Nobody Move, page 10
He heard the truck’s door open and close. Luntz got up slowly but without any effort. Sally came toward him with the shotgun. Luntz watched him with only peace in his heart.
“It isn’t loaded.”
“Want to bet?” Sally’s head and shoulders whipped like a dancer’s—klick-ack!—and he directed the gun at Luntz.
“How much?”
“Fucking Luntz. You’ll bet on anything.”
As Luntz walked toward Sally, he heard the tiny click of hammer on pin in the empty gun.
Sally handed the weapon over and Luntz tossed it into the truck through the window and got in and turned the engine over and cut on the headlights.
“I can’t walk from here!”
“It’s downhill all the way.”
Sally stood in the headlights with his hand raised before his eyes. Luntz backed the truck up slowly to a spot where he could turn it around, and left him.
Luntz thought they’d taken the only road in, but now he came to a fork and without slowing down took the way that looked less rutted, and soon another fork, and now he had no idea where he was. Somewhere between himself and the river he’d find the main road, that’s all he knew. As long as he didn’t get turned around entirely, he was all right. He looked at his watch—it was scabbed with soil and clotted blood. He spat and polished it against his pants leg. The dial said 4:00 a.m., but its face was smashed.
The morning was bright and he’d seen miles of dirt byways before he found the paved one and turned downhill toward the restaurant.
•
Mary’s cell phone started beeping, and Gambol opened his eyes and said, “Fuck him,” and when it stopped beeping he and Mary went back to sleep, and when it beeped again he reached over for it and found the button and said, “Fuck you.”
Juarez said, “You didn’t call.”
“How did you like the moon?”
“What moon?”
“Did you see the moon last night?”
“I’m in Alhambra. There’s no moon. Did you accomplish a certain errand?”
“Accomplish? On what information? Fucked-up information.”
“You’re saying no. Things aren’t complete.”
“No. Just maybe the other guy.”
“The person with the lady’s name.”
“Right. I never found any stairs. Where were the stairs?”
“Okay. New plan. Don’t look back.”
“No. Where were the fucking stairs?”
“It’s in the past. We move on. We take care of this another way.”
Gambol said, “I never found any stairs,” and tossed the phone against the wall across the bedroom. Beside him, Mary stirred but seemed to be asleep. Probably pretending. Gambol closed his eyes.
He dreamed he was skiing down a slope stark naked before a crowd of sideliners, freezing cold but with a large, friendly hard-on. When he woke he found he’d thrown the covers off, and he was still cold, and his large friend was still with him.
He pulled off his boxers with one hand and gripped Mary’s shoulder with the other, and as he nuzzled his groin against the backs of her thighs she turned his way with her eyes closed, and she smiled.
“The last twenty-four hours have been nothing but fucked,” he told her as she opened her eyes. “The next twenty-four hours start right now.”
•
Something came at Anita in the darkness, maybe the headlight of a train, but it was only the door to the waking world. As she drifted toward the door, it banged open. Jimmy stood framed in it, pointing a shotgun at her.
Lying on her back on the bed, she pushed herself up onto her elbows. Her thoughts dragged behind, and even as she stared at him she said, “Who’s there?”
He shut the door and locked it. “Where were you?”
She tried to remember.
He threw the shotgun onto the bed and lifted his duffel bag from the floor and slammed it down beside her. “Where have you been since Wednesday?”
“Down by the Feather River.”
“The Feather River’s right out the back door.”
“A different part. My part.”
“For two days? Three days?”
He started snatching red cylinders from the duffel and slipping them into the shotgun.
She managed to swing her legs around and get her feet on the floor. “Please don’t do that.”
“It’s empty.”
“Then leave it empty.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want to be in a room with you and me and a loaded gun.”
“Your gun’s loaded.” Now he took a rusty church key from the refrigerator door. His actions made no sense to her. He said, “Right? You have your gun?”
“Yeah. Yes.”
He gripped one of the shells, pried an end of it open with the church key, and spilled a lot of ball bearings onto the mattress. “There’s ten—eleven—fuck. Where do they go? Where do they go when you shoot the fucking gun?”
He put the shotgun in the duffel and started to zip it and paused, putting his hand to his mouth.
“When did you start sucking your thumb?”
“It hurts.” Jimmy looked all around as if his thoughts were attacking him. “We have to go.”
“I can’t move.”
“What?”
“I’m tired. And you’re all dirty. You’re filthy. You look like a farmer.”
“So do you. Were you sleeping under a bridge?”
“I didn’t sleep.”
Jimmy stood in the bathroom door and looked at the mirror and said, “Jesus.”
Sitting on the bedside, she let her head hang.
“Open your eyes.” He gripped her by the chin. “Here’s the plan. You shower for two minutes. I’ll find us some clothes downstairs. Then I’ll shower for two minutes.”
“Why are you crying?”
“I’m not crying. Get in the shower.”
“Jesus Christ, Jimmy, there’s snot on your face.”
“Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.”
