Desperation Read online

  "Peter?" Mary sounded alarmed. "Peter, I don't like this."

  "It's all right," he said, but was it? He stared at the cop-car, now tooling slowly up the westbound lane to his left, and wondered. He tried to get a look at the person behind the wheel and couldn't. The cruiser's rear window was caked with desert dust.

  Its taillights, also caked with dust, flickered briefly as the car slowed even more. Now it was doing barely thirty. A tumbleweed bounced into the road, and the cruiser's radial tires crushed it under. It came out the back looking to Peter Jackson like a nestle of broken fingers. All at once he was frightened, very close to terror, in fact, and he hadn't the slightest idea why.

  Because Nevada's full of intense people, Marielle said so and Gary agreed, and this is how intense people act. In a word, weird.

  Of course that was bullshit, this really wasn't weird, not very weird, anyhow, although--

  The cop-car taillights flickered some more. Peter pressed his own brake in response, not even thinking about what he was doing for a second, then looking at the speedometer and seeing he was down to twenty-five.

  "What does he want, Pete?"

  By now, that was pretty obvious.

  "To be behind us again."

  "Why?"

  "I don't know."

  "Why didn't he just pull over on the shoulder and let us go past, if that's what he wants?"

  "I don't know that, either."

  "What are you going to--"

  "Go by, of course." And then, for no reason at all, he added: "After all, we didn't nail the goddam cat to the speed-limit sign."

  He pushed down on the accelerator and immediately began to catch up with the dusty cruiser, which was now floating along at no more than twenty.

  Mary grabbed the shoulder of his blue workshirt hard enough for him to feel the pressure of her short fingernails. "No, don't."

  "Mare, there's not a lot else I can do."

  And the conversation was already obsolete, because he was going by even as he spoke. Deirdre's Acura drew alongside the dusty white Caprice, then passed it. Peter looked through two pieces of glass and saw very little. A big shape, a man-shape, that was about all. Plus the sense that the driver of the police-car was looking back at him. Peter glanced down at the decal on the passenger door. Now he had time to read it: DESPERATION POLICE DEPARTMENT in gold letters below the town seal, which appeared to be a miner and a horseman shaking hands.

  Desperation, he thought. Even better than Destry. Much better.

  As soon as he was past, the white car swung back into the eastbound lane, speeding up to stay on the Acura's bumper. They travelled that way for thirty or forty seconds (to Peter it felt considerably longer). Then the blue flashers on the Caprice's roof came on. Peter felt a sinking in his stomach, but it wasn't surprise. Not at all.

  2

  Mary still had hold of him, and now, as Peter swung onto the shoulder, she began digging in again.

  "What are you doing? Peter, what are you doing?"

  "Stopping. He's got his flashers on and he's pulling me over."

  "I don't like it," she said, looking nervously around. There was nothing to look at but desert, foothills, and leagues of blue sky. "What were we doing?"

  "Speeding seems logical." He was looking in the outside mirror. Above the words CAUTION OBJECTS MAY BE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR, he saw the dusty white driver's door of the cop-car swing open. A khaki leg swung out. It was prodigious. As the man it belonged to followed it out, swung the door of his cruiser closed, and settled his Smokey Bear hat on his head (he wouldn't have been wearing it in the car, Peter supposed; not enough clearance), Mary turned around to look. Her mouth dropped ajar.

  "Holy God, he's the size of a football player!"

  "At least," Peter said. Doing a rough mental calculation that used the roof of the car as a steering-point--about five feet--he guessed that the cop approaching Deirdre's Acura had to be at least six-five. And over two hundred and fifty pounds. Probably over three hundred.

  Mary let go of him and scooted over against her door as far as she could, away from the approaching giant. On one hip the cop wore a gun as big as the rest of him, but his hands were empty--no clipboard, no citation-book. Peter didn't like that. He didn't know what it meant, but he didn't like it. In his entire career as a driver, which had included four speeding tickets as a teenager and one OUI (after the faculty Christmas party three years ago), he had never been approached by an empty-handed cop, and he most definitely didn't like it. His heartbeat, already faster than normal, sped up a little more. His heart wasn't pounding, at least not yet, but he sensed it could pound. That it could pound very easily.

