David heard it, too-an approaching motor. Suddenly it revved up, blatting at full power.
The sound was accompanied by a scream of tires. He looked around at the old man. The old man shrugged and raised his hands, palms up.
David heard what might have been a yell of pain, and then another scream. Human, this time. It would be better to think it had been a scream of wind caught in a gutter or a downspout, but he thought it had almost certainly been human.
“What the hell?” Ralph said. “Jesus! Someone’s screaming his head off! Is it the cop, do you think?”
“God I hope so!” Mary cried fiercely, still standing on the bunk and peering at the useless window. “I hope someone’s pulling the son of a bitch’s lungs right out of his chest!” She looked around at them. Her eyes were still tired, but now they looked wild, as well. “It could be help Have you thought of that? It
could be help!”
The engine-not too close but by no means distant revved. The tires screamed again, screamed the way they did in the movies and on TV but hardly ever in real life Then there was a crunching sound. Wood, metal, maybe both.
A brief honk, as if someone had inadvertently struck the car’s horn. A coyote howl rose, wavering and glassy It was joined by another and another and another. They seemed to be mocking the dark-haired woman’s idea of help. Now the motor was approaching, rumbling at a sedate level just above an idle.
The man with the white hair was sitting at the foot of the cell’s bunk, his hands pressed together finger-to- finger between his thighs. He talked without raising his eyes from his hands. “Don’t get your hopes up.” His voice sounded as cracked and dusty as the salt flats west and north of here. “Ain’t nobody but him. I reckernize the sound of the motor.”
“I refuse to believe that,” Ellie Carver said flatly.
“Refuse all you want,” the old man said. “It don’t matter. I was on the committee that approved the money for a new town cruiser. Just before I finished my term and retired from politics, that was. I went over toCarson City last November with Collie and Dick and we bought it at a DEA auction. That very car. I had my head under the hood before we bid on her and drove her halfway home at speeds varying from sixty-five to a hunnert n ten. I reckernize her, all right. It’s our’n.”
And, as David turned to look at the old man, the still, small voice-the one he had first heard in Brian’s hospital room-spoke to him. As usual, its arrival came pretty much as a surprise, and the two words it spoke made no immediate sense.
The soap.
He heard the words as clearly as he had heard You re praying already while he’d been sitting in the Viet Cong Lookout with his eyes closed.
The soap.
He looked into the left rear corner of the cell he was sharing with old Mr. White Hair.
There was a toilet with no seat. Beside it was an ancient rust-stained porcelain sink.
Sitting beside the righthand spigot was a green bar of what could only be Irish Spring soap.
Outside, the engine-sound of the Desperation police- cruiser grew fatter and closer. A little farther off, the coyotes howled. To David that howling had begun to sound like the laughter of lunatics after the keepers have de-camped the asylum.
The Carver family had been too distraught and too focused on their captor to notice the dead dog hung from the welcome-to-town sign, but John Marinville was a trained noticer.
And in truth, the dog was now hard to miss. Since the Carvers had passed this way, the buzzards had found it. They sat on the ground below the carcass, the ugliest birds Johnny had ever seen, one pulling on Old Shep’s tail, the other gnawing at one of his dangling feet. The body swung hack and forth on the rope twisted around its neck. Johnny made a sound of disgust.
“Buzzards!” the cop said. “Gosh, aren’t they some-thing?” His voice had thickened a great deal. He had sneezed twice more on the ride in from town, and the second time there had been teeth in the blood he sprayed out of his mouth. Johnny didn’t know what was happening to him and didn’t care; he only wished it would hurry up. “I’ll tell you something about buzzards,” the CO~ continued. “They wake to sleep and take their waking slow. They learn by going where they have to go. Wouldn’t you agree, mon capitaine?”
A lunatic cop who quoted poetry. How Sartre.
“Whatever you say, Officer.” He had no intention of antagonizing the cop again, if he could help it; the guy seemed to be self-destructing, and Johnny wanted to be around when the process was over.
They rolled past the dead dog and the grisly skinned-looking things dining on it.
What about the coyotes, Johnny? What was up with them?
But he wouldn’t let himself think about the coyotes, lined up along both sides of the road at neat intervals like an honor guard, or of how they had peeled off like the Blue Angels as soon as the cruiser passed, running back into the desert as if their heads were on fire and their asses were catching- “They fart, you know,” the cop said in his blood-soaked voice: “Buzzards fart.”
“No, I didn’t know that.”
“Yessir, only birds that do. I tell you so you can put it in your book. Chapter 16 of Travels with Harley.”
Johnny thought the putative title of his book had never sounded so quintessentially stupid.
They were now passing a trailer park. Johnny saw a sign in front of one rusty, roof sagging doublewide which read:
I’M A GUN-TOTIN’ SNAPPLE-DRINKIN’ BIBLE-READIN’ CLINTON-BASHIN’ SON OF A BITCH!
NEVER MIND THE DOG, BEWARE OF THE OWNER!
Welcome to country music hell, Johnny thought.
The cruiser rolled past a mining-company building. There were quite a few cars and pickups in the parking lot, which struck Johnny as peculiar. It was past quitting time now, and not by a little. Why weren’t these cars in their own driveways, or down in front of the local watering hole?
“Yep, yep,” the cop said. He lifted one hand, as if to frame a picture. “I can see it now. Chapter 16: The Farting Buzzards of Desperation. Sounds like a goddamn Edgar Rice Burroughs novel, doesn’t it?
Burroughs was a better writer than you, though, and do you know why? Because he was a hack without pretensions. One with priorities. Tell the story, do the work, give people something they can enjoy without feeling too stupid, and stay out of the gossip columns.”
“Where are you taking me?” Johnny asked, striving for a neutral tone.
“Jail,” the big cop said in his stuffy, liquid voice. “Where anything you bray will be abused against you in a sort of caw.”
He leaned forward, wincing at the pain in his back where the cop had kicked him. “You need help,” he said. He tried to keep his voice non-accusatory, even gentle. “Do you know that, Officer?”
“You’re the one who needs help,” the cop replied. “Spiritual, physical, and editorial. Tak!
But no help is going to come, Big John. You’ve eaten your last literary lunch and fucked your last culture cunt. You’re on your own in the wilderness, and this is going to be the longest forty days and forty nights of your entire useless life.”
The words rang in his head like the peal of some sickly bell. Johnny closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again. They were in the town proper now, passing Gail’s Beauty Bar on one side and True Value Hardware on the other. There was nobody on the sidewalks- absolutely nobody. He’d never seen a small Western town that was actually hustling, but this was ridiculous. No one at all? As they passed the Conoco station he saw a guy in the office, rocked back in his chair with his feet up on the desk, but that was it.
Except. . . up ahead…
A pair of animals went trotting lazily across what appeared to be the town’s only intersection, moving on a diagonal beneath the blinker-light. Johnny tried to tell himself they were dogs, but they weren’t dogs.
They were coyotes.
It’s not all the cop, Johnny. don’t you think it is. Something not normal is going on here. Something very much not normal.
As they reached the intersection, the cop slammed on the brakes. Johnny, not expecting it, was thrown forward into the mesh between the front and back seats. He hit his nose and bellowed with surprised pain.
The cop took no notice of him. “Billy Rancourt!” he cried, delighted. “Damn, that’s Billy Rancourt! I wondered where he got off to! Drunk in the basement of The Broken Drum, I bet you that’s where he was! Dollars to doughnuts! Big-Balls Billy, damn if it’s not!”