NIGHT CRUISING (32 page)

It was enough to break
the heart.

Cruise insisted she
take the passenger seat. She finally complied, too tired and
depressed to give him misery.

She had tried to stop
the murder. They couldn't say she hadn't tried. She saw the teenage
boy walk out the back exit of the truck-stop restaurant and she
fairly flew from the corner of the sleeper onto the center section
between the front seats. She was afraid to roll down the window to
wave, but she pressed up against the windshield and she tried to get
the boy's attention. He glanced at the truck. He saw her! He stood
holding a black garbage bag in his arms. He cocked his head as if in
question. She waved wildly, shook her hands, pointed to the rear of
the truck trying to signal that something awful, something permanent
and deadly was taking place there.

Suddenly she heard the
ring of footsteps on the rungs leading to the driver's door and she
fell back, scooting fast as she could away from the windshield,
burrowing into the sheets in the corner of the sleeper as Cruise
climbed into the cab. She saw the boy dump the garbage bag, look her
way once, shrug, and cross the parking lot to a battered black
Camaro. He had not understood her pleas. He might have thought she
was playing a joke on him. Or he might have decided she was a Lot
Lizard and didn't deserve his attention.

As Cruise put the rig
into gear and let out the clutch too quickly, humping the big
growling machine across the parking lot to the feeder road, she
despaired of ever finding someone to help her. She slumped against
the buttoned and rolled brown vinyl walls of the sleeper, letting her
chin fall onto her chest. She sat with her legs beneath her, the raw
places on her ankles burning from her weight, and she wondered when
she was going to die.

"Let's turn on the
CB, see what the world's up to," Cruise said.

She would have rather
he turned on the radio so that she'd know when they found the
trucker's body, but it was long past the time she could suggest
anything to her captor. He was fast losing it if his actions dictated
his state of mind. There was something wrong, terribly wrong, with
his arms. Not only did they look misshapen--too large and puffy--but
she couldn't stand the way he massaged them, the way he held one,
then the other, out from his body as if they were alien appendages he
had just discovered.

And of course, the
killings. It was as if a dam had broken and his thirst for blood
rushed over to flood his senses. He wasn't cautious. Imagine
overlooking the little boy in the back seat of the car at the
lakeside when he murdered the child's father! How could Cruise have
done something like that? If he had been killing people without
getting caught for so many years you'd think he'd have looked in the
back seat first. But he hadn't, thank God, or there would have been a
dead boy alongside his parents on that dark rainy road.

He hadn't made much
effort to hide the truck driver's body either. There it was. She
thought of him as dead. She knew it was the truth.

He might have put him
into the trailer, but Molly didn't think so. She hadn't heard the
doors open or close. She expected he left the driver where he died,
somewhere on the truck-stop property near the trailer. Maybe he'd be
discovered soon and they'd know Cruise had stolen the cab. Wouldn't
it be an easier vehicle to find than the Chrysler?

Molly felt herself
perspiring despite the cab's air conditioner. She could smell her own
scent mingling with those of the driver's. She had not had a bath
in...two...three days. She couldn't remember the sequence of events,
they were all becoming scrambled in her memory. She thought it might
be a side effect of sleep deprivation. She didn't think she had slept
more than an hour or two total in a couple of days. But then she
didn't know for sure. She couldn't remember. The nights were fluid,
running one into the other, time bent out of joint.

She wished now she'd
not been frightened into submission at the border crossing. She had
meant to make a break for it. She never should have looked into
Cruise's eyes. He saw her resolve and took hold of her wrist. Had she
said anything to the border guard, Cruise would have killed her
first.

She didn't want to die.
She guessed she would keep her mouth closed during any atrocity as
long as she was assured of another hour of life. She was selfish.
That thought should have made her feel ashamed, but that's the way it
was. In order to keep breathing, she did as she was told, she didn't
speak up, she didn't even get a chance to warn the black man that he
was doomed if he got out of the truck with Cruise.

