Cheating at Solitaire(20)

“No. You’re doing what I’m doing. You’re slowing down as we approach the goal.”

“He’s going to be dead in there, isn’t he?”

“Probably. There’s no telling how long he’s been in the cold. If we could have gotten some sense out of Arrow, we might have a rough idea when it was the accident happened, but as it is, as far as we know, it could have been hours. It could have been any time since about eleven this morning.”

“Why eleven this morning?”

“That’s when they threw Arrow off the set and she took off with Mark. Both of them, by the way, already fairly out of it. Not to say she was as out of it as she pretended to be at your place.”

“Did you think she was faking? I thought she was faking. I just couldn’t figure out why I thought that.”

“You thought it because she’s a damned piss-poor actress,” Stewart Gordon said. “I thought about pushing it, but I didn’t see the point. There’s one thing all those girls are good at, and Arrow in particular, and that’s turning mulish and shutting up. It made more sense to come out and see. Here we are. We’re not going to be able to get to the door on the passenger’s side. The trade is almost rolled over onto it and it’s jammed against even more rocks. This place is unbelievable with rocks. It’s worse than the shingle at Brighton.”

“We’ll have to climb up to the driver’s door,” Annabeth said.

“I’ll do it. Later on, I’m going to put a shot of Scotch into your tea and tell you why Arrow Normand is the inevitable product of late-stage corporate capitalism. That was a good book, the one about Abigail Adams, but your understanding of economics is up your ass.”

“Right,” Annabeth said.

Stewart Gordon had been pulling himself up to the truck’s driver’s-side door all the time he’d been lecturing her about Arrow, rocks, and capitalism. The windshield was frosted over, but they could see well enough through it to see that there was a man in there, and blood. Annabeth thought about the blood in Arrow Normand’s hair, and then she thought of something else.

“You know,” she said. “This truck is practically on its side.”

“I can see that.”

“I know you can. It’s just—she must have climbed out. Arrow Normand, I mean. She can’t have been thrown from the truck, which is what I thought she said. She must have climbed out. Except, I don’t know. That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Huh,” Stewart Gordon said. “Stand back a little. If the door is frozen shut, it’s going to take a good yank to get it free.”

Annabeth stood back. Stewart Gordon yanked. He yanked again. Annabeth came forward a little and touched his arm.

“Look,” she said. “The little post thingee, the thing that locks the door. It’s down.”

Stewart Gordon stopped and looked.

“That doesn’t make sense either, does it?” Annabeth asked him. “I mean, she couldn’t have been thrown from the truck if the door was locked, and the door wouldn’t lock itself. And I can’t imagine that she thought to lock it while she was climbing out.”

“Just a minute,” Stewart Gordon said. He leaned over and went at the windshield with the side of his arm, brushing off the thin layer of frost in great leaping arcs. The wind was getting worse. Annabeth thought that it was coming straight through her coat and going out the other side.

Stewart Gordon grunted, and stepped back again, staying on top of the truck so that he looked like some kind of fearsome statue in honor of something—Annabeth was very aware that she was making no sense. Stewart Gordon had his hands in his pockets and was looking straight down. Annabeth moved slowly and got herself onto the truck, scared to death that she would slide off into the snow and then need rescuing herself. She got up next to him without his making any sign that he was aware she was coming. She looked down and saw the streaks of red and something else everywhere.

“He hit his head,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean anything, does it? Head wounds give a lot of blood, even minor ones. He could still be alive.”

“He’s not alive,” Stewart Gordon said.

“How do you know? We ought to at least check.”

“We’re not going to check anything. We’re not going to touch anything. We’re going to go get the police no matter how busy they are in the storm. We’re going to get them now.”

“We should get an ambulance, just in case,” Annabeth insisted—and yet, even as she insisted, she knew that he was right and she was wrong. Here it was, she thought, here it was, those ignorant armies clashing by night. Except that it wasn’t night. It was only late afternoon. If she looked hard enough she could still find the sun behind the dark clouds that choked the sky. That was why they could see the purple of the truck, where it was exposed.