“I don’t know that, either.”
“What are you going to—”
“Go by, of course.” And then, for no reason at all, he added: “After all, we didn’t nail the goddamn cat to the speed-limit sign.”
He pushed down on the accelerator and immediately began to catch up with the dusty cruiser, which was now floating along at no more than twenty.
Mary grabbed the shoulder of his blue work shirt hard enough for him to feel the pressure of her short finger- I nails. “No, don’t.”
“Mare, there’s not a lot else I can do.”
And the conversation was already obsolete, because he was going by even as he spoke. Deirdre’s Acura drew alongside the dusty white Caprice, then passed it. Peter looked through two pieces of glass and saw very little. A big shape, a man-shape, that was about all. Plus the sense that the driver of the police-car was looking back at him.
Peter glanced down at the decal on the passenger door. Now he had time to read it: DESPERATION
POLICE DEPART-MENT in gold letters below the town seal, which appeared to be a miner and a horseman shaking hands.
Desperation, he thought. Even better than Destry. Much better.
As soon as he was past, the white car swung back into the eastbound lane, speeding up to stay on the Acura’s bumper. They traveled that way for thirty or forty seconds (to Peter it felt considerably longer).
Then the blue flashers on the Caprice’ s roof came on. Peter felt a sinking in his stomach, but it wasn’t surprise. Not at all.
Mary still had hold of him, and now, as Peter swung onto the shoulder, she began digging in again.
“What are you doing? Peter, what are you doing?”
“Stopping. He’s got his flashers on and he’s pulling me over.~~
“I don’t like it,” she said, looking nervously around. There was nothing to look at but desert, foothills, and leagues of blue sky. “What were we doing?”
“Speeding seems logical.” He was looking in the out-side mirror. Above the words CAUTION OBJECTS MAY BE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR, he saw the dusty white driver’s door of the cop-car swing open. A khaki leg swung out. It was prodigious.
As the man it belonged to followed it out, swung the door of his cruiser closed, and settled his Smokey Bear hat on his head (he wouldn’t have been wearing it in the car, Peter supposed; not enough clearance), Mary turned around to look. Her mouth dropped ajar.
“Holy God, he’s the size of a football player!”
“At least,” Peter said. Doing a rough mental calculation that used the roof of the car as a steering-point—about five feet—he guessed that the cop approaching Deirdre’ s Acura had to be at least six-five. And over two hundred and fifty pounds. Probably over three hundred.
Mary let go of him and scooted over against her door as far as she could, away from the approaching giant. On one hip the cop wore a gun as big as the rest of him, but his hands were empty—no clipboard, no citation-book. Peter didn’t like that. He didn’t know what it meant, but he didn’t like it. In his entire career as a driver, which had included four speeding tickets as a teenager and one OUI (after the faculty Christmas party three years ago), he had never been approached by an empty-handed cop, and he most definitely didn’t like it. His heartbeat, already faster than normal, sped up a little more. His heart wasn’t pounding, at least not yet, but he sensed it could pound. That it could pound very easily.
You’re being stupid, you know that, don’t you? he asked himself. It’s speeding, that’s all, simple speeding. The posted limit is a joke and everyone knows it’s a joke, but this guy’s undoubtedly got a certain quota to meet. And when it comes to speeding tickets, outof-staters are always best. You know that. So… what’s that old Van Halen album title?
Eat ‘Em and Smile?
The cop stopped beside Peter’s window, the buckle of his Sam Browne belt on a level with Peter’s eyes. He did not bend but raised one fist (to Peter it looked the size of a Daisy canned ham) and made cranking gestures.
Peter took off his round rimless glasses, tucked them into his pocket, and rolled his window down. He was very aware of Mary’s quick breathing from the passenger bucket.
She sounded as if she had been jumping rope, or perhaps making love.