  You're being stupid, you know that, don't you? he asked himself. It's speeding, that's all, simple speeding. The posted limit is a joke and,everyone knows it's a joke, but this guy's undoubtedly got a certain quota to meet. And when it comes to speeding tickets, out-ofstaters are always best. You know that. So... what's that old Van Halen album title? Eat Em and Smile?

  The cop stopped beside Peter's window, the buckle of his Sam Browne belt on a level with Peter's eyes. He did not bend but raised one fist (to Peter it looked the size of a Daisy canned ham) and made cranking gestures.

  Peter took off his round rimless glasses, tucked them into his pocket, and rolled his window down. He was very aware of Mary's quick breathing from the passenger bucket. She sounded as if she had been jumping rope, or perhaps making love.

  The cop did a slow, smooth, deep kneebend, bringing his huge and noncommittal face into the Jacksons' field of vision. A band of shadow, cast by the stiff brim of his trooper-style hat, lay across his brow. His skin was an uncomfortable-looking pink, and Peter guessed that, for all his size, this man got along with the sun no better than Mary did. His eyes were bright gray, direct but with no emotion in them. None that Peter could read, anyway. He could smell something, though. He thought maybe Old Spice.

  The cop gave him only a brief glance, then his gaze was moving around the Acura's cabin, checking Mary first (American Wife, Caucasian, pretty face, good figure, low mileage, no visible scars), then looking at the cameras and bags and road-litter in the back seat. Not much road-litter yet; they'd only left Oregon three days before, and that included the day and a half they'd spent with Gary and Marielle Soderson, listening to old records and talking about old times.

  The cop's eyes lingered on the pulled-out ashtray. Peter guessed he was looking for roaches, sniffing for the lingering aroma of pot or hash, and felt relieved. He hadn't smoked a joint in nearly fifteen years, had never tried coke, and had pretty much quit drinking after the Christmas party OUI. Smelling a little cannabis at the occasional rock show was as close to a drug experience as he ever came these days, and Mary had never bothered with the stuff at all--she sometimes referred to herself as a "drug virgin." There was nothing in the pulled-out ashtray but a couple of balled-up Juicy Fruit wrappers, and no discarded beer-cans or wine bottles in the back seat.

  "Officer, I know I was going a little fast--"

  "Had the hammer down, did you?" the cop asked pleasantly. "Gosh, now! Sir, could I see your driver's license and your registration?"

  "Sure." Peter took his wallet out of his back pocket. "The car's not mine, though. It's my sister's. We're driving it back to New York for her. From Oregon. She was at Reed. Reed College, in Portland?"

  He was babbling, he knew it, but wasn't sure he could stop it. It was weird how cops could get you running off at the mouth like this, as if you had a dismembered body or a kidnapped child in the trunk. He remembered doing the same thing when the cop had pulled him over on the Long Island Expressway after the Christmas party, just talking and talking, yattata-yattata-yattata, while all the time the cop said nothing, only went methodically on with his own business, checking first his paperwork and then the contents of his little blue plastic Breathalyzer kit.

  "Mare? Would you get the registration out of the glove compartment? It's in a little plastic envelope, along with
Dee's insurance papers."

  At first she didn't move. He could see her out of the comer of his eye, just sitting still, as he opened his wallet and began hunting for his driver's license. It should have been right there, in one of the windowed compartments in the front of the billfold, big as life, but it wasn't.

  "Mare?" he asked again, a little impatient now, and a little frightened all over again. What if he'd lost his goddam driver's license somewhere? Dropped it on the floor at Gary's, maybe, while he'd been transferring his crap (you always seemed to carry so much more crap in your pockets while you were travelling) from one pair of jeans to the next? He hadn't, of course, but wouldn't it just be typical if--

  "Little help, Mare? Get the damned registration? Please?"

  "Oh. Sure, okay."

  She bent forward like some old, rusty piece of machinery goosed into life by a sudden jolt of electricity, and opened the glove compartment. She began to root through it, lifting some stuff out (a half-finished bag of Smartfood, a Bonnie Raitt tape that had suffered a miscarriage in Deirdre's dashboard player, a map of California) so she could get at the stuff behind it. Peter could see small beads of perspiration at her left temple. Feathers of her short black hair were damp with it, although the air-conditioning vent on that side was blowing cool air directly into her face.

