Desperation

So why didn’t they—”

She saw something in the map-holder, something that bad been revealed when he stirred the crammed-in papers and plucked out a dollar-sign moneyclip that looked like real silver. There were bills folded into it. She fa

“How much.” he asked.

“Forty or so,” she said. “The clip itself s probably worth three or four times that much.

Tell you what, pilgrim—this smells bad.”

Another gust of wind splashed sand against the northern side of the RV, this one hard enough to rock it a little on its flat tires. The two of them looked at each other out of their sweat-shiny faces. Steve met the doll’s blank blue gaze. What happened, here, honey.

What did you see2 He turned for the door.

“Time for the cops.” Cynthia asked.

“Soon. First I want to walk a mile of backtrail, see if I can spot any sign of my boss.”

“In this wind. Man, that’s really dumb!”

He looked at her for a moment, not saying anything, then pushed past her and went down the steps.

She caught up with him at the foot of them. “Hey, let’s call it even, okay. You made fun of my grammar, I made fun of your whatever.”

“Intuition.”

“Intuition, is that what you call it. Well, fine. Call it even. Say yeah. Please. I’m too spooked to want to piss in the catbox.”

He smiled at her, a little touched by the anxiety on her face. “Okay, yeah,” he said. “Even as even can be.”

“You want me to drive the truck back. I can do a mile by the odometer, give you a finishing line to shoot for.”

“Can you turn it around without—” A semi with KLEENEX SOFTENS THE BLOW written on the side blasted past at seventy, headed east. Cynthia flinched back from it, shielding her eyes from flying sand with one Kate Moss arm. Steve put his own arm around her scant shoul-ders, steadying her for a moment or two. “—without get-ting stuck.” he finished.

She gave him an a

“Well… mile and a half, okay. Just to be on the safe side.”

“Okay.” She started toward the Ryder truck, then turned back to him. “I just remembered the name of the little town that’s close to here,” she said, and pointed east. “It’s up that way, south of the highway. Cute name. You’re go

“What.”

“Desperation.” She gri

He walked slowly east along the shoulder of the westbound lane, raising his hand in a wave but not looking up as the Ryder truck, with Cynthia behind the wheel, rumbled slowly past. “I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re looking for!” she called down to him.

She was gone before he had any chance to reply, which was just as well; he didn’t have any idea, either. Tracks. A ridiculous idea, given the wind. Blood. Bits of chrome or taillight glass. He supposed that was actually the most likely. He only knew two things for sure: that his instincts had not just asked him to do this but demanded it, and that he couldn’t get the doll’s glazey blue stare out of his mind. Some little girl’s favorite doll…

only the little girl had left Alice Blue Gown lying face-down in the dirt by the side of the road. Mom had left her jewelry, Dad had left his moneyclip, and son David had left his auto-graphed baseball cards.

Why.

Up ahead, Cynthia swung wide, then turned the bright yellow truck so it was facing back west again. She did this with an economy Steve wasn’t sure he could have matched himself, needing to back and fill just a single time. She got out, started walking toward him at a good clip, hardly looking down at all, and he had time, even then, to be moderately pissed that she should have found what his instinct had sent him out here to look for. “Hey!” she said. She bent over, picked something up, and shook sand off it.

He jogged to where she was standing. “What. What is it.”

“Little notebook,” she said, and held it out. “I guess he was here, all right. J. Marinville, printed right on the front. See.”

He took the small wirebound notepad with the bent cover and paged through it quickly.

Directions, maps Steve had drawn himself, and jotted notes in the boss’s topheavy scrawl, most of them about the scheduled re-ceptions. Under the heading St. Louis, Marinville had scribbled, Patricia Franklin. Redhead, big boobs. Don’t CALL HER PAT OR PATTY! Name of org. is FRIENDS OF OPEN LIBES. Bill sez P.F. also active in animal-rights stuff Veggie.” On the last page which had been used, a single word had been scrawled in an even more flamboyant ver-sion of the boss’s handwriting:

That was all. As if he had started to write an autograph for someone and then never finished.

He looked up at Cynthia and saw her cross her arms beneath her scant bosom and begin rubbing the points of her elbows. “Bruh,” she said. “It’s impossible to be cold out here, but I am just the same. This keeps getting spookier and spookier.

“How come this didn’t just fly away in the breeze.”

“Pure luck. It blew against a big rock and then sand covered the bottom half. Like with the doll. If he’d dropped it six inches to the right or left, it’d prob’ly be halfway to Mexico by now.”

“What makes you think he dropped it.”

“Don’t you.” she asked.

He opened his mouth to say he really didn’t think any-thing, at least not yet, and then forgot all about it. He was seeing a glint out in the desert, probably the same one Cynthia had seen while they were coming up on the RV, only they weren’t moving now, so the glint was staying steady. And it wasn’t just mica chips embedded in rock, he would bet on that. For the first time he was really, painfully afraid. He was ru

“Hey, don’t go so fast!” She sounded startled. “Wait up!”

“No, stay there!” he called back.

He sprinted the first hundred yards, keeping that star point of sun directly in front of him (except now the star point had begun to spread to take on a shape he found dreadfully familiar), and then a wave of dizziness hit and stopped him. He bent over with his hands grasping his legs just above the knees, convinced that every cigar he had smoked in the last eighteen years had come back to haunt him.

When the vertigo passed a little and the padded jackhammer sound of his heartbeat began to diminish in his ears, he heard a distinct but somehow ladylike puffing from behind him. He turned and saw Cynthia approaching at a jog, sweating hard but otherwise fine and dandy. Her gaudy curls had flattened a little, that was all.

“You stick… like a booger on… the end of a finger, he panted as she pulled up beside him.

“I think that’s the sweetest thing a guy ever said to me. Put it in your fucking haiku book, why don’t you. And don’t have a heart attack. How old are you, anyway.”

He straightened up with an effort. “Too old to be inter-ested in your giblets, Chicken Little, and I’m fine. Thanks for your concern.” On the highway a car blipped by with-out slowing. They both looked. Out here, each passing car was a noticed event.

“Well, can I suggest we walk the rest of the way9 Whatever that thing is, it’s not going anywhere.”

“I know what it is,” he said, and trotted the last twenty yards. He knelt before it like a primitive tribesman before an effigy. The boss’s Harley had been hurriedly and indif ferently buried. The wind had already freed one handlebar and part of another.

The girl’s shadow fell over him and he looked up at her wanting to say something that would make her believe he wasn’t completely freaked out by this, but nothing came He wasn’t sure she would have heard him, anyway. Her eyes were wide and scared, riveted on the bike. She fell to her knees beside him, held out her hands as if measuring then dug a little distance to the right of the handlebars The first thing she found was the boss’s helmet. She pulled it free, poured the sand out of it, and set it aside Then she brushed delicately beneath where it had been. Steve watched her. He wasn’t sure his legs would support him if he wanted to get up. He kept thinking of the stories you saw in the paper from time to time, stories about bodies being discovered in gravel pits and pulled out of the ever-popular shallow grave.