Talk Talk (20 page)

Seconds, that was all he had, because the woman--Dana Halter, Dr. Dana Halter--was bent over her cell phone and if the cops stepped in and checked his ID against hers “or his, Bridger's,” there was no hope of talking his way clear of this. Even as he increased the pressure on Natalia's arm, even as she said, “What is the hurry?” and he silenced her with a look, snatched up Madison as if she were an overnight bag and set a brisk pace for the car, it came to him that they must have been hidden somewhere in the lot and followed him when he pulled out of the condo. He cursed himself. He was lax, he was stupid. All of this shit--and he was so wired suddenly it was as if he'd grabbed hold of a high-voltage cable with his bare hands--all of it, all of it, he'd called down on his own head.

But there was the car, a hundred feet away, Madison squirming in his grip, Natalia gone white with the fear that sprang up full-blown out of his frantic headlong urgency, seventy-five feet, fifty, and the two of them were out of the car now, shouting something, brandishing cell phones--both of them, they both had phones, as if Cingular wireless was the supreme force in the universe. “No,” he spat, “no,” as he flung Madison sprawling into the back, jerked Natalia in beside him and slammed the door, “no time”--he meant the belts, the seatbelts--and so what if the buzzer cried out to warn him, and these people, these creeps, were looming up in the rearview, the doors were locked, the engine cranked, and with a flick of the wrist he was out of the parking space, straight ahead, up over the concrete bumper and on into the dirt lot beyond it, heading for the highway in a plume of crushed weed, flying cans and airborne dust.

Strangely, perversely, he found himself worrying about the paint job as he caromed across the vacant lot, thumped through a gully and bore up onto the ramp, cutting off two dickheads in an old hearse with a band logo filigreed across the back panel even as the tires took hold of the pavement and began to sing. The car didn't matter. It was nothing. He'd have to lose it anyway, and soon. There was the blast of the dickheads' horn and then he was right up on the rear end of a Winnebago doing about two miles an hour where the ramp narrowed before merging onto the highway. A glance at Natalia's grim bloodless face, and then his eyes went to the rearview, where the hearse was gunning up on him, horn squalling and the two dickheads stabbing their middle fingers at the windshield. They didn't interest him. What interested him was the black Jetta tearing out of the parking lot and up onto the ramp behind them.

Natalia didn't say a word. Even Madison, rough handling and all, seemed to be holding her breath. Directly ahead of them was the creeping beige, white and lemon-yellow wall of the Winnebago, bicycles, lawn chairs and cooking grills strapped to it as if in some frenzy of reenactment, and right there on their bumper was the hearse. Foot by foot, yard by yard, the ramp fell under the wheels, no room to maneuver on either side because the narrow sweeping arc of it had been cut through rock the color of dried blood, and there were two horns competing now, the Jetta on the bumper of the hearse, arms waving, mouths flung open in rigid oral display. He heard his own voice then, just as the ramp began to broaden out to the highway: “Put your seat belts on.”

What amazed him about it later was the way the Jetta had stayed with him. The hearse fell back as if it were hooked to a chain and the Winnebago was just part of the scenery, but the Jetta came on even as he put his foot to the floor and cut everything else away from him. When he hit a hundred and ten, he was aware of a movement beside him--Natalia, her mouth clamped and her eyes in retreat, sliding in back to cling to her daughter--but the gesture meant nothing, not now. At a hundred twenty the car discovered what it was made for, all those German horses, the Autobahn, “cruising speed.” There was a part of him that knew he was in trouble, knew that they could be punching in 911 and telling the dispatcher anything, that there was a drunk driver up ahead, a reckless driver, a deranged life-endangering criminal in a wine-colored Mercedes with dealer placards that might as well have been flags whipping in the wind, but there was another part, a larger part, that just didn't give a shit, the part that ran on adrenaline and pushed his foot to the floor.

Later, after the Jetta had become a memory and Natalia had run out of breath bitching at him and he'd filled whole cauldrons with qualifications and sophistries and outright lies (Oh, hey, they were bad people, people he'd done a real estate deal with who didn't want to honor their contractual obligations, and didn't she know real estate people were the worst?), after she fell asleep wrapped up in back with her daughter and he eased off the main road at Placerville to take the Gold Country Highway back on up to I-80, he began to think about the immediate future. Tahoe was out, definitely out, and he'd have to ditch the car as soon as he could, but 80 would take him to Reno and from Reno he could find a road south to Vegas--it would be a long drive, a lot longer than he'd counted on, and it would involve some elaborate explanation and days of worship at the altar of her, but it was necessary at this point. He'd had a close call. A learning experience.

