The Big Dirt Nap (17 page)

Forty-three

The cellular customer you are trying to reach is not available.

I’d try Lucy again later. She hadn’t called but maybe the sound of the crash in the factory spooked her and she went for the cops. Sam and I waited for twenty minutes, then, by unspoken agreement, we started walking.

Ordinarily a seven-mile hike is a piece of cake for me; I’d made it to the top of Half Dome, for pete’s sake, but I’d had a pretty full forty-eight hours and my thigh was bloody and throbbing from the cut. And my shoulder was aching from the shelf unit that had winged it. The road had virtually no shoulder and when the occasional car passed, it felt as if we’d be swept under the tires. There were no truckers, who probably would have stopped to help us, just a few kids who came too close, threw beer cans at us, and scared the crap out of me. But not Sam.

We’d walked about a mile when a car, already suspicious because it was going thirty-five with no one else on the road, pulled over fifteen yards ahead of us. The driver checked us out in his side mirror, then leaned out and asked if we wanted a ride.

It was amazing how much safer I felt with the C2 in my bag. I still hadn’t fired the thing, but it gave me the confidence to say “Sure.” Even so, I hopped into the backseat and let Sam ride up front. If I needed to whip out the Taser, being in the back would give me a little cover and it would be harder for the driver to see how scared I was to actually use it.

He had a plump face and that earmuff hairline—some back, some sides, no top. The suit was shiny and there were two suitcases with company stickers on them in the back. Salesman. He didn’t seem to mind that Sam obviously looked like a homeless man and smelled like fuel, and I—face scratched, hoodie torn, green slime on one pants leg and blood on the other—didn’t look or smell much better. And that suited us. All we wanted was a ride to Titans. A few minutes into the ride we found out why he didn’t mind.

“Friends, I think you were put into my path for a purpose,” he said with a smile. He waited for an acknowledgment.

Oh, brother. “And what would that be?” I asked, not really wanting to know.

“I’m here to snatch you from the road to perdition—literally and figuratively, heh, heh—and to set you back on the road to righteousness. You back there
can
stop your whoring and this man
can
stop his wretched drinking and fornicating and all you have to do is . . .”

What was he talking about? I couldn’t speak for Sam but I hadn’t whored and fornicated for a good year and a half. As a matter of fact, if I got through this experience alive, I planned to pick them up again with a vengeance
. I tried tuning the driver out but he went on like that for six of the longest miles of my life. And each time his sermon reached a new crescendo he slowed down a bit for emphasis; we were going twenty-four excruciating miles an hour by the time we reached the turnoff for Titans.

“Stop the car. We can walk the rest of the way,” I said. “It’ll give us time to contemplate turning around our misspent lives.”

At the speed we were going it wasn’t dangerous so I opened the car door slightly and—worried that I’d jump out—the driver finally rolled to a stop. Clearly he hadn’t finished his pitch and was annoyed by our early exit. I wondered if he had his spiel rehearsed and just cruised the highways at night looking for poor, unsuspecting hitchhikers to proselytize to.

As I got out he handed me some pamphlets from a religious group that I had never heard of but one that he assured me was chock-full of good American values. Sam gave the passenger-side door a stronger shove than I would have expected.

“Thank you, my friend,” Sam said. “Can you spare a dollar to help me and the lady get a couple of coffees, to start our new lives of sobriety?”

“I won’t do that,” the driver said, with a smile. “You’ll only spend it on drink.” I didn’t think Sam would, but I was ready for a strong one right about then.

“How about a reference? I’m a mechanical engineer and I think I recognize the corporate logo on your suitcases.”

The driver hit the gas and took off, muttering some very un-brotherly words; Sam tossed the pamphlets after him and turned to me. “He obviously hasn’t paid for his own drinks in a while if he thinks we’re both going to catch a buzz for a dollar,” he said. “T and E man. Probably cheats his company on travel and expenses.”

The dirt road leading to the reservation and Titans just beyond it wasn’t far. This time we talked.

“Sam, by all accounts you’re a smart, likable guy. I gotta ask. What the hell happened?”

“Maybe I’ll tell you the whole story one day. The short version is this . . . The company went under, all my savings were tied up in my 401(k). I borrowed money short-term at usurious rates to keep up my house payments, but I defaulted on the loans, and then lost my house. I lived in the trailer park for a while, but without a job even that got too expensive. It was surprisingly easy. And shockingly fast. I drank a bit after that.” I could see why.

