Ellie reached for the door handle, meaning to lean out and get Melissa Sweetheart— surely no psycho with a rifle could pick her off in the time it would take to grab up a little girl’s doll—then looked back at Ralph. “Where’re the handles?” she asked.
The driver’s-side door of the cruiser opened, and the cop dropped into it like a bomb. The seat crunched back against Ralph’s knees and he winced, glad that Kirstie’s legs were hanging down between
his. Not that Kirstie was still. She wriggled and twisted on his lap, hands held out to her mother.
“My doll, Mummy, my doll! Melissa!”
“Officer—” Ellie began.
“No time,” the cop said. “Can’t. Tak!” He U-turned across the road and headed east in a spew of dust.
The rear end of the car fishtailed briefly. As it steadied again, it occurred to Ralph how fast this had happened—not ten minutes ago they’d been in their RV, headed down the road. He’d been about to ask David to play Twenty Questions, not because he really wanted to but because he had been bored.
He sure wasn’t bored now.
“Melissa Sweeeeeeetheart!” Kirstie screamed, and then began to weep.
“Take it easy, Pie,” David said. It was his pet name for his baby sister. Like so many other things about David, neither of his parents knew what it meant or where it had come from. Ellie thought it was short for sweetie pie, but when she had asked him one night, David had just — shrugged and grinned his appealing, slanted little grin.
“Nah, she’s just a pie,” he had said. “Just a pie. that’s all
“But ‘Lissa’s in the dirty old dirt,” Kirstie said, looking at her brother with swimming eyes.
“We’ll come back and get her and clean her all up,” David said.
“Promise?”
“Uh-huh. I’ll even help you wash her hair.”
“With Prell?”
“Uh-huh.” He put a quick kiss on her cheek.
“What if the bad man comes?” Kirstie asked. “The bad man like Mr. Big Boogeyman?
What if he dollnaps Melissa Sweetheart?”
David covered his mouth with his hand to hide the ghost of a grin. “He won’t.” The boy glanced up into the rearview mirror, trying to make eye contact with the cop. “Will he?”
“No,” the cop said. “The man we’re looking for is not a dollnapper.” There was no facetiousness Ralph could detect in his voice; he sounded like Joe Friday. Just the facts, ma’am.
He slowed briefly as they passed a sign which read DES-PERATION, then accelerated as he turned right. Ralph hung on, praying that the guy knew what he was doing, that he wouldn’t roll them. The car seemed to lift slightly, then settled back. They were now heading south. On the horizon, a huge bulwark of earth, its tan side cut with cracks and zigzag trenches like black scars, loomed against the sky.
“What is he, then?” Ellie asked. “What is this guy? And how did he get hold of the stuff you use to stop speeders? The watchamacallit?”
“Highway carpet, Mom,” David said. He ran a finger up and down the metal mesh between the front and back seats, his face intent and thoughtful and troubled. Not even a ghost of a smile there now.
“Same way he got the guns he’s toting and the car he’s driving,” the man behind the wheel said. Now they were passing theRattlesnakeTrailer Park , now the headquarters of the Desperation Mining Corporation. Up ahead was a huddle of business buildings. A blinker-light flashed yellow under a hundred thousand miles of blue- denim sky. “He’s a cop. And I’ll tell you one thing,
Carvers: when you’ve got a nutty cop on your hands,I. you ye got a situation.”
“How do you know our name?” David asked. “You didn’t ask to see my dad’s driver’s license, so how do you know our name?”
“Saw it when your dad opened the door,” the cop said, looking up into the rearview mirror. “Little plaque over the table. GOD BLESS OUR ROAMING HOME. THE CARVERS.
Cute.”
Something about this bothered Ralph, but for now he paid no attention. His fright had grown into a sense of foreboding so strong and yet so diffuse that he felt a little as if he’d eaten something laced with poison.
