Deeply Odd(44)

I don’t know why I couldn’t let go of it, but I said, “You’re not even doing ninety now.”

“One hundred and four miles an hour, child.”

I leaned to my left to look more directly at the speedometer. “Wow. It sure doesn’t feel like we’re going that fast. I guess that’s one of the pluses of a Mercedes.”

“It’s partly Mercedes, but also the aftermarket work that went into it. This baby is souped.”

We rocketed past a guy in a Ferrari, probably on his way to Vegas. I think he was wearing a poofy cap, though it wasn’t green and black.

“Hundred and ten,” Mrs. Fischer said, “and smooth as butter.”

“It really is souped,” I acknowledged.

“Radically souped. There’s this nice man in Arizona, everybody calls him One-Ear Bob, though his name’s Larry. He’s such a big handsome bruiser, you hardly notice the ear thing, except you tend to tilt your head to one side when you’re talking to him. His front business is a combination real-estate brokerage, insurance agency, souvenir shop, and roadside cafe. But he makes his real money in secret, in the buildings far at the back end of his property, where he can do anything you want done to a vehicle and then some.”

“Why secret?”

In a dramatic but unnecessary whisper, she said, “Because a lot of what One-Ear Bob does to cars breaks the law.”

“What law?”

“Oh, all kinds of laws, sweetie. Idiot safety laws, bone-headed environmental laws that actually contribute to pollution, the laws of physics, you name it.”

“Arizona, huh? Wouldn’t be Lonely Possum, Arizona, would it?”

Suddenly coy, she said, “Might be, might not.”

“What happened there sixty years ago on that oven-hot night?”

“Never you mind. Now let me tend to my driving. With all this conversation, my speed’s fallen to a hundred.”

From the console between the front seats, I fetched a box of 9-mm ammunition about which Mrs. Fischer had told me earlier. I had emptied the magazine of the pistol while resisting my assailant on the roof of the building in Elsewhere. Now I pressed ten rounds into it and locked it into the butt of the weapon.

Mile by mile, the desert grew more stark, a vastness of sand and rock, mesquite and sage and withered bunchgrass, with here and there low shapes of rock that looked like the serrated backs and long, flat heads of Jurassic-era crocodiles immense in size, petrified now and half buried in the earth.

The low clouds were gray in the east, darker overhead, nearly black in the west. Ahead of us, a wedge of birds flew high across the interstate, winging southeast.

Pico Mundo, my hometown, lay more than a hundred miles in that direction. Perhaps I might soon be led back there. If patterns exist in our seemingly patternless lives—and they do—then the law of harmony insists that the most harmonious of all patterns, circles within circles, will most often assert itself. If my end was coming, it might find me in those familiar streets that I loved and through which I had been haunted for so much of my life. But we were racing away from Pico Mundo at the moment, and I sensed that the case of the man who would burn children was not the one that would lead me home.

I put ten rounds of ammunition in each front pocket of my jeans. For one who dislikes guns as thoroughly as I do, I strangely find myself resorting to them more frequently as I make steady progress on my circular journey from loss to acceptance of loss, from failure to possible redemption.

A sign announced the interstate exits to Barstow, a community of military installations, railyards, warehouses, outlet stores, and chain motels. Although I intuited that I would find my quarry much deeper in the Mojave than this place, I suddenly said, “Here. Exit here. He’s done something in Barstow. Something terrible.”

By the grace of Mrs. Fischer’s expert driving and One-Ear Bob’s improvements to the vehicle, we decelerated as efficiently as if we had reverse rocket thrusters, crossed three lanes in an exquisite arc that brought us to the foot of the exit ramp, and swept into Barstow, home of the Mojave River Valley Museum.

We had come now to one of those times in my life when humor was no longer an armor, when any joke would have been an abomination, the slightest smile a transgression.

“The children,” I said. “The two girls and the boy. They lived here.”

“You mean live here,” Mrs. Fischer corrected.

Taken by a sudden chill, I said, “No, I don’t believe I do.”





Seventeen


THE RHINESTONE COWBOY ONCE PROWLED THE streets of Barstow to what end I thought I knew, but he was gone now, his corrupted and magnetic spirit an attractant that issued from some nest deeper in the barrens.