He was a walking news item. Something you hear about in a sound bite on CNN right before the story about the ferry accident in some part of the world you didn’t know existed.

“No family?” I asked.

“No.” There had to be a longer answer to that one but I didn’t push it.

Near the entrance to the reservation two cars were parked nose to nose. At least three people were out of the cars and arguing. Sam grabbed my sleeve and raised a finger to his lips. He pulled me into the brush at the side of the road, and we crouched down to avoid being seen. The voices grew louder. A man’s voice said, “. . . not what I signed on for . . .” and another said, “. . . you can go back to . . .”

I was staring straight ahead trying to make out any recognizable shapes or faces when a field mouse crept into my line of sight. We watched each other for about a minute, but I blinked first. The mouse ran around in circles, confused, and when he came close enough for me to see his little teeth I let out a yelp.

“What was
that
?” one of the threesome said.

Sam pulled two black lawn and leaf bags from his stash. “Put it over your head and curl up,” he whispered. “Now!” He did the same.

A moment later the car in front of us moved and the one that was facing us turned its headlights on. We flattened ourselves farther into the brush.

“It’s nothing, just the wind blowing some roadside garbage. Turn those lights off, you idiot.” It was a woman’s voice. And it was familiar.

Forty-four

In the last two hours I’d been bloodied, slimed, pelted with crushed beer cans, preached at, and mistaken for a bag of garbage.

“Do you go through this often?” I asked, once the cars had taken off and we climbed out of our bags.

“Almost every day. The lawn-and-leaf-bag trick saved my life once.” Maybe twice, I thought, folding the bag and giving it back to him. I couldn’t be entirely sure about whose voices I’d heard but they hadn’t sounded happy and wouldn’t have appreciated being interrupted.

“Any idea what kind of cars they were?”

“Too far to tell. But one was a smallish SUV, not a regular sedan.”

That wasn’t much help. Even Lucy’s rental car was a smallish SUV. We walked the rest of the way to the hotel, passing the spot where the cars had been stopped. I looked around for a due.

“What are you looking for?” Sam asked. I didn’t know myself; It was as if I expected whoever it was to have left a calling card. But there were no convenient cigarette butts, candy wrappers, or vodka bottles, just some dusty tire tracks and a jumble of footprints.

“Just curious,” I said. “You see anything?”

“Not much,” Sam said. “I can tell you that one of them was a big man, size fourteen or fifteen shoes and probably pretty damn heavy.” I couldn’t believe what I’d heard. “I worked in a shoe factory, remember?”

Our plan was this: I’d enter the hotel through the main lobby, trying to keep a low profile until I got to my room. Sam would sneak in through the loading dock and take the freight elevator up to my room, where, hopefully, Lucy would be waiting for us. Then we’d try to reach Betty Smallwood for legal advice.

“You’re not going to take off on me, are you? Look at me,” I said, holding on to his arm. “I’ve gone through a lot to find you. Claude and Billy need you.” He shook his head and I believed him.

We split up at the beginning of the long driveway into Titans. I kept close to the parked cars and in seconds, Sam had disappeared behind a hedge of green-and-white euonymus—clearly he’d done this before.

The valet parking attendant was asleep so I didn’t have any trouble getting by him and through the revolving doors unnoticed. Unfortunately, Taylor, the friendly but perpetually confused desk clerk, was still on duty.

“Ms. Cavanaugh, gosh, are you all right?” I motioned for him to keep his voice down, but he was a teenage boy and that made my suggestion ludicrous. “Can I call a doctor for you?”

That got me more unwanted attention. One gentleman initially got up, ostensibly to offer his services, then demurred when he saw how bad I looked—visions of a malpractice suit, no doubt. I went to the front desk to shut up the well-meaning clerk.

“I’m fine.” Now that he’d blown my hopes of sneaking into the hotel unnoticed, I decided to ask him for a favor. “Taylor, do you have a locker here?” He nodded. “What’s in it?”

“A T-shirt, a sweatshirt, jeans, and sneakers. Old stuff, nothing nice,” he said, still confused.

“Good.” I looked through my handbag and pulled out my wallet. “I’ll give you a hundred dollars if you send someone to my room with your clothes in five minutes.”

“I could call Amanda. She’s coming back later, so she could bring you something to wear.”

“I need men’s clothing.”

