Desperation

The cop made a cranking gesture with his empty hand. Ralph rolled his window halfway down. “What’s the trouble, Officer.”

“How many are you.” the cop asked.

“What’s wr—”

“Sir, how many are you.”

“Four,” Ralph said, begi

We have a couple of flats—”

“No, sir, all your tires are flat. You ran over a piece of highway carpet.”

“I don’t—”

“It’s a strip of mesh embedded with hundreds of short nails,” the cop said. “We use it to stop speeders whenever we can—it beats the hell out of hot pursuit.”

“What was a thing like that doing in the road.” Ellie asked indignantly.

The cop said, “I’m going to open the rear door of my car, the one closest to your RV.

When you see that, I want you to exit your vehicle and get into the back of mine. And quickly.”

He craned his neck, saw Kirsten—she was now holding onto her mother’s leg and peering cautiously around it—and gave her a smile. “Hi, girly-o.”

Kirstie smiled back at him.

The cop shifted his eyes briefly to David. He nodded, and David nodded back noncommittally. “Who’s out there, sir.” David asked.

“A bad guy,” the cop said. “That’s all you need to know for now, son. A very bad guy.

Takr’ “Officer—” Ralph began.

“Sir, with all due respect, I feel like a clay pigeon in a shooting gallery. There’s a dangerous man out here he’s good with a rifle, and that piece of highway carpet suggests he’s nearby. Further discussion of the situation must wait until our position has been improved, do you understand.”

Tak. Ralph wondered. Was that the bad guy’s name9 “Yes, but—”

“You first, sir. Carry your little girl. The boy next Your wife last. You’ll have to cram, but you can all fit into the car.”

Ralph unbelted and stood up. “Where are we going” he asked.

“Desperation. Mining town. Eight miles or so from here.”

Ralph nodded, rolled up his window, then picked up Kirsten. She looked at him with troubled eyes that were not far from tears.

“Daddy, is it Mr. Big Boogeyman.” she asked. Mr. Big Boogeyman was a monster she had brought home from school one day. Ralph didn’t know which of the kids had described this shadowy closet-dweller to his gentle seven—r year-old daughter, but he thought if he could have found him (he simply assumed it was a boy, it seemed to him that the care and feeding of the monsters in the school-yards of America always fell to the boys), he would have cheerfully strangled the bugger. It had taken two months to get Kirstie more or less soothed down about Mr. Big Boogeyman. Now this.

“No, not Mr. Big Boogeyman,” Ralph said. “Probably just a postal worker having a bad day.”

“Daddy, you work for the post office,” she said as he carried her back toward the door in the middle of the Wayfarer’s cabin.

“Yup,” he said, aware that Ellie had put David in front of her and was walking with her hands on his shoulders. “It’s sort of ajoke, see.”

“Like a knock-knock without the knocking.”

“Yup,” he said again. He looked out the window in the RV’s cabin door and saw the cop had opened the back door of the police cruiser. He also saw that when he opened the Wayfarer’s door, it would overlap the car door, making a protective wall. That was good.

Sure. Unless the desert rat this guy’s looking for is in back of us. Christ Almighty, why couldn’t we have gone to Atlantic City.

“Dad.” That was David, his intelligent but slightly peculiar son who had started going to church last fall, after the thing that had happened to his friend Brian. Not Sunday school, not Thursday Night Youth Group, just church. And Sunday afternoons at the parsonage, talking with his new friend, the Rev. Who, by the way, was going to die slowly if he had been sharing anything with David but his thoughts. According to David it was all talk, and after the thing with Brian, Ralph supposed the kid needed someone to talk to. He only wished David had felt able to bring his questions to his mother and father instead of to some holy joe outsider who was married but still might—“Dad. Is it all right.”

“Yes. Fine.” He didn’t know if it was or not, didn’t really know what they were dealing with here, but that was what you said to your kids, wasn’t it. Yes, fine, all right. He thought that if he were on a plane with David and the engines quit, he’d put his arm around the boy and tell him everything was fine all the way down.

He opened the door, and it banged against the inside of the cruiser door.

“Quick, come on, let’s see some hustle,” the cop said, looking nervously around.

Ralph went down the steps with Kirstie sitting in the crook of his left arm. As he stepped down, she dropped her doll.

“Melissa!” she cried. “I dropped Melissa Sweetheart, get her, Daddy!”

“No, get in the car, get in the car!” the cop shouted. “I’ll get the doll!”

Ralph slid in, putting his hand on the top of Kirstie’s head and helping her duck. David followed him, then Ellie. The back seat of the car was filled with papers, and the front seat had been warped into a bell-shape by the oversized cop’s weight. The moment Ellie pulled her right leg in, the cop slammed the door shut and went racing around the back of the cruiser.

“Lissa!” Kirstie cried in tones of real agony. “He forgot ‘Lissa!”

Ellie reached for the doorhandle. meaning to lean out and get Melissa Sweetheart—surely no psycho with a rifle could pick her off in the time it would take to grab up a little girl’s doll—then looked back at Ralph. “Where’re the handles.” she asked.

The driver’s-side door of the cruiser opened, and the cop dropped into it like a bomb. The seat crunched back against Ralph’s knees and he winced, glad that Kirstie’s legs were hanging down between his. Not that Kirstie was still. She wriggled and twisted on his lap, hands held out to her mother.

“My doll, Mummy, my doll! Melissa!”

“Officer—” Ellie began.

“No time,” the cop said. “Can’t. Tak!” He U-turned across the road and headed east in a spew of dust. The rear end of the car fishtailed briefly. As it steadied again, it occurred to Ralph how fast this had happened—not ten minutes ago they’d been in their RV, headed down the road. He’d been about to ask David to play Twenty Ques-tions, not because he really wanted to but because he had been bored.

He sure wasn’t bored now.

“Melissa Sweeeeeeetheart!” Kirstie screamed, and then began to weep.

“Take it easy, Pie,” David said. It was his pet name for his baby sister. Like so many other things about David, neither of his parents knew what it meant or where it had come from. Ellie thought it was short for sweetie pie, but when she had asked him one night, David had just—shrugged and gri

“We’ll come back and get her and clean her all up,” David said.

“Promise.”

“Uh-huh. I’ll even help you wash her hair.”

“With Prell.”

“Uh-huh.” He put a quick kiss on her cheek.

“What if the bad man comes.” Kirstie asked. “The bad man like Mr. Big Boogeyman.

What if he dollnaps Melissa Sweetheart.”

David covered his mouth with his hand to hide the ghost of a grin. “He won’t.” The boy glanced up into the rearview mirror, trying to make eye contact with the cop. “Will he.”

“No,” the cop said. “The man we’re looking for is not a dollnapper.” There was no facetiousness Ralph could detect in his voice; he sounded like Joe Friday. Just the facts, ma’am.

He slowed briefly as they passed a sign which read DES-PERATION, then accelerated as he turned right. Ralph hung on, praying that the guy knew what he was doing, that he wouldn’t roll them. The car seemed to lift slightly, then settled back. They were now heading south. On the hori-zon, a huge bulwark of earth, its tan side cut with cracks and zigzag trenches like black scars, loomed against the sky.