That was behind him now. The scenery was improving. He cranked the music, let the wheels roll under him. After a while he found himself singing along, keeping time with the flat of his hand against the dash, the adrenaline slowly draining from his veins even as the road climbed and the trees thickened and the naked faces of the mountains began to catch and shape the light. He hit the accelerator to blow past an RV sleepily towing a car behind it and made himself a promise: there was no way anybody was ever going to find him again.

ANGER DIDN'T BEGIN to describe what she was feeling. It was rage, cold and clear-eyed, unwavering, ecstatic, the rage of the psychopath, the soldier under fire, the wielder of the blade. Never in her life had she felt anything like it, not when she was a child sitting across from her mother at the kitchen table in her witch's black rags and the ghoul-green facepaint she'd spent half an hour on, burning to fly out the door on her broom and go trick-or-treating with her school friends, and her mother making her sit there through ten repetitions of her vowel drill, ten full repetitions, though it was Halloween and she pleaded and spat and stormed up to her room and felt the house shudder with the violence of the door splintering the frame; not when she'd been locked up in the county jail with the drunks and degenerates and no one to listen to her; not when she'd stood in the hallway at the courthouse and watched her lawyer's face go slack as they took her back into custody though she'd been cleared of all charges and everyone knew it was a farce and she could have screamed till the walls came crashing down around them. This was different. This was incendiary.

Just the sight of him, that was all it took. The look on his face, the way he walked, the clothes he was wearing. After all the tension and anticipation, after working herself up so she could barely breathe, after taking it out on Bridger and feeling her stomach clench with loss and hate and frustration, there he was, standing right there in front of them--Frank Calabrese, or whatever his name was--in his pin-striped designer shirt and buffed red leather Docs, his jacket thrown carelessly over one arm, his wife the liar and their kid at his side, and “he” tried to stare “them” down as if they were the ones who'd stolen from him. And then he'd turned his back and ignored them, ignored their shouts and accusations as if he were deaf too--“Thief!” she'd screamed, over and over, bursting from the car and charging across the lot, her arms waving as if she were calling down an airstrike, and she thought they had him, finally had him, because people were beginning to turn their heads and somebody would call the police, she would, Bridger would, and he was trapped there in the parking lot in the unforgiving blaze of nine-thirty in the morning and nothing he could do about it. She felt a thrill go through her. He was doomed. Dead in the water. “Dead meat.”

Yet everything about him, from the sway of his shoulders to the thrust-back arrogance of his face, said it was no trouble at all, no problem, somebody else's affair. He was steady, brisk, steering his numb-faced wife and the kid toward the car with quick efficient strides, for all the world no more concerned than if he were out taking a little exercise after church in the languid hundred-degree heat. She and Bridger were nothing to him, less than nothing, and the thought of it made her seize with hatred. If she'd had a gun, she would have used it. Or she could have. She really believed she could have.

She had something on him, though--evidence, a totem, an artifact. Even as he mounted the cement curb in the Mercedes and took off across the vacant lot, she saw it lying there on the pavement, right where he'd slid into the car and slammed the door behind him. His jacket. Marooned in the rush to escape. Dropped. Forgotten. She was sweating, her heart pounding, already shortening her stride, and she bent without thinking to snatch it up before reversing direction and breaking for her own car with everything she had.

All the while, caught behind the Winnebago as Bridger pounded the horn and she leaned out the window shrieking and gesticulating as if she'd come unhinged and the road opened up and the Mercedes pulled steadily away from them until it was a faint gleam in the distance and then, heartbreakingly, gone altogether, the jacket lay on the floor at her feet. It was there as Bridger swerved in and out of traffic, dialing 911 to shout lies to the dispatcher--“Drunk driver!” he yelled into the phone, “Drunk driver!”--there all the way through the long ascent to South Lake Tahoe while she fixed her eyes on the road, rounding each curve with the expectation of seeing the blinking lights of the highway patrol and Frank Calabrese up against the car with the handcuffs on him. Then they were in the town itself, cruising the streets, scanning the parking lots and back alleys, rolling in and out of motel lots, scrutinizing every red car they came across, and she was so intent on the chase, so wound up in what she was doing, she never gave the jacket a thought. Or the slash on her head either. It was just there, part of the world in its new configuration.

