In the truck-stop parking lot, Jane reviewed her options one more time, the people from whom she might seek help. She needed someone in addition to Luther Tillman. Her preference among the possibilities was an unlikely choice, but she kept returning to him.
A week earlier, in Texas, she had been driving the desert night in a black Ford Escape when a Texas Highway Patrol officer pulled her over. She’d left him cuffed to her vehicle, which had been hot once it had been connected to her, and made off with his cruiser, a black-and-white Dodge Charger. Certain that she couldn’t outrun the roadblocks, she’d used the patrol car’s lightbar to pull over a Mercedes E350, intending to take the car and use the driver as cover, because the police would be looking for a woman alone. She hadn’t expected that she and the eighty-one-year-old widower who owned the E350, Bernie Riggowitz, would spend more than twelve hours together or that they would bond so completely.
Now she took from her wallet a photo of his late wife that he’d given her, with whom he’d driven all over the country on extended road trips. Miriam was lovely, her face a portrait of kindness.
Jane called Bernie’s cell number. When he answered, she said, “I’m looking at this picture of Miriam you gave me, and I can’t help asking myself, how did a guy like you win over a doll like her?”
“I’m no plosher, so I won’t say I was a double for Cary Grant back then. But I was sweet as halva. Halva and chutzpa can take a guy a long way, plus I could dance a little. How’s by you, Alice?”
She had told him that her name was Alice Liddell. Because he never followed the news—Feh! It’s all lies or depressing—he hadn’t known she was the most-wanted fugitive in America, only that she was “mixed up in something you need to mix yourself out of.”
“Maybe by now,” Jane said, “you know more about me.”
“Oh, you’re everywhere. I know all kinds of shmontses about you now. I might believe one percent of it if I was stupid. But anyone wants me to spill anything about you, they can go talk to the wall.”
“You’re a peach. Where are you, Bernie?”
“I’m here in Scottsdale with Nasia and Segev making over me, everything ipsy-pipsy. But …”
Nasia was his daughter, Segev his son-in-law.
“But?” she said.
“But they want me to stop traveling, move in here, be pampered to death. They think Miriam’s in that grave. They won’t understand she’s out there everywhere we ever went together all those years of driving. I’m not lonely on the road, ’cause she’s always with me.”
“Nasia is your only child, isn’t she?”
“My best blessing now that Miriam’s gone. So I have to pretend maybe I’ll give up the road, which I won’t.”
“You know I have such a blessing, too.”
“Do I know? Since I found out, I can’t sleep for worry. You never mentioned when we had our little drive together.”
“You didn’t know who I was then. My kid is suddenly in a very bad jam. I can’t get him …” Speaking about her helplessness brought a tightness to her chest, a knot of emotion that made it hard to speak for a moment. “I can’t get him out of this jam alone.”
“The way you talk, a person would think I’m a stranger. You can’t just tell me what I should do?”
“It’s going to be damn dangerous. I have no right—”
“Are we mishpokhe or what?”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“What it means is, it means family.”
“That’s very sweet. But in fact we aren’t family.”
“I know my own family, bubeleh—who is and who’s not. Didn’t you call me Grandpa one day in Texas? And didn’t I tell that nice policeman you were my granddaughter? So then it’s settled. Tell me what, when, where.”
Under that serene blue sky, on the tumultuous surface of the earth, as long as there were Bernies and Luthers, there was hope.
Jane said, “You and Miriam traveled sometimes in a motor home.”
“We took most trips by car, some in a Fleetwood Southwind. It’s a different country one way from the other, but always beautiful.”
“You could still drive a motor home?”
“Can I walk, can I talk, can I twiddle my thumbs? I could drive you coast to coast without a bump.”
“What size was that Fleetwood of yours?”
“Thirty-two feet, but I can do longer. Gas is better than diesel. A diesel pusher—engine in back—will be a lot heavier and harder to turn. Where are we going?”
“Tell you tomorrow. Let’s meet in Indio, near Palm Springs.” She gave him the address. “Can you be there tomorrow afternoon?”
“Indio’s five hours from here. I could be there and back and there again, with time to stop for a nosh. You got a motor home?”
“I’ll have one. From Enrique, the guy we visited in Nogales that time. Meanwhile, have someone take a photo of you, a head shot.” She gave him the email address that she’d given to Luther.
“Don’t you worry,” Bernie said. “Whatever we need to do, we’ll do it twice.”
“There’s no way I can ever thank you enough, Bernie.”
“So before you hang up, say the word for me.”
“What word?”
“What we are and always will be.”
Her voice caught again in her throat. “Mishpokhe.”
“Pretty good. You should let that kh rattle against the roof of your mouth a little better, but not bad for a first try, bubeleh.”
17
GOTTFREY NEVER SLEEPS MORE THAN A FEW HOURS. He doesn’t know why he needs any sleep. Sleep is a requirement of the body, and his body isn’t real. A disembodied mind should function without sleep.
But he isn’t the author of this drama, isn’t responsible for the conflicting details that suggest a careless playwright.
He is only along for the ride.
After a late breakfast in the Holiday Inn coffee shop, he walks two blocks to the Best Western, where Rupert Baldwin is staying.
The sky over Worstead is wooly and gray. The air pools in stillness; but a predawn breeze earlier smoothed a layer of pale dust along the gutter, in and out of which wander paw prints laid down by a dog or by the coyote that he saw the previous night.
At the Best Western, when Gottfrey knocks on the door to Room 16, Rupert calls out, “It’s not locked.”
In the same Hush Puppies and rumpled corduroy suit and beige shirt and bolo tie that he was wearing for the operation at Hawk Ranch, Rupert sits at a small table with two chairs. Through reading glasses, he squints at one of two laptops that are open and in use.
The bedspread has not been turned back, though it is slightly rumpled, as if Rupert had rested sleeplessly atop it for a short while before getting on with the search for Ancel and Clare Hawk.
Closing the door behind him, Gottfrey says, “Couldn’t sleep?”
“Didn’t need to.”
Intrigued, Gottfrey asks, “Do you ever?”
Without looking up, Rupert asks, “Do I ever what?”
“Need to sleep.”
“Not when I have Hershey’s Special Dark and can wash down some crank with Red Bull.” He taps a can of the high-caffeine energy drink, beside which is a bag of miniature dark-chocolate candy bars.
“ ‘Crank’? You’re using methamphetamine?”
“Not often. Only since this case. I hate this slut. I want her dead sooner than now. I want her in-laws injected and licking my boots, and then I want them dead.”
“There’s another one,” Gottfrey says. “A conflicting detail. You never wear boots.”
Rupert finally looks up from the laptop, frowning, his stare as sharp as the prongs of a meat fork. “Something wrong with you?”
Gottfrey shrugs. “Things should’ve gone better last night.”
“Better? Hell, it couldn’t have gone worse.” Rupert returns his attention to the laptop. “When all the Hawks are dead, including her brat, I’m going to surprise that shitkicker Juan Saba, cut off his package, and feed it to his wife before I blow her brains out.”
“You sure are passionate about this. Dedicated to the mission.”