Johnny got in the car. As he did, he touched the right breast pocket of his motorcycle jacket.
The cellular phone was in there.
He couldn’t sit on his bottom, it hurt too much, so he leaned over on his right thigh, one hand cupped loosely over his throbbing nose. It felt like something alive and malevolent, something that was sinking deep, poisonous stingers into his flesh, but for the time being he was able to ignore it. Let the cellular work, he prayed, speaking to a God he had made fun of for most of his creative life, most recently in a story called “Heaven-Sent Weather,” which had been published in Harper’s magazine to generally
favorable comment. Please let the damned phone work, God, and please let Steve have his ears on.
Then, realizing all of that was getting the cart quite a bit ahead of the horse, he added a third request: Please give me a chance to use the phone in the first place, okay?
As if in answer to this part of his prayer, the big cop passed the driver’s door of his cruiser without even looking at it and walked to Johnny’s motorcycle. He put Johnny’s helmet on his own head, then swung one leg over the seat—he was very tall, so it was actually more of a step than a swing—and a moment later the Harley’s engine exploded into life. The cop stood astride the seat, unbuckled helmet straps hanging, seeming to dwarf the Harley with his own less lovely bulk. He twisted the throttle four or five times, gunning the motor as if he liked the sound. Then he rocked the Harley upright, kicked back the center stand, and toed the gearshift down into first. Moving cautiously to start with, reminding Johnny a little of himself when he had taken the bike out of storage and ridden it in traffic for the first time in three years, the cop descended the side of the road.
He used the hand-brake and paddled along with his feet, watching intently for hazards and obstacles.
Once he was on the desert floor he accelerated, changing rapidly up through the gears and weaving around clumps of sagebrush.
Run into a gopher-hole, you sadistic fuck, Johnny thought, sniffing gingerly through his plugged and throbbing nose. Hit something hard. Crash and burn.
“Don’t waste your time on him,” he mumbled, and used his thumb to pop the snap over the right breast pocket of his motorcycle jacket. He took out the Motorola cellular phone (the cellulars had been Bill Harris’s idea, maybe the only good idea his agent had had in the last four years) and flipped it open. He stared down at the display, breath held, now praying for an S and two bars. Come on, God, please, he thought, sweat trickling down his cheeks, blood still leaking out of his swollen, leaning nose. Got to be an S and two bars, anything less and I might as well use this thing for a suppository.
The phone beeped. What came up in the window on the left side of the display was an 5, which stood for “service,” and one bar.
Just one.
“No, please,” he moaned. “Please, don’t do this to me, just one more, one more please!”
He shook the phone in frustration . . . and saw he had neglected to pull up the antenna.
He did, and a second bar appeared above the first. It flickered, went out, then reappeared, still flickery but there.
“Yes !“ Johnny whispered. “Yesss!” He jerked his head up and stared out the window.
His sweat-circled eyes peered through a tangle of long gray hair—there was blood in it now—like the eyes of some hunted animal peering out of its hole. The cop had brought the Softail to a stop about three hundred yards out in the scree. He stepped off and then stepped away, letting the bike fall over. The engine died. Even in this situation, Johnny felt a twinge of outrage. The Harley had brought him all the way across the country without a single missed stroke of its sweet American engine, and it hurt to see it treated with such absent disdain.
“You crazy shit,” he whispered. He snuffled back half- congealed blood, spat a jellied wad of it onto the cruiser’s paper-littered floor, and looked down at the telephone again.
On the row of buttons at the bottom, second from the right, was one which read NAME/MENU. Steve had programmed this function for him just before they had set out. Johnny punched the button, and his agent’s first name appeared in the window: BILL. Pushed it again and TERRY appeared. Pushed it again and JACK appeared—Jack Appleton, his editor at FS&G. Dear God, why had he put all these people ahead of Steve Ames? Steve was his lifeline.
Down on the desert floor three hundred yards away, the insane cop had taken off the helmet and was kicking sand over Johnny’s ‘86 Harley drag. At this distance he looked like a kid pulling a tantrum. That was fine. If he intended to cover the whole thing, Johnny would have plenty of time to make his call … if the phone cooperated, that was. The ROAM light was flashing, and that was a good sign, but the second transmission-bar was still flickering
“Come on, come on,” Johnny said to the cellular phone in his shaking, blood-grimy hands. “Please, sweetheart okay? Please.” He punched the NAME/MENU button again and STEVE appeared. He dropped his thumb onto the SEND button and squeezed it. Then he held the phone to his ear bending over even farther to the right and peering out of the bottom of the window as he did so. The cop was still kicking sand over the Harley’s engine-block.
The phone began to ring in Johnny’s ear, but he knew he wasn’t home free yet. He had tapped into the Roamer network, that was all. He was still a step away from Steve Ames.
A long step.
“Come on, come on, come on A drop of sweat ran into his eye. He used a knuckle to wipe it away.
The phone stopped ringing. There was a click. “Welcome to the Western Roaming Network!” a cheery robot voice said. “Your call is being routed! Thank you for your patience and have a nice day!”
“Never mind the seventies shit, just hurry the fuck up,” Johnny whispered.
Silence from the phone. In the desert, the cop stepped back from the bike, looking at it as if trying to decide if he had done enough in the way of camouflage. In the dirty paper choked back seat of the cruiser, Johnny Marinville began to cry. He couldn’t help it. In a bizarre way it was like wetting his pants again, only upside down. “No,” he whispered.
“No, not yet, you’re not done yet, not with the wind blowing like it is, you better do a little more, please do a little more.”
The cop stood there looking down at the bike, his shadow now seeming to stretch out across half a mile of desert, and Johnny peered at him through the bottom of the window with his clotted hair in his eyes and the phone mashed against his right ear. He let out a long, shaky sigh of relief as the cop stepped forward and began to kick sand again, this time spraying it over the Harley’s handlebars.
In his ear the telephone began to ring, and this time the sound was scratchy and distant. If the signal was going through—and the quality of this ring seemed to indicate that it was—another Motorola telephone, this one on the dashboard of a Ryder truck somewhere between fifty and two hundred and fifty miles
east of John Edward Marinville’s current position, was now ringing.
Down in the desert, the cop went on kicking and kicking, burying the handlebars of Johnny’s scoot.
Two rings.., three rings . . . four.
He had one more, two at the most, before another robot voice came on the line and told him that the customer he was calling was either out of range or had left the vehicle.
Johnny, still crying, closed his eyes. In the throbbing, red- tinged darkness behind his lids he saw the Ryder truck parked in front of a roadside gas station/general store just west of the Utah—Nevada state line. Steve was inside, buying a pack of his damned cigars and goofing with the counter girl, while outside, on the Ryder’s dashboard, the cellular phone—Steve’s half of the corn-link Johnny’s agent had insisted upon—rang in the empty cab.
Five rings…
And then, distant, almost lost in static but sounding like the voice of an angel bent down from heaven all the same, he heard Steve’s flat West Texas drawl: “Hello … you boss?”
An eastbound semi blew by outside, rocking the cruiser in its backwash. Johnny barely noticed, and made no attempt to flag the driver. He probably wouldn’t have done even if his attention hadn’t been focused on the telephone and Steve’s tenuous voice. The rig was doing seventy at least. What the hell was the driver going to see in the two-tenths of a second it would take him to pass the parked cruiser, especially through the thick dust matted on the windows?