The altitude at Tahoe was 6,225 feet, according to the sign posted at the town limits, and the weather was radically different here. There were streaks of snow on the mountains above the lake, the sky was socked-in and the air coming through the vent felt chilly against her face. Bridger was hunched over the wheel, steering with his wrists, looking beaten. For a long while they said nothing, the car creeping past shops, supermarkets, gas stations, condos, one street after another. “Let's face it, we lost him,” he said finally, his eyes rimmed red with exhaustion. “He could be visiting a friend in one of these condos, he could be in a casino in Stateline, he could--” He shrugged, said something she didn't quite get. “The license--you know, the dealer plates--do you remember what they said, I mean, the dealer name? I think it was Bob-Something Mercedes?”

“Bob Almond Mercedes/BMW,” she said. “Larkspur.”

He'd put on his thoughtful look. They were going so slowly they might as well have been walking. “Because I was thinking--I mean, this isn't getting us anywhere--we could call Milos and he could maybe check out the dealer and see who bought the car, what name, I mean--”

“I don't want to go back there,” she said, surprising herself. “And besides, he wouldn't use his real name, would he?”

“Get a serial number or something--a vehicle identification number.”

“What good's that going to do?”

He didn't answer. Instead, he said, “What about the jacket?”

The jacket, yes. It was flung at her feet like one of those mats they put down to protect the carpet. She reached for it, smoothed it in her lap: raw silk, in black, with red detailing. A smell of cologne rose to her nostrils, and something else too, something deeper, denser: the smell of him, the smell of his body, his underarms, his skin. “Hugo Boss,” she announced, turning over the label. “Nice to know the bastard has taste, huh? Did you see him,” she said, running a hand through the inside pocket, “the way he looked at us? The balls?” There was something there, something hard--sunglasses, Revo, two hundred fifty dollars a pair. She held them up so Bridger could see.

He gave them a cursory glance and then his eyes jumped suddenly to the mirror--someone must have beeped at him--and he hit the blinker and pulled into a No Parking/No Standing Zone as a little black car, a Mini, shot past them. After a moment, he took the glasses from her and held them at length as if examining some dead thing he'd found under the sink, then clapped them on his face. They were wraparounds, metallic silver. “Yeah,” he said, checking himself out in the rearview, “I hear you.”

She plunged her hand into the outer pocket on the left side and came up with a comb to which a straggle of dense dark hairs adhered, a Sharpie pen that looked unused and a thin wad of tissue. An odd feeling came over her, even as Bridger turned to her and said, “How do I look?” She slid her fingers over the teeth of the comb, lifted it to her nostrils--there was the smell of him again, of his scalp and the shampoo he used, and it was as if she knew him in some elemental way, as if she'd been with him, the violation mutual.

A light rain began to spot the windshield. Bridger's head floated there beside her, but he wasn't Bridger exactly, not with the slit reptilian orbits of his eyes, the reflective lenses slashing at his features, reducing him. “Take them off,” she said.

He swiveled his head and removed the sunglasses, and even as he said, “Is that it?” she dug into the other pocket and came up with a slip of paper, a receipt from Johnny Lee's Family Restaurant, and held it up to the light.

“What is it, a credit card receipt? That could be something. What does it say?”

It took her a moment, the print blurred and pointillated, but then it came together, the total, the tax, the account number and the slashing confident signature under the cardholder's name: “Bridger Martin.”

“We have to get rational about this,” he was saying, or at least that was what she thought he was saying. “Rational,” wasn't that it? Of course he might have been talking about “Rashomon,” the Kurosawa film, and for the tiniest sliver of a second she wondered just how the three of them--she, Bridger and the thief--fit into that scenario, with its shifting perspective and deconstructed narrative. She saw Toshiro Mifune, his mouth a rictus of fear and aggression, flailing his sword, and then she was back to Bridger, who was saying something else now, something she was too tired to process.

They were in a nondescript restaurant, fake wood paneling, lights so dim you could barely make out the menu, tuna on rye with a sliver of dill pickle for $9.95 and three dollars for iced tea. It was late in the afternoon now, high summer but wintry for all that, a damp high-altitude gloom hanging over the town as if this weren't California at all, but someplace perennially dreary. Like Tibet. Was Tibet dreary? Her mind was wandering. She was exhausted--and hungry--and here was the tuna sandwich she'd ordered herself in a voice that must have lost all control of the long vowels and those nearly impossible fricatives (a side of french fries) because the waitress had given her the interplanetary stare and she felt like some animal on a leash, but she didn't care: this was her life and there was nothing she could do about it. Not in her present condition. Plus she had Bridger to deal with--she'd dragged him into this, and now he was a victim too “(I don't even have a Citibank card,” he protested, and she imagined him whining, his voice reduced, plaintive, weak). Bridger was upset--she couldn't blame him--but her eyes dropped to the sandwich and shut him out.