  "I don't--" she started, and then, with unmistakable relief: "Oh, here it is."

  At the same moment Peter looked in the compartment where he kept business cards and saw his license. He couldn't remember putting it in there--why in the name of God would he have?--but there it was. In the photograph he looked not like an assistant professor of English at NYU but an unemployed petty laborer (and possible serial killer). Yet it was him, recognizably him, and he felt his spirits lift. They had their papers, God was in his heaven, all was right with the world.

  Besides, he thought, handing the cop his license, this isn't Albania, you know. It may not be in our zone of perception, but it's definitely not Albania.

  "Peter?"

  He turned, took the envelope she was holding out, and gave her a wink. She tried to smile an acknowledgement, but it didn't work very well. Outside, a gust of wind threw sand against the side of the car. Tiny grains of it stung Peter's face and he slitted his eyes against it. Suddenly he wanted to be at least two thousand miles from Nevada, in any direction.

  He took Deirdre's registration and held it out to the cop, but the cop was still looking at his license.

  "I see you're an organ donor," the cop said, without looking up. "Do you really think that's wise?"

  Peter was nonplussed. "Well, I . . ."

  "Is that the vehicle registration, sir?" the cop asked crisply. He was now looking at the canary-yellow sheet of paper.

  "Yes."

  "Hand it to me, please."

  Peter handed it out the window. Now the cop, still squatting Indian-fashion in the sunlight, had Peter's driver's license in one hand and Deirdre's registration in the other. He looked back and forth between them for what seemed a very long time. Peter felt light pressure on his thigh and jumped a little before realizing it was Mary's hand. He took it and felt her fingers wrap around his at once.

  "Your sister?" the cop said finally. He looked up at them with his bright gray eyes.

  "Yes--"

  "Her name is Finney. Yours is Jackson."

  "Deirdre was married for a year, between high school and college," Mary said. Her voice was firm, pleasant, unafraid. Peter would have believed it completely if not for the clutch of her fingers. "She kept her husband's name. That's all it is."

  "A year, hmmm? Between high school and college. Married. Tak!"

  His head remained down over the documents. Peter could see the peak of his Smokey Bear hat ticking back and forth as he fell to examining them again.

  Peter's sense of relief was slipping away.

  "Between high school and college," the cop repeated, head down, big face hidden, and in his head Peter heard him say: I see you're an organ donor. Do you really think that's wise? Tak!

  The cop looked up. "Would you step out of the car, please, Mr. Jackson?"

  Mary's fingers bore down, her nails biting into the back of Peter's hand, but the burning sensation was far away. Suddenly his balls and the pit of his stomach were crawling with dismay, and he felt like a child again, a confused child who only knows for sure that he has done something bad.

  "What--" he began.

  The cop from the Desperation cruiser stood. It was like watching a freight elevator go up. The head disappeared, then the open-collared shirt with its gleaming badge, then the diagonal strap of the Sam Browne belt. Then Peter was looking at the heavy beltbuckle again, the gun, and the khaki fold of cloth over the man's fly.

  This time what came from above the top of the window wasn't a question. "Get out of the car, Mr. Jackson."

  3

  Peter pulled the handle and the cop stood back so he could swing the door open. The cop's head was cut off by the roof of the Acura. Mary squeezed Peter's hand more violently than ever and Peter turned back to look at her. The sunburned places on her cheeks and brow were even clearer now, because her face had gone almost ashy. Her eyes were very wide.

  Don't get out of the car, she mouthed.

  I have to, he mouthed back, and swung a leg out onto the asphalt of U.S. 50. For a moment Mary clung to him, her hand entwined in his, and then Peter pulled loose and got the rest of the way out, standing on legs that felt queerly distant. The cop was looking down at him. Six-seven, Peter thought. Got to be. And he suddenly saw a quick sequence of events, like a filmclip run at super speed: the huge cop drawing his gun and pulling the trigger, spraying Peter Jackson's educated brains across the roof of the Acura in a slimy fan, then yanking Mary out of the car, driving her face-first into the lid of the closed trunk, bending her over, then raping her right out here beside the highway in the searing desert sunshine, his Smokey Bear hat still planted squarely on his head, screaming You want a donated organ, lady? Here you go! Here you go! as he rocked and thrust.