It seemed a squalid way
to die. In a truck stop. In the dark at the back of the lot.

She shivered, sweat
drying beneath her shirt so that it stuck to her skin.

She thought she ought
to talk to Cruise, find a route into his madness where she might
influence him, but she couldn't find her tongue and couldn't make
words form in her mouth. What could she say? What had she been able
to say so far that changed anything he had wanted to do?

Nothing.

It was all beyond her
ken, beyond her control. She mentally flinched over the word "ken."
It was another word from vocabulary lessons like the word "chattel"
that she didn't know she knew or would ever use. Ken. Range of
knowledge. Beyond her range of knowledge and control. Way out there
in the ozone layer floating into the hole over Alaska, drifting into
space.
Beyond her ken
.

Ever since she got into
the car with Cruise in Mobile she realized all choice had been out of
her hands. She was out of her element. Lost in the depths.

She listened to the
periodic static and sudden influx of voices talking on the CB about
late loads and missing home and dispatchers who made them wait over
weekends to deliver and clocking the miles and doctoring the logbooks
before they hit the weigh stations and staying on the lookout for
Smokeys. Cops is what they meant, of course.

It might as well have
been a foreign language because they didn't teach her about loads and
logbooks in school.

Besides which, the
voices weren't talking to her.

#

He wanted to talk to
her. He filtered the many voices coming from the CB, but didn't give
them his direct attention. He wanted to tell Molly something about
the cuts on his arms, but he didn't know how. Maybe just that they
tortured him, that he felt impelled to do it again, to cut into the
tightening flesh to let out the galloping fear. He wanted to tell her
that ghosts kept following them. Indians on ponies keeping pace with
the truck, their reflections glimmering off the side window as he
drove. Edward sat on the engine cover between them, dripping sewage
water from the gap in his throat. And in the sleeper lay the ghost of
the black truck driver, whistling wind and gulping for air.

He had been anonymous.
He was one of the elite, the chosen, a man above the law. Now they
knew about him, those faceless peasants in their faceless jobs. They
meant to cage him and judge him. He wasn't afraid so much as enraged
that he had been found out in the end. He thought he never would.

He had failed to look
in a back seat. He left someone as witness. A
real
witness.

Maybe they even knew he
carried the knife attached to the Velcro patch on his scalp. Oh, that
made his arms flare with renewed itching. He scratched at himself and
felt a scab come loose, tearing and pulling at the hair along his
arm.

They could know it all
if they knew a little. He put nothing past the police and their low
cunning. He had been apart from society all his adult life. He picked
up the kids for company, but they didn't count. Kids weren't quite
flowing with the mainstream yet, especially not the ones he found on
the road. They had turned their backs, just as he had, on the right
life, the conventional path.

Now the world had found
him out. They hunted him like he was a common fox on the run. The
hounds were howling at his back.

He reached to turn down
the squelch on the CB radio. The roar of the big rig's engine filled
the cab. Cruise brushed aside Edward from the engine cover so he
could see Molly better. "I want you to take a look at my arms
the next time we stop."

She jumped at his
voice. She must have been dreaming while awake. "What?"

"My arms are
bothering me a lot. They feel so tight it's like they're covered with
elastic bands cutting off the blood. My hands keep going numb."

"What's wrong with
them?"

"I don't know! It
started happening at Lannie's house. I tried to do something about
it, but nothing helps."

"What do you want
me to do about it? Maybe you should see a doctor."

He smiled sadly. "You
know I can't go to a doctor."

"Cruise, this is
no good, you know that, don't you?"

"What do you
mean?"

"This running.
Hiding. You can't escape now. They know about you."

"We were talking
about taking a look at my arms." He turned to watch the road.
From the corners of his eyes he saw the Indians, see-through
apparitions on painted ponies that dogged the truck every mile of the
way. In the sleeper Edward and the truck driver commiserated over
their similar deaths.