He hadn't stopped talking even to draw breath since she'd pulled that charge slip out of the jacket pocket, and what was the term for that? “Logorrhea.” Yes, another SAT word to drill her students with, but she didn't have any students, not anymore. She was wandering, again she was wandering, and she was thinking, unaccountably, of the talk fests they used to have in the dorm at Gallaudet, in Sign mainly, but with people speaking aloud too in a way that was all but unintelligible to a hearie, a kind of sing-along moan that underscored the signs. “Talk talk.” That was what happened when the deaf got together, a direct translation into English--they talked a lot, talked all the time, talked the way Bridger was talking now, only with their hands. Index finger of the four hand at the mouth, tapping, tapping to show the words coming out. “When deaf get together talk talk all the time.” Communication, the universal need. Information. Access. Escape from the prison of silence. Talk, talk, talk.

Bridger's hand was on her wrist, the wrist of the hand that held the tuna sandwich as it moved to her lips. “You're making those noises,” he said.

She looked around her. People were watching. She tried to suppress the impulse, but it was almost unconscious, autonomic, a reaction to stress that most deaf people shared: she was emitting, had been emitting, a soft high-pitched keening sound, as if she were a dolphin washed ashore, and it embarrassed her. Her own throat produced these noises, her own larynx, and she had no control over them. “Sorry,” she said, and signed it too, right hand, palm facing in, the slow circle over her heart.

“You're not listening,” he said.

“I am,” she lied.

He looked away in exasperation, his features pinched, eyes rolling upward, and that made her angry, but she didn't want to make a scene, or any more of a scene than she'd already made with her dolphin noises, so she wiped her face of expression and focused on him. What he was talking about, the gist of it anyway, was that they were both tired and incapable of making a decision at this point (“I'm not going back,” she interrupted him, “and that son of a bitch is not going to get away with this, I swear, even if I have to crawl on my belly--or my abdomen, my abdomen--from here to New York, I'm going to nail him, you hear me?”), and that they needed to check into a motel, get some rest and decide what to do in the morning, because they were just frustrating themselves driving around looking for nothing, for a car that was a hundred miles away by now.

“I found him before,” she countered. “Didn't I?”

“Yeah, I know--the deaf have some kind of ESP, right? And it “was” amazing, I admit it, but you don't really believe in all that, do you?”

“No,” she said.

“Because if you do, maybe you can tell me what this jerk is going to do next, maybe you can visualize it, picture him cruising down the open road with our money in his pockets, free money, everything free--he doesn't have to worry about looking for the cheapest motel in town, does he? No, he's going to stay at the Ritz Carlton, he's going to--”

She set the sandwich down so she could use her hands. “He's Frank Calabrese,” she said, finger-spelling it beneath the words, “and he's going back to New York. And you know what?”

He lifted his eyebrows, leaned in close on the twin props of his elbows so that his face was inches from hers. The waitress, probably nineteen or twenty but so petite and baby-faced she looked more like twelve, darted her eyes nervously at them, and Dana felt distracted. There was a TV mounted on the near wall, ghost figures going through their silent motions. She felt a wave of depression crash over her even as Bridger threw it back at her: “What?”

“There's nothing to discuss. I don't care if I have a hundred nights' sleep in a row, I'm not going to change my mind.” Then she closed her mouth, shot a withering glance round the restaurant, and used her hands exclusively: “Whether you come along or not, I'm going after him.”

They checked into the Gold Country Motel with her credit card--neither of Bridger's was good, both maxed out thanks to Frank Calabrese--and she showered and then stretched herself across the white slab of the queen-size bed and stared at the ceiling like a zombie while Bridger paced back and forth, one hand pinning the phone to his ear while the other swooped, plunged and snatched at the air to underline the specifics of his distress. First he dialed the credit card companies, and then the CRAs, and it seemed to take him forever. She couldn't sleep. Couldn't even close her eyes. Her head throbbed where she'd hit the windshield and she seemed to have irritated something in her left knee when she slammed her way into the car in the parking lot of the restaurant outside Sacramento. At Bridger's insistence they'd stopped at a drugstore and picked up a tube of Neosporin and a package of Band-Aid sport strips, and she'd spent ten minutes dabbing at the wound--it was a purple blotch, like a birthmark, with a crusted gash in the center of it--but it was superficial and it was already healing and she didn't really want to call even more attention to herself by walking around with a shining square flesh-colored patch stuck to her head, so she'd parted her hair and combed it over to at least partially hide the contusion.