I was asked to hold on. I did, somehow, although with the passing of each endless second I became more and more sure that he had smelled a rat and was calling the phone company on one line while I held on the other.
At last – at long, long last – he came back on. He sounded upset, but that was all right. That was just how I wanted him to sound.
“Saturday night?”
“Yes, that’s right. But I don’t have a punch-bowl as big as they’re going to want unless I call across town, and my impression was that he already has one. I’d just like to be sure.”
“Look, mister, my call-sheet says Mr Dolan ain’t expected in until three P. m. Sunday afternoon. I’ll be glad to have one of my girls check out your punch-bowl, but I want to straighten this other business out first. Mr Dolan is not a man to fuck around with, if you’ll pardon my French…”
“I couldn’t agree with you more,” I said.
“…and if he’s going to show up a day early, I got to send some more girls out there right away.”
“Let me double-check,” I said. The third-grade reading textbook I use, Roads to Everywhere, was on the table beside me. I picked it up and riffled some of the pages close to the phone.
“Oh, boy,” I said. “It’s my mistake. He’s having people in Sunday night. I’m really sorry. You going to hit me?”
“Nah. Listen, let me put you on hold – I’ll get one of the girls and have her check on the…”
“No need, if it’s Sunday,” I said. “My big punch-bowl’s coming back from a wedding reception in Glendale Sunday morning.”
“Okay. Take it easy.” Comfortable. Unsuspicious. The voice of a man who wasn’t going to think twice.
I hoped.
I hung up and sat still, working it out in my head as carefully as I could. To get to LA by three, he would be leaving Vegas about ten o’clock Sunday morning. And he would arrive in the vicinity of the detour between elevenfifteen and eleven-thirty, when traffic was apt to be almost non-existent anyway.
I decided it was time to stop dreaming and start acting.
I looked through the want ads, made some telephone calls, and then went out to look at five used vehicles that were within my financial reach. I settled for a battered Ford van that had rolled off the assembly line the same year Elizabeth was killed. I paid cash. I was left with only two hundred and fifty-seven dollars in my savings account, but this did not disturb me in the slightest. On my way home I stopped at a rental place the size of a discount department store and rented a portable air compressor, using my MasterCard as collateral.
Late Friday afternoon I loaded the van: picks, shovels, compressor, a hand-dolly, a toolbox, binoculars, and a borrowed Highway Department Jackhammer with an assortment of arrowhead-shaped attachments made for slicing through asphalt. A large square piece of sand-colored canvas, plus a long roll of canvas – this latter had been a special project of mine last summer – and twenty-one thin wooden struts, each five feet long. Last but not least, a big industrial stapler.
On the edge of the desert I stopped at a shopping center and stole a pair of license plates and put them on my van.
Seventy-six miles west of Vegas, I saw the first orange sign: CONSTRUCTION AHEAD PASS AT YOUR OWN RISK. Then, a mile or so beyond that, I saw the sign I had been waiting for since… well, ever since Elizabeth died, I suppose, although I hadn’t always known it.
DETOUR AHEAD 6 MILES.
Dusk was deepening toward dark as I arrived and surveyed the situation. It could have been better if I’d planned it, but not much.
The detour was a right turn between two rises. It looked like an old fence-line road which the Highway Department had smoothed and widened to temporarily accommodate the heavier traffic flow. It was marked by a flashing arrow powered by a buzzing battery in a padlocked steel box.
Just beyond the detour, as the highway rose toward the crest of that second rise, the road was blocked off by a double line of road cones. Beyond them (if one was so extraordinarily stupid as to have, first, missed the flashing arrow and, second, run over the road cones without realizing it – I suppose some drivers were) was an orange sign almost as big as a billboard, reading ROAD CLOSED USE DETOUR.