He thought that if he held his hand up it would be steady, but that didn’t change the fact that he had become more scared not less, since the cop had sped them away from their disabled roaming home with such spooky ease. It apparently wasn’t the kind of fear that made your bands shake (it’s a dry fright, he thought with a tiny and not very characteristic twinkle of humor), but it was real enough, for all that.
“A cop,” Ralph mused, thinking of a movie he’d rented from the video store down the street one Saturday night not too long ago. Maniac Cop, it had been called. The line of ad-copy above the title had read: YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT. PERMANENTLY. Funny how stupid stuff like that sometimes stuck with you. Except it didn’t seem very funny right now.
“A cop, right,” their cop replied. He sounded as if he ‘~ might be smiling.
Oh, really? Ralph asked himself. And just how does a smile sound?
He was aware that Ellie was looking at him with a kind of strained curiosity, but this didn’t seem like a good time to return her glance. He didn’t know what they might read in each other’s eyes, and wasn’t sure he wanted to find out.
The cop had been smiling, though. He was somehow sure of it.
Why would he he? What’s funny about a maniac cop on the loose, or six flat tires, or a family of four crammed into a hot police-car with no handles on the back doors, or my daughter’s favorite doll lying face-down in the dirt eight miles back? What could possibly be funny about any of those things?
He didn’t know. But the cop had sounded as if he were smiling.
“A state trooper, did you say?” Ralph asked as they drove beneath the blinker.
“Look, Mummy!” Kirsten said brightly, Melissa Sweet heart at least temporarily forgotten. “Bikes!
Bikes in the street, and standing on their heads! See down there? Isn’t that funny?”
“Yes, honey, I see them,” Ellie said. She didn’t sound as if she found the upside-down bikes in the street any-where near as hilarious as her daughter did.
“Trooper? No, I didn’t say that.” The big man behind the wheel still sounded as if he were smiling. “Not a state trooper, a town cop.”
“Really,” Ralph said. “Wow. How many cops do you have in a little place like this, Officer?”
“Well, there were two others,” the cop said, the smile in his voice more obvious than ever, “but I killed them.”
He turned his head to look back through the mesh, and he wasn’t smiling after all. He was grinning. His teeth were so big they looked more like tools than bones. They showed all the way to the back of his mouth. Above and below them were what seemed like acres of pink gum.
“Now I’m the only law west of thePecos .”
Ralph stared at him, mouth gaping. The cop grinned back, driving with his head turned, pulling up neatly in front of the Desperation Municipal Building without ever looking once at where he was going.
“Carvers,” he said, speaking solemnly through his grin, “Welcome to Desperation.”
An hour later the cop ran at the woman in the jeans and the work shirt, his cowboy boots rattling on the hard- wood floor, his hands outstretched, but his grin was gone and Ralph felt savage triumph leap up his throat, like something ugly on a spring. The cop was coming hard, but the woman in the jeans had managed—probably due more to luck than to any conscious decision on her part— to keep the desk between them, and that was going to make the difference. Ralph saw her pull back the hammers of the shotgun which had been lying on the desk, saw her raise it to her shoulder as her back struck the bars of the room’s largest cell, saw her curl her finger around the double triggers.
The big cop was going like hell, but it wasn’t going to do him any good.
Shoot him, lady. Ralph thought. Not to save us but because he killed my daughter. Blow his motherfucking head off!
The instant before Mary pulled the triggers, the cop fell to his knees on the other side of the desk, his head drop-ping like the head of a man who has knelt to pray. The double roar of the shotgun was terrific in the closed holding area. Flame licked out of the barrels.
Ralph heard his wife scream—in triumph, he thought. If so, it was premature. The cop’s Smokey Bear hat flew off his head, but the loads went high. Shot hit the back wall of the room and thudded into the plastered stairwell outside the open door with a sound like wind-driven sleet hitting a windowpane. There was a bulletin-board to the right of the doorway, and Ralph saw round black holes spatter across the papers tacked up there. The cop’s hat was a shredded ruin held together only by a thin leather hat-band.