Vic smiled at them both, updating their ticket before leaving it on the table. She walked to the counter, again aware of the man’s sideways stare. She opened the glass case and found the thickest slice of the sickly yellow pie. A crack ran along the surface, and a discolored blotch had formed after a full day in the dry heat. Grumpyfarts would complain about it. Vic pulled the can of whipped topping from the fridge and used it to spackle over the less inviting parts of the dessert.
Delivering the pie and finishing her checkup of the diners, Vic returned to her spot behind the counter. She took a moment, leaning against the short wall by the register. She lifted each foot from the floor and rotated her ankles, feeling the blood flow into her achy calves as her back tightened. Her shift would be over in an hour. Then, she’d go home and collapse into bed for a few hours before kiddo needed to get to school.
As she stretched out a kink in her neck, the driver announced the bus would leave in ten minutes. Vic took a deep, calming breath. This final bit of chaos would be the last thing she’d have to put up with tonight. One by one, the seniors lined up at the register, their eyes wide in worry that the driver would abandon them here. She worked through the tickets one at a time. Most of the customers paid in cash, thankfully, and were patient and kind with her.
After a few minutes of hustling at the register, Victoria regarded the remaining customers. Grumpyfarts scowled at her from the back of the line. She met his gaze with a smile. In moments, he’d be out of her life forever.
“May I borrow a pen?”
Vic slammed the register drawer. A reflex. The eye-fucker from the end of the counter. He stood next to the line at the register. The odor of cigarettes stained the air. She handed him a pen from the cup behind the register, nodding back at him. Vic returned her attention to the customer waiting to pay. Behind them, patrons returned to the tables to drop their tips before leaving the diner and her life forever.
“Can you move your ass, sweetheart?” mumbled Grumpyfarts. His fleshy arms folded across his sunken chest. Vic opened her hand for the ticket, and he wadded it into a ball as he gave it to her. She forced her smile as she took the paper, opened it flat, and tallied the cost of their meal. “And you need to comp that pie, given the shitty service!” His wife stood a few feet behind him, face lowered with shame at his behavior.
Vic caught herself before she huffed—a comp would come out of her pay for the night. She needed every penny of that money. “I understand, sir, but we’re short-staffed tonight. We’re doing the best we can, you know?” she offered with a light laugh. For Christ’s sake. This old fart probably had more money in his wallet than she’d seen in three months, and he wanted a slice of pie for nothing.
She rang up the total. The man’s chest puffed out as he leaned into her space. “Listen, sugartits, I’m not paying for the pie. I had to send my meal back twice so Guapo back there could get it right!” Vic’s eyes widened as she turned to the kitchen, finding Samson’s gaze stabbing the old man.
Turning back, Vic forced a smile through her irritation. With a stern voice she said, “I apologize if the service wasn’t up to your expectations, but we don’t comp food on demand here. You order it, you pay for it.” She kept her cool as Grumpyfarts fumed to a shade resembling the roasted beets no one ever ordered.
After a few breaths, the man’s lips pursed in a forced exhalation. “Fine!” he mumbled. He dug his thick paw into his pocket, pulling out a wad of cash. He separated the bills, licking a finger and flattening them out one at a time. Once he had his money organized, he pulled out a few bills and threw them behind the register. They spun around Vic’s head and tumbled on the air until reaching the floor. Vic groaned as she stooped to pick them up. A few minutes more, that’s all she had to endure. As she rose with the collected bills, Vic faced a ten-dollar bill clutched between Mr. Grumpyfart’s talons. Once she saw it, the old man whisked it back into his pocket. “Kiss your fucking tip good-bye!” he laughed.
Victoria cleared the couple’s ticket and offered the man his change. Mr. Grumpyfarts shoved open the diner door and wandered into the night. Behind him, his wife held up a twenty, waving it to capture Victoria’s attention, and set the bill on their table before moving to the door. She stopped long enough to mouth the words, “I’m so sorry.” Then, like a fart in the wind, she disappeared from Vic’s life.
Vic cleared the Grumpyfarts sale and speared the ticket on the spindle. She was ready to clean up, collect her tips, and go home.
