“Did you have any trouble buying it, since you’re from out of state and
all?”
“No.” Doyle stretched out on the bed.
“In fact, it was too damned easy.”
Nineteen Friday afternoon, George Leland drove across the Nevada
badlands toward Reno, his eyes brimming with pain even though the
sunglasses he wore cut out half the glare from the white-white sand. He
did not make good time. He was unable to keep his mind on his driving.
Since that especially severe headache he had suffered early Thursday
morning when he had gone after Alex Doyle with a garden ax, Leland had
found his thoughts wandering freely, almost beyond his control. He was
not able to concentrate on anything for more than five minutes at a
stretch. His mind jumped from subject to subject like a motion picture
full of quick-cuts.
Time and again he snapped back from a daydream, surprised to find
himself behind the wheel of the van. He had driven miles and miles
while his mind was elsewhere . . .
Apparently some fraction of his attention was on the road ahead and the
traffic around him; but it was a very small fraction. If he had been on
a heavily used freeway instead of out here in the flat, open wastelands,
he would have killed himself, would have demolished the van during one
of those daydreams.
Courtney was always there with him, in and out of the dreams.
Now, as he came back again to the sand-flanked highway and the reality
of the Chevrolet grumbling crankily beneath him, she was perched only a
couple of feet away, her long legs drawn up on the seat beneath her.
“I almost had them yesterday,” Leland said contritely. “But these damn
worn tires . . . ”
“That’s okay, George,” she said, close yet faraway.
“No, Courtney. I should have nailed them. And . . . Last night,
when I checked the motel in Salt Lake, they were not there.” He was
puzzled by that. “In that book of his, it said they’d stay at the
Highlands Motel in Salt Lake City. What happened to them?”
She must not have known, for she did not answer.
Leland wiped his left hand on his trousers while he held the wheel in
his right, repeated the gesture and drove with the left. “I looked in
all the motels near the Highlands. They weren’t staying in any of them.
I’ve lost them. Somehow, they got away from me.”
“You’ll pick them up again,” she said. He had hoped that she would be
sympathetic and would encourage him. Lovely Courtney.
you could always depend on Courtney.
“Maybe I will,” he said, squinting out at the rolling hills of sand and
the distant blue-and-rose mountains. “But how? And where?”
He hoped she had the answer to that.
She did. “In San Francisco, of course.”
“San Francisco?”
“You have my address there,” Courtney said. “And that’s where they’re
going. Isn’t it? ”
“Yes,” he said. “It sure is.”
“There you are.”
“But . . . Maybe I can catch them in Reno tonight. ” The lovely,
soft-voiced, ethereal girl said, “They’ll change motels again.
You won’t find them.”
He nodded. It was true.
For a while, then, he went away from her. He was not in Nevada now, but
in Philadelphia. Three months ago. He had gone downtown to see a film
which had been entertaining and which . . . Well, the girl in it had
looked so much like Courtney that he had been unable to sleep that
night. He saw the film the next night too, and he learned from the
lobby posters that the actress who fascinated him was Carol Lynley. But
he soon forgot that. He went back to the film night after night, and
she became the real Courtney.
She was perfect. Long yellow-white hair, elfin features, those eyes
that seemed to pierce him . . . Gradually, the sixth and seventh and
eighth and ninth times he saw the movie, he began to experience a
regeneration of sexual desire-which was odd, because the film was family
fare. Finally, though, he had gone bar-hopping and had picked up a
girl. He had made it with her . . . But she looked nothing like