  "What's this about, Officer?" Peter asked, his mouth and throat suddenly dry. "I think I have a right to know."

  "Step around to the rear of the car, Mr. Jackson."

  The cop turned and walked toward the back of the Acura without bothering to see if Peter was going to obey. Peter did obey, walking on legs that still felt as if they were relaying their sensory input by some form of telecommunications.

  The cop stopped beside the trunk. When Peter joined him, he pointed with one big finger. Peter followed it and saw there was no license plate on the back of Deirdre's car--just a marginally cleaner rectangle where it had been.

  "Ah, shit!" Peter said, and his irritation and dismay were real enough, but so was the relief beneath them. All this had had a point after all. Thank God. He turned toward the front of the car and wasn't exactly surprised to see the driver's door was now closed. Mary had closed it. He had been so far into this ... event ... occurrence ... this whatever it was ... that he hadn't even heard the thump.

  "Mare! Hey, Mare!"

  She poked her sunburned, strained face out of his window and looked back at him.

  "Our damned license plate fell off!" he called, almost laughing.

  "What?"

  "No, it didn't," the Desperation cop said. He squatted again--that calm, slow. lithe movement--and reached beneath the bumper. He fumbled there, on the other side of the place where the plate went, for a moment or two, his gray eyes gazing off toward the horizon. Pete was invaded by an eerie sense of familiarity: he and his wife had been pulled over by the Marlboro Man.

  "Ah!" the cop said. He stood up again. The hand he had been investigating with was clenched into a loose fist. He held it out to Peter and opened it. Lying on his palm (and looking very small in that vast pinkness) was a road-dirty piece of screw. It was bright in only one place, where it had been sheared off.

  Peter looked at it, then up at the cop. "I don't get it."

&nbs
p; "Did you stop in Fallon?"

  "No--"

  There was a creak as Mary's door opened, a clunk as she shut it behind her, then the scuff of her sneakers on the sandy shoulder as she walked toward the back of the car.

  "Sure we did," she said. She looked at the fragment of metal in the big hand (Deirdre's registration and Peter's driver's license were still in the cop's other one), then up at the cop's face. She didn't seem scared now--not as scared, anyway--and Peter was glad. He was already calling himself nine kinds of paranoid idiot, but you had to admit that this particular close encounter of the cop kind had had its

  (do you really think that's wise)

  peculiar aspects.

  "Pit-stop, Peter, don't you remember? We didn't need gas, you said we could do that in Ely, but we got sodas so we wouldn't feel guilty about asking to use the restrooms." She looked at the cop and tried on a smile. She had to crane back to see his face. To Peter she looked like a little girl trying to coax a smile out of Daddy after Daddy had gotten home from a bad day at the office. "The restrooms were very clean."

  He nodded. "Was that Fill More Fast or Berk's Conoco you stopped at?"

  She glanced uncertainly at Peter. He turned his hands up at shoulder level. "I don't remember," he said. "Hell, I barely remember stopping."

  The cop tossed the useless chunk of screw back over his shoulder and into the desert, where it would lie undisturbed for a million years, unless it caught some inquisitive bird's eye. "But I bet you remember the kids hanging around outside. Older kids, mostly. One or two maybe too old to actually be kids at all. The younger ones with skateboards or on Rollerblades.".

  Peter nodded. He thought of Mary asking him why the people were here--why they came and why they stayed.

  "That was the Fill More Fast." Peter looked to see if the cop was wearing a nametag on one of his shirt pockets, but he wasn't. So for now, at least, he'd have to stay just the cop. The one who looked like the Marlboro Man in the magazine ads. "Alfie Berk won't have em around anymore. Kicked em the hell out. They're a dastardly bunch."

  Mary cocked her head at that, and for a moment Peter could see the ghost of a smile at the corners of her mouth.