“Oh, sure, I get it,” he said knowingly. “We have a few other customers who like to do that, too. There’s one guy, you should see him, wig and everything.”

“A hundred dollars and you’ll eventually get them back,” I said, handing him the cash.

Forty-five

The elevator doors had just opened when I heard Lucy’s scream. Sam flew past me and I grabbed him and hustled him back to the room before any other guests came out into the corridor to see what the disturbance was. After a few deep breaths, Lucy calmed down and apologized.

“It wasn’t you. It was me,” she said. “I was expecting Paula.”

“No offense taken,” Sam said, sitting down on the love seat and putting his shopping bag on the floor.

“That’s a Michael’s bag.”

“It is. Good company. I used to own stock.”

Lucy did her best to hide her surprise at both Sam’s articulate answer and his obvious ease with the situation.

“What happened to you?” she said to me. “You look like shit.”

“Thank you, I’ve been hiding in a Hefty bag. Why did you leave? We had to hitchhike back. You should have heard the psycho that picked us up.”

What she did hear was the crash of the metal shelving unit inside the factory. She immediately called the cops and they told her to get the hell out of there and wait for them at Titans.

“That’s what I did, about an hour ago, but they haven’t come yet. They’re probably at the factory looking for you two,” she said.

“They didn’t show up when we were there,” I said. “Who did you call?”

“I called 911. Who do you get when you call 911?”

“A dispatcher,” Sam said. “Up here they get a lot of prank calls so they make you jump through hoops to make sure it’s really an emergency.”

“Oh, I think from the way I was shrieking a perceptive person would have been able to tell that this was the real thing.”

Sam smiled. “Any chance there’s a Diet Coke in that minibar?”

“Mother’s milk,” Lucy said, and got up to get them each a can.

“You two get acquainted. I desperately need a shower and a change of clothes. Sam’s new clothing should be up in a few minutes. But don’t scream when it is delivered. We don’t want to attract any more attention.”

I stripped a pillowcase from the bed and retrieved the leather pants and sleeveless top from my overnight bag and took them into the bathroom. The hoodie and top pulled off easily but the pants were glued to my leg with my own dried blood. Yanking them off hurt like hell, but I did it quickly the way you’d pull off a Band-Aid. The blood started flowing again and I stepped into the tub to catch it.

The shower felt great until I made a tactical error and let my thigh get hit by a direct stream of water. I let out a scream that rivaled Lucy’s. I shifted positions and resigned myself to the fact that my right side would be cleaner than my left.

The gash was ragged but not that deep—my jeans had saved me a few layers of skin. Using the cuticle nippers in my travel kit, I started a hole in the pillowcase, then tore it into strips to make a bandage. I did a pretty good job; I looked like a professional tennis player with her thigh wrapped before a big match. I held my hairbrush like a tennis racket, spinning it around in my hands the way the pros do. I even took a few practice swings before realizing how idiotic it was for me to have left my best friend in the next room with a homeless man while I stood, naked, in the bathroom, practicing my serve.

I slipped into my pants carefully, grateful that the tight leather would hold the bandage in place. Sam and Lucy seemed to be having a lively conversation outside so I took an extra few minutes to put on makeup, rubbing tint on the apples of my cheeks. No need to look totally hideous.

When I emerged, towel-drying my hair, they’d been joined by a third person.

“You specifically told me not to scream,” Lucy said through gritted teeth.

“Sit down.”

And I did, since I make it a point never to argue with a woman who’s got a gun.

Forty-six

“Good to see you,” I said. “Thanks for returning my jacket.” Lucy and Sam were less sure that it was good to see Oksana since she was clearly upset and holding a gun.

“Everything’s gone wrong,” she said, eyes weepy, waving the gun around the room. She repositioned the heavy leather messenger bag strapped across her chest and, in doing so, managed to point the gun at everyone in the room. “I’m not even supposed to be here.”

“Feel free to leave,” Lucy said. I shot her a look that suggested it wasn’t smart to be a wiseass to a fairly hysterical person with a weapon.

Oksana had been fired. When the
friend
learned Oksana couldn’t pay her share of the rent she’d been locked her out of the mobile home. With no other place to go she returned to Sergei, who’d asked for payment of a different kind.

Sam was sympathetic. “I know how it is,” he said, “when it seems like everything’s gone wrong. But you’re so young. You’ll wake up tomorrow and see the world hasn’t come to an end. And you’ll go on. Believe me. Sit down and try to relax.”

