he took in the driver. "You're from Hamlin. And Billings? You Ed Billings's wife?"

  "That's right. You know Ed?"

  "Not personal. Know some folks who've retired to one of his developments? Paso Verde."

  "That's a big one, yeah." She looked at her watch. "Popular."

  "And what's your story, sir?"

  Taylor said, "I'm headed to Berkeley."

  "Colorado?"

  "California. Taking a poetry course there."

  "Okay."

  "I'm hitching from Denver to Hamlin."

  Hannah said, "I was driving back from some meetings in Colorado Springs. The Ford had a flat and he fixed it for me."

  "You have
business in Hamlin?" the sheriff asked.

  "I'm getting the Amtrak there. To Oakland."

  "Rather than from Denver."

  "Yup."

  "You got money for the train, why're you hitchin'?" the sheriff asked.

  Pellam thought these questions, while delivered pleasantly, were a bit intrusive, directed as they were to a man who, in this particular scenario, was an innocent bystander. But Taylor was happy to talk. "The experience of it." He gave his enthusiastic little laugh again. "I'd hitch all the way if I had time. I mean, the whole point of life is experience. Right?"

  "You're not thumbing on the interstate, are you?"

  "Ramps only," Taylor said automatically. With a grin. He'd been through this before.

  The sheriff looked at Hannah, who didn't know the drill ahead of time, but caught on. She said sourly, "I was on Fourteen when I had the flat."

  Route 14--the highway where the pickup/camper run-in occurred.

  "Okay. Now, I'm not writing anybody up."

  "Thank you, officer," Taylor said. Though, once again, Pellam had no clue what he might get written up for. He was acting so easygoing that Pellam knew his pack had to be drug free.

  Hannah didn't say thanks; her beautiful but severe face gave off the message: I got rear-ended in my birthday truck. Why the hell was a citation even an issue?

  Licenses and registrations were redistributed. Except Pellam's. Which the sheriff thumbed slowly. "Now you, sir."

  "The brakes went."

  "I said I'm not citing anybody. But on that, you know you have an obligation to check your equipment."

  Pellam didn't think he'd ever looked at a brake line. He doubted he could recognize one.

  "What I'm curious about is, are you making movies here?"

  When the sheriff had checked the VIN on the Winnebago's dash he must have seen the Colorado Film Board's location permit.

  "That's right. I'm a location scout for a film company based in L.A."

  "Really?" Hannah asked, her curiosity piqued for the first time and sour attitude on hold. Pellam got this a lot. He wondered if she'd ask for a walk-on part. He had an amusing image of her as a femme fatale; she had the right look and spirit to be a really good bad girl. Sexy, too, which was another requirement. In fact, he was scouting for a film noir at the moment, an indie titled Paradice.

  "And you're setting it here?" she asked.

  "Well, I was going to recommend it. Came across this place east of here fifteen miles or so. What's it called? Devil's...?"