A phlegmy rattle pulled her gaze up to the older man from the counter. He stood in front of the register, holding out a few creased dollars to her. He looked tired, or scared, or both. After tonight, Vic wasn’t sure she cared which it was. She made his change for the two drinks, the man’s son calling from the door in a brisk tone, “Get a move on, Pops!”
With his thumb, the father motioned back toward the counter where they had been sitting. “I left you a note,” he creaked. His tone was meek, apologetic. Vic smiled her professional service smile. Jesus Christ, the leering son and now the father leaving her his number, or a lewd comment on a napkin? Would tonight end, please? She watched the last two patrons exit, and the diner became quiet and still.
Vic took a moment to enjoy it. She waited several deep breaths to collect herself, massaging the plaster smile out of her cheeks. She reached under the counter for the dish tub. Rounding to the tables, she stretched her arms and back. She knew how to pack an entire section in a single trip. Larger plates on the bottom, then the smaller plates, bowls stacked to the side, glassware on top, and silverware collected in the drink glasses.
She approached the farthest table from the kitchen. Mr. and Mrs. Grumpyfarts. Remembering the twenty the wife left, her face cracked into a smile. A genuine one. Vic mocked the old man to herself, “Guess who paid for their pie, sugartits!”
She cleared their plates into the tub. Not finding a tip, she felt a pang of disappointment and scanned the table again. She was sure she’d seen the wife leave a twenty. A quick glance at the surrounding booths yielded nothing either. She checked the floor under the table. Nothing. Maybe it stuck to one of their plates? That happened sometimes. She shuffled the dishes in the tub. No money there either.
Figuring it would turn up, she moved on to the next cluttered table. This time she scanned the tabletop to locate her tip before misplacing it. No tip on this table either. Her disappointment deepened. What the hell? She set the tub on an empty table and walked the diner floor, the ache in her legs growing as she checked each messy table, looking for cash.
There was none, anywhere. It made no sense—she’d seen people leaving money for her!
She stood stunned for a moment, unsure whether to trust her memory or her eyes. She scoured the room, looking for anything green. Her eyes landed on the two mugs at the counter. The stinky eye-fucker and his gross father. She walked over, eyes on the stools where they had sat.
No tip. Instead, Vic found a napkin folded in front of the mug of untouched tea. She lifted the thin paper and opened it. For a moment she hoped money would fall out of it. But none did. She saw writing.
This was the note the strange old man had mentioned. She read the clean, straight print: “I’m very sorry. We’ll pay you back in a few days. With interest.”
Chapter 28
Wes
Scraping tips broke something in Pop. He hadn’t been keen on the idea when Wes explained it to him. The way he acted back there at the restaurant in Fort Stockton, it amazed Wes that the waitress didn’t call the police on them. “Just act natural,” Wes had told him, “and I’ll do the heavy lifting.” The pun was intended, but Pop missed it.
Holy Christ, could he have been more rigid? He wouldn’t even look at the waitress, much less talk to her. Wes hadn’t seen Dad touch his tea at all. “Act natural.” Pffft. Maybe Wes should have just kept the plan from him, let Pop enjoy his tea while Wes did the dirty work. Of course, then he risked his dad asking lots of dumb q
uestions. Like he does. It would have drawn unwanted attention. “Where ya goin’, Wes? Whatcha doin’ at that table, Wes? Why are you picking up that money, Wes? That’s not yours, so don’t put it in your pocket, Wes! Aren’t you going to give it back to the hot waitress, Wes? Why are we running away, Wes?”
And what the hell was that note? Wes had almost bitten off his own lip when Pop asked for a pen. Pop threatened to scream that the cops were looking for them, unless Wes got him a goddamned pen. Wouldn’t explain why. So Wes got him a pen, and Pop wrote the waitress a note, promising that he’d pay her back.