She stepped under the shower and would have stayed forever, but the bulb in the ceiling blew, and in the dimness under the falling water she thought she saw fireflies clambering from the drain and coming at her face, and she left the stall quickly. She lay on the mattress without looking for a towel and didn’t realize she was falling asleep until something woke her.
Jimmy stood over her in a pair of jeans too short for his legs and too wide for his waist. “Move, honey.” He tossed her a bundle of flannel and denim, and she dressed in jeans and a lumberman’s shirt while he jerked her this way and that, trying to help her, and at the same time babbling math:
“We have ten percent of a plan. We go to see the judge. We take his half. That’s half a million plus for each of us. We put it in two accounts and go in two separate directions. You can deal with your husband or not—that’s later. I’m out of that one.”
“These pants won’t stay up.”
“Use my belt. Where’s your purse? Just give it to me.” He yanked the shotgun from the duffel. “Okay. We’re gone.”
“Gone where?”
“There’s no way to go,” he said, “but the way we’re going. I know how it ends, but there’s no other way.”
“Why?”
“Because Gambol did a bad thing. Let’s go.”
On the stairs down, Jimmy turned to her and said, “What about your shoes?”
“I don’t need shoes.” She got past him on the stairs.
“Don’t you have shoes?”
“I’ve got feet.” She passed the door to the restaurant. It stood wide open.
“Not the Caddy,” Jimmy said. “The truck.” Her bare feet changed course and took her to the truck.
“In. In. In.”
Jimmy tossed the shotgun on the floorboards at her feet. He still held her purse. He took the Caddy’s keys from it and threw the purse in her lap, shut the door in her face and went over to the Caddy and slapped the keys down on the vinyl roof.
As he climbed into the seat beside her he said, “Make it easy for the next owner.” He leaned wearily against the steering wheel as he started the truck.
•
Gambol woke to the smell of food. Daylight leaked around the curtains into the room. Mary’s cell phone, he saw, had returned to its charger on the nightstand. He took it in his fist and rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand and said, “Fuck.”
He called O’Doul’s, and a woman answered: “Dooley’s. What.”
“Juarez. That’s what.”
“The name is not familiar.”
“Get Juarez. It’s Gambol.”
“He’s not here.”
“I said this is Gambol. Get him.”
“He’s really not here. He went north.”
“North where?”
“North. That’s all he said.”
“When did he leave?”
“I don’t know. Real early.”
“Who’s with him?”
“The Tall Man.”
“Nobody else?”
“Just the Tall Man. Isn’t that enough?”
He went out to find Mary in the kitchen in her shorty robe, standing over a fry pan with a cigarette jutting from her lips, humming a tune. “Steak and eggs,” she said, “and guess what? Champagne.”
“Juarez is coming up.”
“Up where?”
“Up here.”
“Shit. Here? Shit.”
“Yeah. And the Tall Man.”
“Is that monster still with him?”
“That monster’s always been with him.”
“Was he always like that? Born like that?”
Gambol said, “You mean tall?”
Mary laughed as if nothing was funny. “How did his face get like that?”
Gambol looked at the bloody hunks sizzling in the pan and said, “I’m not hungry.”
•
Luntz pushed it hard, making sure he heard the tires on every curve. If a cop lit him up, he’d steer it off a cliff.
“You brush against these people, you know? Just brush up—and it’s an electric thing, you get some juice from it, you feel like you’ve got some balls, but—these people are hard.”
She didn’t answer. He gave her shoulder a shake. “No curiosity? Don’t you want the news? Capra’s dead. Gambol blew his head off.”
“In a hundred years we’re all dead.”
“Did you ever know anybody who got murdered?”
Beside him she was white and pale. “The dead come back. Death isn’t the end.”
“Let’s be optimistic,” he said, “and assume that’s bullshit.”
“At night you can see them standing across the river.”
“That sounds like DTs.” He reached for the pocket in his too-large flannel shirt—Capra’s maybe, or Sally’s—and handed her the half pint of vodka. “Have a party.”
She unscrewed the cap. “If you know the crossing place,” she said, “you can block their way.” She looked like a child in an older brother’s clothes. She turned the bottle up and wrapped her lips around its neck.
Three bikers passed, coming up the other way. Then two more traveling side by side. “Must’ve got an early start from Bolinas. We got out just in time.” Half a minute later, a whole pack—seven, eight, nine, Luntz couldn’t count.
He tried the radio and spun the dial until he hit some music, any music, not even real music—country music. News came on, and Anita slapped at the knobs until it went away.
“Are we in range? Where’s your cell phone?”
“I don’t know.”
“Look in your purse. Let me have it. Don’t just stare at it. Fuck. Call information.”
“Do you want it or not?”
“Get the number for O’Doul’s Tavern in Alhambra.” Luntz grappled for his cigarettes and found one left in the pack. It was ripped in the middle and streaked with dirt. He managed to keep it lit through two drags before he tossed it.
Anita said, “It’s dialing.”
He wrested the phone from her hand as a woman answered: “Dooly’s, babe.”
“Let me speak to Juarez. Right now.”
“No Juarez here.”
“Tell him it’s Gambol.”
