Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [85]
“See? It’s easy when you just handle things logically,” I said confidently as I headed onto a two-lane highway so dark that it looked more like an allegory than a road. “No reason to get emotional.”
It was ten o’clock at night.
“Nope. I don’t see another car anywhere,” said Ashley. “We’re all alone out here. If anything happens, we will be stranded and invisible.”
“Come on!” I argued. “Even if we break down, we can just lock the doors and wait until morning. Someone will be driving on this road during the day.”
“I bet that’s what all those girls walking home from the factories in Juárez, Mexico, thought when they left work,” said Ashley. “You know, before they were never seen again.”
“Oh, shut up and leave me alone,” I barked as I began to realize that it had been ten minutes, then twenty minutes, then thirty minutes since the last time I passed a billboard or a gas station. Or anything. There seemed to be no call boxes, or signs indicating how near or far we were from somewhere.
“Did I tell you about the time I was driving alone on a road just like this when a criminally insane trucker started sideswiping my car?” Ashley asked me, after an hour of driving past nothing but impenetrable nightscape. She was now giving me heart palpitations. “Even though I tried to get away, I spun into a drainage ditch by the side of the road. By the way, there are no cell towers out here. Phones are totally useless.”
“That never happened to you,” I responded, kind of weakly. “You’re making that up.”
“No I’m not,” she said. “Well, you’re half right. It didn’t happen to me. But it totally happened to someone else on Cold Case Files.”
Fifteen minutes of darkness later a sign for GAS/FOOD appeared just ahead and on the right. Elated at the idea of even a sad, empty outpost of civilization, I pulled over and stopped at what turned out to be creepy little market with dingy lighting, unstocked shelves, and a dentally deficient, sallow-faced man at the register.
Of course, Ashley was instantly reminded of a movie she once saw where a woman went into the restroom at a truck stop and was never heard from again. “Vanished,” she said, “until weeks later, when her overwrought boyfriend, a mud-caked, bloody Kurt Russell, finds her ravaged body stuffed in a duffel bag buried underground. By the way, cellphones don’t work at all when you’re buried alive.”
As I walked around the store, looking not for snacks but for “provisions,” I realized that I was not only purchasing sugary treats to keep me awake for the drive, but amassing supplies in case Ashley’s warnings were a harbinger of things to come. The pickings were slim. In the event that we were destined to be stranded in the desert in an inoperable car, we would have to survive on gummy bears, Cheez-Its, and Twizzlers until the helicopters arrived. On Ashley’s advice, I also made a point of posing in front of the mirrorized security cameras before we checked out, to create a record of my activities for any detectives tracking my whereabouts, should that become necessary.
Back on the road at eleven at night, I now had no choice but to keep on driving, surrounded by thick darkness. It was almost like following a road inside a painting on black velvet. So of course I was truly delighted when at last I spotted a sign that said it was seventy-six miles to Vernal.
And then, at one A.M., thar she blows: the Dinosaur Inn. I actually heard myself yell out “Yee-haw!” as I pulled into the small, empty parking lot. In fact, so grateful was I to see that big green neon brontosaurus on the sign out front, even though it boasted no claims of amenities except “We have Beanie Babies,” when the clerk asked me if I was Ferrill Markoe, I happily nodded and said yes.
“I could easily imagine this place surrounded by squad cars and police tape,” said Ashley.
“Go sleep in the car by yourself,” I told to her, wheeling my suitcase to my room.
DAY TWO
Turned out waking up at five A.M. was no trouble for me since I never unwound enough to fall asleep in the first place. But turning on the television to get oriented,