That was when the cellular phone on the dashboard gave out its strident, oddly nasal cry: Hmeep!
Hmeep!
Steve grabbed it off the dashboard but didn’t open it right away. He looked at the girl instead. “Don’t say a word,” he told her as the phone hmeep-ed in his hand a third time.
“You might get me trouble if you do. ‘Kay?”
Hmeep! Hmeep!
She nodded. Steve flipped the phone’s mouthpiece open and then pushed SEND on the keypad, which
was how you accepted an incoming call. The first thing he was aware of when he put the phone to his ear was how heavy the static was—he was amazed the call
had gone through at all.
“Hello, that you, boss?”
There was a deeper, smoother roar behind the static— the sound of a truck going by, Steve thought—and then Marinville’s voice. Steve could hear panic even through the static, and it kicked his heart into a higher gear. He had heard people talking in that tone before (it happened at least once on every rock tour, it seemed), and he recognized it at once. At Johnny Marinville’s end of the line, shit of some variety had hit the fan. “Steve! Steve, I’m. . . ouble… bad..
He stared out at the road, running straight-arrow into the desert, and felt little seeds of sweat starting to form on his brow. He thought of the boss’s tubby little agent with his thou shalt nots and his bullying voice, then swept all that away. The last person he needed cluttering up his head right now was Bill Harris.
“Were you in an accident? Is that it? What’s up, boss? Say again!”
Crackle, zit, crackle.
“Johnny… ear me?”
“Yes, I hear you!” Shouting into the phone now, know-ing it was totally useless but doing it anyway.
Aware, out of the corner of his eye, that the girl was looking at him with mounting concern. “What’s happened to you?”
No answer for so long he was positive this time he had lost Marinville. He was taking the phone away from his ear when the boss’s voice came through again, impossibly far off, like a voice coming in from another galaxy: “west … Ely . . . iffy.”
No, not iffy, Steve thought, not iffy but fifty. “I’m west of Ely, on Highway 50.” Maybe, anyway. Maybe that’s what he’s saying. Accident. Got to be. He drove his scoot off the road and he’s sitting out there with a bust leg and blood maybe pouring down his face and when I get back to New York his guys are going to crucify me, if for no other reason than that they can ‘t crucify him— ot sure how far … least, probably more … RV pulled off the road… ittle farther up…
The heaviest blast of static yet, then something about cops. State cops and town cops.
“What’s—” the girl in the passenger seat began.
“Shh! Not now!”
From the phone: “… my bike … into the desert wind.., mile or so east of the RV..
And that was all. Steve yelled Johnny’s name into the phone half a dozen times, but only silence came back. The connection had been broken. He used the NAME/MENU button to bring up J.M. in the display window, then pushed SEND. A recorded voice welcomed him to the Western Roaming Network, there was a pause, and then another recording told him that his call could not be completed at this time. The voice began to list all the reasons why this might be so. Steve pushed END and flipped the phone closed. “God damn it!”
“It’s bad, isn’t it?” Cynthia asked. Her eyes were very wide again, but there was nothing cute about them now. “I can see it in your face.”
“Maybe,” he said, then shook his head, impatient with himself. “Probably. That was my boss. He’s up the line somewhere. Seventy miles’d be my best guess, but it might be as much as a hundred. He’s riding a Harley. He—”
“Big red-and-cream bike?” she asked, suddenly ex-cited. “Does he have long gray hair, sort of like Jerry Garcia’s?”
He nodded.
“I saw him this morning, way far east of here,” she said. “He filled up at this little gas station—cafeteria place in Pretty Nice. You know that town, Pretty Nice?”
He nodded.
“I was eating breakfast and saw him out the window. I thought he looked familiar. Like I’d seen him on Oprah or maybeRickiLake .”
“He’s a writer.” Steve looked at the speedometer, saw he had the panel truck up to seventy, and decided he could let it out just a little more. The needle crept up toward seventy-five. Outside the windows, the desert ran back-ward a little faster. “He’s crossing the country, getting material for a book.
He’s done some speaking, too, but mostly he just goes places and talks to people and makes notes.
Anyway, he’s had an accident. At least I think that’s what’s happened.”
“The connection was fucked, wasn’t it?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Do you want to pull over? Let me out? Because it’s no problem, if that’s what you want.”
He thought it over carefully—now that the initial shock was receding, his mind seemed to be ticking away coldly and precisely, as it always had before in situations like this. No, he decided, he didn’t want her out, not at all. He had a situation on his hands, one that had to be dealt with right away, but that didn’t mean the future could be forgotten.Appleton might be okay even if Johnny Marinville had highsided his Harley and fucked himself up bigtime, he had looked like the sort of man who could (blazers and rep ties notwithstanding) accept the idea that sometimes things went wrong. Bill Harris, however, had struck Steve as a man who believed in playing Pin the Blame on the Donkey when things went wrong … and jamming that pin as far up the donkey’s ass as it would go.
As the potential donkey, Steve decided what he would really like was a witness—one who had never set eyes on him before today.
“No, I’d like you to ride along. But I have to be straight with you—I don’t know what we’re going to find. There could be blood.”
“I can deal with blood,” she said.
She made no comment about how fast he was going. but when the rental truck hit eightyfive and the frame began to shake, she fastened her shoulder-harness. Steve squeezed the gas-pedal a little harder, and when the truck got up around ninety, the vibration eased. He kept both hands curled around the wheel, though; the wind was kicking up, and at these speeds a good hard gust could swerve you onto the shoulder. Then, if your tires sank in, you were in real trouble.
Flipping-over trouble. The boss would have been even more vulnerable to windshear on his bike, Steve reflected. Maybe that was what had happened.
By now he had told Cynthia the basic facts of his em-ploy: he made reservations, checked routes, vetted sound- systems at the places where the boss was scheduled to speak, stayed out of the way so as not to conflict with the picture the boss was painting—
Johnny Marinvil]e, the thinking man’s lone wolf, a politically correct Sam Peckinpah hero, a writer who hadn’t forgotten how to hang tough and lay cool.
The panel-truck, Steve told her, was empty except for some extra gear and a long wooden ramp, which Johnny could ride up if the weather got too foul to cycle in. Since this was midsummer, that wasn’t very likely, but there was another reason for the ramp as well, and for the tiedowns Steve had installed on the floor of the van before setting out. This one was unspoken by either of them, but both had known it was there from the day they had set out fromWestport,Connecticut . Johnny Mar-inville might wake up one morning and simply find him-self unwilling to keep riding the Harley.
Or incapable of it.
“I’ve heard of him,” Cynthia said, “but I never read anything by him. I like Dean Koontz and Danielle Steel, mostly. I just read for pleasure. Nice bike, though. And the guy had great hair. Rock-and-roll hair, you know?”
Steve nodded. He knew. Marinvil]e did, too.
“You really worried about him or just worried about what might happen to you?”
He likely would have resented the question if someone else had asked it, but he sensed no implied criticism in Cynthia’s tone. Only curiosity. “I’m worried about both,” he said.
She nodded. “How far have we come?”
He glanced down at the odometer. “Forty-five miles since I lost him off the phone.”
“But you don’t know exactly where he was calling from.”
“You think he just fucked himself up, or someone else, too?”
He looked over at her, surprised. That the boss might’ve fucked someone else up was exactly what he was afraid of, but he never would have said so out loud if she hadn’t raised the possibility first.