The cop did a slow, smooth, deep kneebend, bringing his huge and noncommittal face into theJacksons ’
field of vision. A band of shadow, cast by the stiff brim of his trooperstyle that, lay across his brow. His skin was an uncomfortable-looking pink, and Peter guessed that, for all his size, this man got along with the sun no better than Mary did. His eyes were bright gray, direct but with no emotion in them. None that Peter could read, anyway. He could smell something, though. He thought maybe Old Spice.
The cop gave him only a brief glance, then his gaze was moving around the Acura’s cabin, checking Mary first (American Wife, Caucasian, pretty face, good figure, low mileage, no visible scars), then looking at the cameras and bags and road-litter in the back seat. Not much road-litter yet; they’d only left Oregon three days before, and that included the day and a half they’d spent with Gary and Marielle Soderson, listening to old records and talking about old times.
The cop’s eyes lingered on the pulled-out ashtray. Peter guessed he was looking for roaches, sniffing for the lingering aroma of pot or hash, and felt relieved. He hadn’t smoked a joint in nearly fifteen years, had never tried coke, and had pretty much quit drinking after the Christmas party OUI. Smelling a little cannabis at the occasional rock show was as close to a drug experience as he ever came these days, and Mary had never bothered with the stuff at all—she sometimes referred to herself as a “drug virgin.” There was nothing in the pulled-out ashtray but a couple of balled-up Juicy Fruit wrappers, and no discarded beer-cans or wine bottles in the back seat.
“Officer, I know I was going a little fast—”
“Had the hammer down, did you?” the cop asked pleasantly. “Gosh, now! Sir, could I see your driver’s license and your registration?”
“Sure.” Peter took his wallet out of his back pocket. “The car’s not mine, though. It’s my sister’s. We’re driving it back toNew York for her. FromOregon . She was at Reed.ReedCollege , inPortland ?”
He was babbling, he knew it, but wasn’t sure he could stop it. It was weird how cops could get you running off at the mouth like this, as if you had a dismembered body or a kidnapped child in the trunk. He remembered doing the same thing when the cop bad pulled him over on the Long Island Expressway after the Christmas party, just talking and talking, yattata~yattata~yattatB~ while all the time the cop said nothing, only went methodically on with his own business, checking first his paperwork and then the contents of his little blue plastic Breathalyzer kit.
“Mare? Would you get the registration out of the glove compartment? It’s in a little plastic envelope, along withDee ’s insurance papers.
At first she didn’t move. He could see her out of the corner of his eye, just sitting still, as he opened his wallet and began hunting for his driver’s license. It should have been right there, in one of the windowed compartments in the front of the billfold, big as life, but it wasn’t.
“Mare?” he asked again, a little impatient now, and a little frightened all over again.
What if he’d lost his goddamn driver’s license somewhere? Dropped it on the floor atGary ’s, maybe, while he’d been transferring his crap (you always seemed to carry so much more crap in your pockets while you were traveling) from one pair of jeans to the next? He hadn’t, of course, but wouldn’t it just be typical if— “Little help, Mare? Get the damned registration” Please ?“
“Oh. Sure, okay.”
She bent forward like some old, rusty piece of machinery goosed into life by a sudden jolt of electricity and opened the glove compartment. She began to root through it, lifting some stuff out (a half-finished bag of- Smartfood, a Bonnie Raitt tape that had suffered a miscar nage in Deirdre’s dashboard player, a map ofCalifornia ) so she could get at the stuff behind it. Peter could see small beads of perspiration at her left temple.
Feathers of her short black hair were damp with it, although the air conditioning vent on that side was blowing cool air directly into her face.
“I don’t.—” she started, and then, with unmistakable relief: “Oh, here it is.”
At the same moment Peter looked in the compartment where he kept business cards and saw his license He couldn’t remember putting it in there—why in the name of God would he have?—but there it was. In the photo graph he looked not like an assistant professor of English at NYU but an unemployed petty laborer (and possible serial killer). Yet it was him, recognizably him, and he felt his spirits lift. They had their papers, God was in his heaven, all was right with the world.