“He’s still gone.”
“Don’t mess around.”
“I told you—he’s gone.”
“Where is he at?”
“I told you. He went north.”
Luntz waited for a thought.
The woman said, “Who is this?”
He thumbed the disconnect and drove for several seconds holding the phone out the window, then let it drop.
Anita sat with her hands folded around the empty bottle.
The morning seemed lit by a blowtorch. The edges of his sight shimmered. “Dear Jesus, give me music.” He had to spin the knob several times to get the band to move even half an inch. No music. News of this and that, a local murder.
“Did you hear that?”
Anita reached for the dial, and Luntz stopped her fingers and squeezed until she made a small sound.
“Desilvera. That’s your name.”
He crushed her fingers. She didn’t resist.
He let her go. “That’s Hank. Henry Desilvera. That’s your husband.”
She looked straight ahead. “Not anymore.”
PART FOUR
JIMMY steered the pickup left-handed, his right arm crossing his chest and the right hand dangling out the window. “Did you kill him?”
Anita lifted the bottle from her lap and made sure it was perfectly empty. She wondered how Jimmy had hurt his hand.
“Did you kill your old man?” Now his right hand hopped back and forth between the gearshift and the radio knobs. “It said so on this radio, right here. Henry Desilvera. Shot to death in his home.”
“God rest his soul.” She closed her eyes and curled her toes around the barrel of the shotgun at her bare feet.
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Why don’t you say ‘Wow’?”
He found something and turned it up, a trio of women singing—
Tubular and tasty
Wanazee, Wanazee
Tubular and tasty
—and Jimmy said, “What?” and Anita said, “Wanazee,” because it sounded magical, and Jimmy spun the knob—“Goddamn hillbilly mugwump shit.”
Jimmy pulled the truck over and nearly ran down a fence post and braked hard and killed the engine. In the pasture before them stood horses switching their tails, lifting their heads up and down. Jimmy said, “Let me see your gun.”
“I’m not showing anybody my gun.”
“I want to see if it’s been fired.”
“How would you know if it’s been fired?”
“Let’s have it.” He took the revolver from her purse and shoved it under his seat. “Where are your shoes?” He gripped her knee with one hand and took the shotgun from under her feet with the other and dropped the weapon behind his seatback. “No more guns.” He stuck his fingers in the pocket of his floppy shirt and came up empty and felt around the dash and got his cigarette pack, which was flat. He balled it up and threw it at the windshield in front of him and turned the key and floored the pedal, and this time he hit the fence post.
Anita stayed quiet and let him think, if that’s what he was doing. He looked across the quiet farmland in front of them as if he might climb the fence and walk out into the fields and lose himself.
“I don’t know what the setup is,” he said. “But I know you set me up.”
He reversed and got on the road and floored it again.
They sailed into Madrona, where the demands of sparse traffic seemed to help him focus. He shut up and drove halfway through town without a destination before pulling into the Alaska Burger’s parking lot. He turned off the engine and gazed at the polar bear holding up a gigantic bun at the curbside.
Anita said, “I want my gun.”
“No more guns.”
“I’ll need it when we talk to the judge.”
“You set me up.”
“I brought you in. You’re just right. The judge has been in court. He’s seen bad people.”
“I’m not a thug.”
“You don’t know what you are. He’ll know. And he’s a sick old man. He’s just a sack of cancer.”
“Wow. You’re meaner than I thought. And deeper down.”
“My people are of the earth. We know who the devils are. But we love the devil. We love the devil.”
He stared hard at her. Something moved in her belly like a child, and the child was Jimmy. She shut her ears to its crying, and she could feel him drawing strength from her blood. Jimmy dropped his gaze. He turned and put both hands on the wheel. He raised the left one to consult his smashed wristwatch. “How long till dark?”
“I don’t know.”
“We should go after dark. Does this judge have his own computer?”
“Maybe. I guess so.”
“What about somebody taking care of him? Are there other people in the house?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then we’ll scope the place right now. You know where he lives, right?”
“Yes.”
“Fine. I said we had ten percent of a plan. It’s more like two percent. I gotta get some smokes.”
While Jimmy was gone she shut her eyes and dozed, until he ruined the moment by jerking open his door and blowing tobacco smoke and saying, “Red alert. I just saw Juarez. Or his Caddy. Or it was Gambol’s Caddy. Those fuckers have identical cars.” He slammed the door, it didn’t catch, he slammed it again and got the truck going, looking everywhere at once like a juggler watching airborne objects. “Yeah, Gambol went and got his Caddy. Or it’s Juarez. They’re like high school chicks—twin Cadillacs.” He drove fast, watching only the rearview mirror. “They weren’t following us. They don’t know this truck. Except Gambol saw it last night. But I mean—a million pickups. Unless Sally told them. Fucking Sally. Fuck. We get this done and get the fuck out. Get the fuck out and . . .” Anita sat with her eyes closed, humming “Wanazee, wanazee,” and feeling the sensations of a cliff diver in a night sky while Jimmy tore through the streets and never stopped his mouth.
