For a few seconds he was very close to going off the road anyway. He could feel the sand sucking harder at the rightside wheels, felt the van trying to tip. His instinct was to twist the wheel hard to the left. Instead, he fed the van gas and only urged it in that direction, feeling sweat dampen his last good shirt at the armpits. At last the suck on the tires diminished and he began to feel in control of the van again. Hogan blew his breath out in a long sigh.
‘Good piece of driving, man.’
His attention had been so focused he had forgotten his passenger, and in his surprise he almost twisted the wheel all the way to theIleft, which would have put them in trouble again. He looked around and saw the blonde kid watching him. His gray-green eyes were unsettlingly bright; there was no sign of sleepiness in them.
‘It was really just luck,’ Hogan said. ‘If there was a place to pull over, I would . . . but I know this piece of road. It’s Sammy’s or bust. Once we’re in the foothills, it’ll get better.’
He did not add that it might take them three hours to cover the seventy miles between here and there.
‘You’re a salesman, right?’
‘As rain.’
He wished the kid wouldn’t talk. He wanted to concentrate on his driving. Up ahead, fog-lights loomed out of the murk like yellow ghosts. An Iroc Z with California plates followed them. The van and the Z crept past each other like old ladies in a nursing-home corridor. In the corner of his eye, Hogan saw the kid take the cigarette from behind his ear and begin to play with it. Bryan Adams indeed. Why had the kid given him a false name? It was like something out of an old Republic movie, the kind of thing you could still see on the late-late show, a black-and-white crime movie where the traveling salesman (probably played by Ray Milland) picks up the tough young con (played by Nick Adams, say) who has just broken out of jail in Gabbs or Deeth or some place like that —
‘What do you sell, dude?”
‘Labels.’
‘Labels?’
‘That’s right. The ones with the Universal Product Code on them. It’s a little block with a pre-set number of black bars in it.’
The kid surprised Hogan by nodding. ‘Sure — they whip ’em over an electric-eye gadget in the supermarket and the price shows up on the cash register like magic, right?’
‘Yes. Except it’s not magic, and it’s not an electric eye. It’s a laser reader. I sell those, too. Both the big ones and the portables.’
‘Far out, dude-mar.’ The tinge of sarcasm in the kid’s voice was faint . . . but it was there.
‘Bryan?’
‘Yeah?’
‘The name’s Bill, not m’man, not dude, and most certainly not dude-mar.’
He found himself wishing more and more strongly that he could roll back in time to Scooter’s, and just say no when the kid asked him for a ride. The Scooters weren’t bad sorts; they would have let the kid stay until the storm blew itself out this evening. Maybe Mrs. Scooter would even have given him five bucks to babysit the tarantula, the rattlers, and Woof, the Amazing Minnesota Coydog. Hogan found himself liking those gray-green eyes less and less. He could feel their weight on his face, like small stones.
‘Yeah — Bill. Bill the Label Dude.’
Bill didn’t reply. The kid laced his fingers together and bent his hands backward, cracking the knuckles.
‘Well, it’s like my old mamma used to say — it may not be much, but it’s a living. Right, Label Dude?’
Hogan grunted something noncommittal and concentrated on his driving. The feeling that he had made a mistake had grown to a certainty. When he’d picked up the girl that time, God had let him get away with it. Please, he prayed. One more time, okay, God? Better yet, let me be wrong about this kid — let it just be paranoia brought on by low barometer, high winds, and the coincidence of a name that can’t, after all, be that uncommon.
Here came a huge Mack truck from the other direction, the silver bulldog atop the grille seeming to peer into the flying grit. Hogan squeezed right until he felt the sand piled up along the edge of the road grabbing greedily at his tires again. The long silver box the Mack was pulling blotted out everything on Hogan’s left side. It was six inches away — maybe even less — and it seemed to pass forever.
When it was finally gone, the blonde kid asked: ‘You look like you’re doin pretty well, Bill —
rig like this must have set you back at least thirty big ones. So why — ‘
‘It was a lot less than that.’ Hogan didn’t know if ‘Bryan Adams’ could hear the edgy note in his voice, but he sure could. ‘I did a lot of the work myself.’
‘All the same, you sure ain’t staggerin around hungry. So why aren’t you up above all this shit, flyin’ the friendly skies?’
It was a question Hogan sometimes asked himself in the long empty miles between Tempe and Tucson or Las Vegas and Los Angeles, the kind of question you had to ask yourself when you couldn’t find anything on the radio but crappy synthopop or threadbare oldies and you’d listened to the last cassette of the current best-seller from Recorded Books, when there was nothing to look at but miles of gullywashes and scrubland, all of it owned by Uncle Sam.
He could say that he got a better feel for his customers and their needs by traveling through the country where they lived and sold their goods, and it was true, but it wasn’t the reason. He could say that checking his sample cases, which were much too bulky to fit under an airline seat, was a pain in the ass and waiting for them to show up on the conveyor belt at the other end was always an adventure (he’d once had a packing case filled with five thousand soft-drink labels show up in Hilo, Hawaii, instead of Hillside, Arizona). That was also true, but it also wasn’t the reason.
The reason was that in 1982 he had been on board a Western Pride commuter flight which had crashed in the high country seventeen miles north of Reno. Six of the nineteen passengers on board and both crew-members had been killed. Hogan had suffered a broken back. He had spent four months in bed and another ten in a heavy brace his wife Lita called the Iron Maiden. They
(whoever they were) said that if you got thrown from a horse, you should get right back on.
William I. Hogan said that was bullshit, and with the exception of a white-knuckle, two-Valium flight to attend his father’s funeral in New York, he had never been on a plane since.
He came out of these thoughts all at once, realizing two things: he had had the road to himself since the passage of the Mack, and the kid was still looking at him with those unsettling eyes, waiting for him to answer the question.
‘I had a bad experience on a commuter flight once,’ he said. ‘Since then, I’ve pretty much stuck to transport where you can coast into the breakdown lane if your engine quits.’
‘You sure have had a lot of bad experiences, Bill-dude,’ the kid said. A tone of bogus regret crept into his voice. ‘And now, so sorry, you’re about to have another one.’ There was a sharp metallic click. Hogan looked over and was not very surprised to see the kid was holding a switchknife with a glittering eight-inch blade.
Oh shit, Hogan thought. Now that it was here, now that it was right in front of him, he didn’t feel very scared. Only tired. Oh shit, and only four hundred miles from home. Goddam.
‘Pull over, Bill-dude. Nice and slow.’
‘What do you want?’
‘If you really don’t know the answer to that one, you’re even dumber than you look.’ A little smile played around the corners of the kid’s mouth. The homemade tattoo on the kid’s arm rippled as the muscle beneath it twitched. ‘I want your dough, and I guess I want your rolling whorehouse too, at least for a while. But don’t worry — there’s this little truck stop not too far from here. Sammy’s. Close to the turnpike. Someone’ll give you a ride. The people who don’t stop will look at you like you’re dog-shit they found on their shoes, of course, and you might have to beg a little, but I’m sure you’ll get a ride in the end. Now pull over.’
Hogan was a little surprised to find that he felt angry as well, as tired. Had he been angry that other time, when the road-girl, had stolen his wallet? He couldn’t honestly remember.