“Somebody else might be involved,” he replied reluctantly. “He said something about state cops and town cops. It might’ve been ‘Don’t call the state cops, call the town cops.’
I couldn’t tell for sure.”
She pointed to his cellular, which was back on the dashboard.
“No way,” he said. “I’m not calling any cops until I see what kind of mess he’s gotten himself into.”
“And I promise that won’t be in my statement, if you promise not to call me cookie anymore.”
He smiled a little, although he didn’t feel much like smiling. “Probably that’s a good idea. You could always say— “—that your phone wouldn’t work anymore,” she finished. “Everybody knows how finicky those things are.”
“You’re okay, Cynthia.”
“You’re not so bad yourself.”
At just under ninety, the miles melted away like spring snowfall. When they were sixty miles west of the point where Steve had lost contact, he began slowing the truck a couple of miles an hour for each mile traveled. No police-cars had passed them in either direction, and he supposed that was good. He said so, and Cynthia shook her head doubtfully.
“It’s weird, is what it is. If there’s been an accident where your boss or maybe someone else got hurt, wouldn’t you think a few cop-cars would’ve gone past us by now? Or an ambulance?”
“Well, if they came from the other way, west—”
“According to my map, the next town that way isAustin , and that’s much farther ahead of us than Ely is behind us. Anything official—anything with sirens is what I mean— should be heading east to west.
Catching up with us. Get it?”
“I guess so, yeah.”
“So where are they?”
“I don’t know.”
“Me either.”
“Well, keep looking for.. . well shit, who knows? Any thing out of the ordinary.”
“I am. Slow down a little more.”
He glanced at his watch and saw it wasquarter to six The shadows had drawn long across the desert, but the day was still bright and hot. If Marinville was out there, they would see him.
You bet we will, he thought. He’s going to be sitting at the edge of the road, probably with his head busted and half his pants torn off from when he spilled and rolled And likely making notes on how it felt.
Thank God he wears his helmet, at least. If he didn’t— “I see something! Up there!” The girl’s voice was excited but controlled. She was shading her eyes from the westering sun with her left hand and pointing with her right. “See? Could that… aw, shit no. That’s way too big to be a motorcycle. Looks like a motor home.”
“I think this is where he called from, though. Some-where around here, anyway.”
“What makes you think so?”
“He said there was an RV off the road a little farther up—I heard that part quite clearly.
He said he was about a mile east of it, and that’s about where we are now, so—”
“Yeah, don’t say it. I’m looking, I’m looking.”
He slowed the Ryder truck to thirty, then, as they approached the RV, to walking pace.
Cynthia had unrolled the passenger window and was halfway out of it, her tank top riding up to reveal the small of her back (the small small of her back, Steve thought) and the ridge of her spine.
“Anything?” he asked her. “At all?”
“Nope. I saw glint, but it was way out on the desert floor—a lot farther than he’da gone if he’d cracked up. Or if the wind pushed him off the road, you know?”
“Probably the sun reflecting off the mica in the rocks.”
“Uh-huh, could have been.”
“Don’t fall out that window, girl.”
“I’m fine,” she said, then winced her eyes shut as the wind, which was becoming steadily more grumpy, threw grit in her face.
“If this is the RV he was talking about, we’re already past where he called from.”
She nodded. “Yeah, but keep going. If there’s some-body home in there, they might have saw him.”
He snorted.” ‘Might have saw him.’ Did you learn that reading Dean Koontz and Danielle Steel?”
She pulled in long enough to give him a haughty look but he thought he saw hurt beneath it. “Sorry,” he said. “I was only teasing.”
“Oh?” she said coolly. “Tell me something, Mr. Big Texas Roadie—have you read anything your boss
has written?”
“Well, he gave me a copy of Harper’s with a story of his in it. ‘Heaven-Sent Weather,’ it was called. I read that, sure did. Ever’ word.”
“Did you understand ever’ word?”
“Uh, no. Look, what I said was snotty. I do apologize. Sincerely.”
“Okay,” she said, but her tone suggested that he was going to be on probation, at least for awhile.
He opened his mouth to say something that might be funny if he was lucky, something that would get her to smile (she had a nice one), and then he got a really good look at the RV. “Oh hey, what’s this?” be asked, speaking more to himself than to the girl.
“What’s what?” She turned her head to look out through the windshield as Steve coasted the Ryder truck to a stop on the shoulder, just behind the RV. It was one of the middle- sized ones, bigger than Lassie but smaller than the Godzillas he’d been seeing ever sinceColorado .
“Guy must have run over some nails in the road, or something,” Steve said. “Tires look like they’re all flat.”
“Yeah. So how come yours aren’t?”
By the time it occurred to him that the people in the RV might have been public-spirited enough to pick up the nails, the girl with the punky tu-tone hair was out of the cab and walking up to the RV, hallooing.
Well, she knows a good exit-line when she gets one off give her that, he thought, and got out on his side.
Wind struck him in the face hard enough to rock him back on his heels. And it was hot, like air blown over the top of an incinerator.
“Steve?” Her voice was different. The prickly pertness, which he thought might have been the girl’s way of flirting, was gone. “Come over here. I don’t like this”
She was standing by the side door of the RV. It was unlatched, banging back and forth in the wind a little even though this was the lee side, and the steps were down It wasn’t the door or the steps she was looking at, though At the foot of the stairs, half-buried in sand that the wind had blown beneath the RV, was a doll with blond hair and a bright blue dress. It lay face-down and abandoned Steve didn’t care for the look of this much, either. DoIls~z with no little girls around to mind them were sort of creepy under any conditions, that was his opinion, at_ least, and to come upon one abandoned by the roadside, half-buried in blowing sand— He opened the unlatched door and poked his head into~7 the RV. It was brutally hot, at least a hundred and ten degrees. “Hello? Anybody?”
But he knew better. If they’d been here, the people who~-owned this RV, they would have been running the engine ‘g for the air conditioning.
“Don’t bother.” Cynthia had picked up the doll and was ~. brushing sand from its hair and the folds of its dress. “This is no dime store dolly. Not huge bucks, but expensive.
And someone cared about her. Look.” She pulled out _ the skirt with her fingers so he could see where a small — neat patch had been sewn over a rip. It matched the dress almost exactly in color. “If the girl who owned this doll was around, it wouldn’t have been out lying in the dirt I practically guarantee you that. The question is, why didn’t she take it with her when she and her folks left? Or at least put it back inside?” She opened the door, hesitated went up one of the two steps, hesitated again, looked back at him.
“Come on.”
“I can’t. I have to find the boss.”
“In a minute, okay? I don’t want to go in here by myself. It’s like the Andrea Doria, or something.”
“You mean the Mary Celeste. The Andrea Doria sank “Okay, smarty-britches, whatever.
Come on, it won’t take long. Besides She hesitated.
“Besides, it might have something to do with my boss? Is that what you’re thinking?”
Cynthia nodded. “It’s not that big a reach. I mean, they’re both gone, aren’t they?”
He didn’t want to accept that, though—it felt like a complication he didn’t deserve. She saw some of that on his face (maybe even all of it; she sure wasn’t dumb) and tossed up her hands. “Oh shit, I’ll look around myself.”
She went inside, still holding the doll. Steve looked thoughtfully after her for a moment, then followed.