His dad might be smart, but it was the same smart as Irene. It was all from books and school, and none of it from knowing people or the way shit got done. Until an hour ago, they had done nothing wrong. Then they committed a petty crime. It might put a bigger spotlight on them, but the waitress would sure as shit remember Pop’s odd behavior. That could come back to bite them in the ass. Wes hoped they could get to Utopia before anyone put together the Silver Alert and the description of the two odd diners who’d scraped tips on their way out the door. They could deal with the slap on the wrist later, but at the moment, Pop was running out of time.
After they were back on the road, Pop summed up their petty crime at almost $150. It would be enough to get them to Utopia and back. For Wes, that was the end of it. One less problem to deal with. But Pop couldn’t let it rest. He sat there silent, plodding, sketching out a list on a napkin from the diner. The location, date, time, and take from their brief adventure. Then he started working out a payback schedule. “To be fair to the waitress,” he kept saying, “to compensate her for the inconvenience.” After a while, he became quiet. His face was wet whenever Wes stole a glance at him, and his breathing was sharp. He never started sobbing, but he turned into a melty, whining mess.
“Pop, it’ll be fine,” Wes consoled. “This is temporary. Fixable. Nothing we can’t deal with later.”
“It doesn’t change the fact that it’s wrong,” Pop lamented. “I mean, I’ve never done anything like that before. Never needed to.”
Wes sighed, “Yeah, well, these are kind of extraordinary times, aren’t they? We wouldn’t have had to do it if Irene hadn’t freaked the fuck out.”
A rising whine escaped Pop’s lips, the sound a kid makes at being treated unfairly. “That’s the thing, though, Wes! Why is this getting so difficult?” He wiped his nose on his unbraced hand. “I mean, the checkpoint? The voice couldn’t tell us about that? Given us a way around it?”
“Yeah but we talked about that and—”
“I know,” Dad interrupted, “but now stealing? It’s getting worse! Why do we have to resort to crimes if we have some larger power on our side? What about that poor waitress? What if she needed this money?”
“Please, Pop,” Wes begged, “just stop! Everything will be fine, okay?” He reached over to take his dad’s hand, finding the hard brace instead of skin. “Remember, this is a loan. A temporary fix. We can pay her back. But we need time to do that. Time we won’t have unless we get you to that kid in Utopia.”
“It’s not right, son.” Wes saw Pop shake his head in the corner of his vision. “This feels wrong.”
Silence marked the next few minutes. Thoughts and excuses bounced inside Wes’s skull. None of them felt helpful now. It didn’t matter. Wes could tell Pop was pretending to sleep to avoid the conversation. That was fine. His father’s mood was temporary too. His cancer was not. Fix Pop, then they’d have time to fix their mistakes.
Another few minutes, and Dad fell asleep, his breathing moving into the deep wet rattle Wes recognized from the hospital. Wes pushed the argument from his head and focused on the road passing beneath them. A steady sixty-five miles per hour, moving them closer and closer to his dad’s salvation. The coffee’s effects were ebbing, the focus of the caffeine turning into a distraction in his bladder. He would need to stop at some point, but he also wanted Pop to get some proper sleep. When he woke, he should feel better about things.
Wes noted the subtle shift of color in the sky, allowing him to find the horizon in the muddy blackness ahead of his headlights. The sun would rise soon. The marked division between land and sky expanded around him, the land pushing up in black swells to prop up the kindling sky. The El Camino’s speed was deceptive, creating lethargic shifts in the inky waves of land.
The sky blushed, as if they’d embarrassed the night with their behavior in the diner. Wes shrugged off the thought, stretching out his shoulders and yawning, taking notice of the dramatic change in the landscape that the coming day was reluctant to reveal. Texas was flat, but it wasn’t without curves. The oranges and reds stained the vegetation all around, giving the night’s flat canvas sudden texture and shape and motion, rising and falling away in long undulations of land painted with ruby shadows and pink highlights. Everything here seemed covered in something living, not like the real desert back home, where dust was king. The rotating blades of dozens of wind turbines became visible on the hills to the north. They twisted with the air, the lackadaisical patterns of light and shadow, rise and fall, mesmerizing Wes. The land glowed pink and then red and then purple, and finally exploded in greens around them.