“Forgive me, but who are you?” she asked, doing as Sam had suggested.

“Sam Dillon.” I wondered when he’d last used his entire name. Of course, the name meant nothing to her. “People at the hotel sometimes call me Big Y,” he said. At that her eyes widened even further.

“You’re Big Y? Is Billy here, too?” She stood up and looked around nervously. “You’ve got to get out of here.
All
of you. Sergei and his men are looking for you. He was hired to make sure nothing interfered with the casino deal. Nick tried to butt in and look at what happened to him.”

After years of being a gofer for the Mishkins, Nick wanted to cash in. When he couldn’t he threatened to go to the press with a story that would have had the hotel’s investor on the first boat back to China and maybe even queer the Quepochas’ chances for recognition.

“Sergei saw Nick talking to me and thought I was a reporter, right?” I said. Oksana nodded. “Did he have someone follow me to Springfield and search my house?”

“Could be Vitaly. And Marat. I heard Sergei tell them to check your computer. But not at the hotel because then the cops might suspect something.” She rubbed her runny nose on the back of her hand, the one that held the gun.

“Wouldn’t you like to put that gun down?” I said.

She acted as if she hadn’t heard me. Sam nonchalantly reached for his can of soda and moved a little closer to Oksana, ready to make a move if necessary.

“They were supposed to reason with Nick, not kill him. I don’t know what happened. And then, then . . .”—she closed her eyes briefly—“Sergei asked me to find out how much you knew. I didn’t want to be involved. I liked Nick, but I owe Sergei my life.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That you knew nothing about the Mishkins’ loan, the casino, or any of this business, that you were nice.” She wanted me to believe her and I wanted to, but she was a practiced liar, and whether she’d admit it or not, Sergei clearly had a Rasputin-like hold on her. “I told him it was another woman . . . named Lucy.” She looked at Lucy and raised her shoulders as if to apologize.

“Now he thinks I lied to him and they are after me, too. These people would just as soon kill you for fifteen hundred dollars as they would for fifteen million.” Fifteen million dollars was indeed a powerful motivator. If Sergei thought he could get his hands on that kind of money, who knew what he’d be capable of? Oksana had sensibly taken the gun from Sergei’s building for protection.

“Well, if it makes any difference, you didn’t lie to him,” Lucy said. “That’s exactly why I was meeting Nick. After I saw the Crawfords.” The realization dawned on Lucy’s face; her fling with Claude may have saved her life. Talk about friends with benefits.

I tried to think of a way out of the hotel that would help us avoid Sergei and his men, if they were, in fact, looking for us. “Oksana, how did you know we were back at the hotel?”

“When that bitch Rachel Page fired me I asked Helayne to put my personal things in a bag. I was picking it up and she said she saw you.” Yeah, it was hard to stay under people’s radar when you were covered with blood and slime.

I was racking my brain to come up with a plan when our exit strategy knocked on the door. Lucy leaped out of her seat. Sam covered Oksana’s gun with his hand. “Let’s keep this out of sight, okay?” She agreed and put the gun in her hobo bag, which looked as if it was stuffed with all of her belongings.

A young girl in heavy Goth makeup was at the door. She held a bundle of clothing, my hundred-dollar rental from Taylor, the desk clerk. She looked around the room and saw a homeless guy dressed in rags; a model-thin Ukrainian girl with tear-streaked makeup; Lucy, nervously hopping from one foot to another; and me, barefoot in tight leather pants.

“So, are you guys dressing for the party?” she asked cautiously.

“Say it again?” I said, recognizing the voice but not the look.

“It’s me, Amanda.” The corpse flower had bloomed, and so, apparently, had she. The blond, blue-eyed homecoming queen who’d been recording the growth of the corpse flower was wearing white foundation, thick black eye makeup, leather wrist cuffs, and a cadaverous expression. The bicycle chain formerly used to lock the greenhouse was now doubled around her waist and tied off prettily with the lock.

“I called you,” she said to Lucy, “but the line was busy. The whole school is downstairs. We’re going to be partying all night in the lobby. Is this your cameraman?” Amanda asked, looking at Sam.

“One of them,” I lied.

“These are pretty good outfits, but it’s not really Goth unless you make your faces a little whiter. I have white shoe polish if you like.”

So much for the rosy glow artfully applied to the apples of my cheeks; I asked her in.