It was funny. He
couldn't see or hear the ghosts too well. They were muted in form and
sound, but it was obvious they were there at the periphery of his
hearing and vision. He didn't think that incongruous. He had always
believed in them. The odd thing might be that they had never showed
themselves before now.

"Okay," Molly
said. "I'll look at your arms for you."

"Will you?"
He sounded like a petitioner. He cleared his throat. He had a notion
that the persona he had spent years sculpting was changing in several
pertinent aspects. But then it would since the day had come that he
was hunted.

"Sure," she
said. "Why not."

"We have to get
off this freeway."

"Why's that?"

He could tell by how
she replied that she knew why. "You know why. They'll be looking
for me. You said so yourself."

"I also said this
was no good now, Cruise. You should think about that. They're going
to get you sooner or later. You've killed too many people."

"More than you
know," he said softly.

His arms were singing
an improvised melody, a rhapsody in a minor key. He rubbed them each
in turn while handling the big round steering wheel that kept the
truck in the inside lane. Cruise could sense the mechanical beast
lying in wait for the release of power. There was more horsepower
beneath the hood than in a herd of wild Indian mustangs. If he
wanted, if he dared, he could make the truck fly down the freeway
like an eagle on a downdraft.

"
Not yet
,"
he murmured.

"What?" Molly
asked, leaning toward him.

"Not yet,"
the ghosts in the sleeper chorused for him. "It isn't time yet."

Molly let it go. He
knew she thought he was going crazy and maybe he was.

"Let me tell you
about a guy I once knew," he said to drown the whispers at his
ear. He thought he saw Molly slump dejectedly into her seat, but that
didn't stop him. He told her the story anyway to keep them both
occupied during the darkest hours across the state of Arizona.

#

Mark had to have one of
the truckers help him install the CB and antenna. It didn't take but
a few minutes. "Channel Nineteen," the truck driver said.
"That's the one we use. Channel Nine, that's the emergency
channel the police monitor. Good luck, man. I'm going to tell
everyone on the road about this son of a bitch. We'll all watch for
him."

Mark was on his way
again, the CB squawking and blaring as he drove east toward dawn. He
thumbed the mike, said into it, "I'm looking for a bobtail rig.
I don't know what kind it is, but it's dark blue. The man driving it
is wanted by the police for murder. He's got my daughter hostage."

He let go the thumb
button on the mike and waited for a response. Static roared. He
turned the little knob that had the word "squelch" beneath
it. The static died into a ringing silence. Just as he was about to
send out his message again, a voice came over the CB so loudly it
sounded like an amplifier was on the dash. "What's your name?
Whose this driver you're trying to find?"

Mark glanced into the
oncoming lanes. He counted three tractor trailers. Ahead of him was
one. He looked in the rear view mirror and saw another three cars
behind. One of them was talking to him.

"I'm Mark Killany.
I've been following the trail of a man who just killed a truck driver
at Guthrie's Truck Stop outside of Tucson. He dropped his trailer and
took the rig. An eyewitness saw my daughter waving inside the cab."
He didn't add that he
suspected
it was his daughter.

The voice returned
fast. "This guy's bob-tailing it, is he? And you don't know the
make of truck? Was it a Peterbilt, a Mack, an International?"

"I don't know what
it was. The boy who saw it said it had a snub nose. It was a ...
cab-over, that's what he called it. And it was blue, dark blue."

"Probably an
International," the disembodied voice said. "International's
got most of the cab-overs. What are you driving, come back?"

"I'm in a white
Chevy, a Caprice."

"I got you in the
rocking chair. I'm coming up on your left. I'll keep out an eye for
the son of a bitch. He never should have killed a trucker. We'll run
him off the fucking road."

"Don't do that. My
girl's with him, remember. At least she was when he was last seen in
Tucson."

"Got it covered,
Mr. Killany. I'll pass on the word, try to help get your girl back.
You hear that, boys? We're going to a rodeo. Over and out."