Wes turned back to the road as the sun thundered over the horizon. The landscape disappeared again, lost in a brilliant haze. He lowered the visor. It blocked out the center of the ball of fire without covering up the road ahead. The asphalt congealed out of the light, forming a solid just yards in front of his car. Wes stared into this transition, where the sun reflected off particles in the road. The steady stream of flashing glints lulled him into a daze.
The El Camino shuddered against the rumble strip on the shoulder. Wes jumped at the adrenaline spike, steering the car back onto the road. Christ, he was tired. He needed to rest too, at least give the sun a chance to get out of their way.
Out of the morning glow, the sign for the exit to Junction appeared. Wes sang his little tune in his head: “El Paso we’ll pass through, across the Van Horn; east to Fort Stockton, and east we go on; Ozona, we’ll own ya, but Junction’s the cap; that’s where we stop to look at the map.”
Junction, Texas. Wes smiled. This was where they would leave the interstate for the state roads that would lead them to Utopia. They were so close.
Wes slid the car onto the exit ramp, scanning the frontage road for a place to stop. Next to a large truck stop sat an off-brand motel. Its marquee contained three words, only one of which Wes cared about: cash or credit. Perfect.
He pulled into the parking lot, slamming the car into park and rubbing the burn from his eyes. They just needed to get through the next day or two. Then they could fix everything with the waitress, Irene, and the cops. Once Pop was healthy again. Once time wasn’t so limited. Whatever he had to do, Wes would get his father to Utopia, and get him healed.
After that, Wes would be grateful to pay whatever bills came due.
Chapter 29
Irene
Irene woke in the shadow of a frantic dream. The sounds were wrong—keyboards, polite conversations. She wasn’t at Dad’s house. This wasn’t the hospital either. The smells weren’t clean enough.
Her eyes peeled open. She blinked through the morning haze, rediscovering the Las Cruces Sheriff’s Office. She was here to pick up Dad. But it wasn’t Dad. Her arm pricked as nerves decompressed and allowed signals to reach her brain. She shook her hand, trying to speed up the process. Her other hand found her phone. She checked for messages or voicemails from Dad or Wes. Nothing.
She revived her laptop and waited for her analysis to come back up. It ran over eight hundred scenarios overnight. Irene paged to the summary report. Seventy-seven percent of the models favored Wes taking Dad west. Most predicted Wes heading to Phoenix or Tucson. It made sense. Farther from the border, prices for drugs would be higher than in, say, El Paso. A few took Wes east, to San Antonio or Houston.
Irene stared at the map. Was she missing something? T
his was where an assumption would bite her in the ass. Would Wes have doubled back north? Irene didn’t think so. Wes was dumb, but he wasn’t an idiot. Reversing toward Truth or Consequences would mean more trouble for him. That assumption felt valid.
Irene scrolled the map up a few inches on her screen. A wide swath of empty white filled her screen. Would Wes have headed south? Into Mexico? None of her models could have considered it, since she didn’t have any data for the country. Her focus sharpened in a moment of panic. He wouldn’t do that, right? Drugs in Mexico were cheap and available. It made little sense for Wes to run there if he was planning to sell them for cash. He wanted to be where the drugs had value.
She could feel the grain of sand in her mind. If she was honest, Irene didn’t know what the Mexican drug trade looked like. She didn’t understand much about it in the States either, but at least she had some data points to work from. The sand grew to a stone as she considered the previous evening. Wes started out with some goal, but Irene messed that up for him with the Silver Alert. Maybe Wes’s goal had changed, then? Evade instead of arrive? Would he run to Mexico? The political border would offer a buffer against the authorities looking for him. Why run for hundreds of miles when you can relax and hide after a few dozen? Then he could wait for the heat to die off before making his way back.
Her heart fell. What if he wasn’t planning on selling the drugs? What if his goal was to use them? If that was the case, why take Dad with him? To milk him for money?
The possibilities were growing out of control. There were too many unknowns, stacking up in a feeble house of cards that had no chance of holding weight. She needed clarity. A place to focus. A single question she could chew up with her mind. A knock on the table pulled her gaze.
It was Officer McHay. Irene smiled at her, but it waned when she didn’t smile back.
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