Good Morning, Killer - April Smith [135]
Jason Ripley was in the back with me and the prisoner, Todd Hanley was up front with the driver. Nobody talked much during the two-hour ride. I did not think it would ever get easier with Jason, but it didn’t matter. Neither of us needed the other anymore.
We made a pit stop at a gas station that was the only service for fifty miles. It was part general store—racks of white bread, huge bags of ice—and part tourist trap, with bins of quartz crystal and fossils and skeletons of small desert animals in plastic bags. There were real scorpions inside crystal paperweights.
I headed for the ladies’ room, thinking about the kind of person who would catch those nasty scorpions, took down my khakis and heard the unmistakable sound of stainless steel on porcelain. My handcuffs had fallen into the rest stop toilet bowl. Well, that clinched it. Fishing them out, I knew I would soon be over and done with it all.
We went half a mile down an unmarked road to a place where two boulders met, for no reason, at a right angle. They did nothing to block the wind and scree, which blasted from every direction so our hair whipped madly and we had to shout, and the cold cut through our parkas, as if Brennan had brought us to the cauldron source of all winds.
The dogs squinted against the blow and their ears were up and they trotted the area, pawing the sand where it had been dug before. Brennan pointed here and there and stood with shoulders hunched, a stream of snot running from his nose. Motorists doing ninety with their windshield wipers on might have gambled one or two seconds on a glance at the small circle of vehicles; we were out there while the rain came and went, while lightning raked the charcoal clouds moving in from Arizona, while six more holes two feet deep were dug by the sheriff’s men, and Brennan went down on his knees weeping and saying he was sorry that we could not find his stash.
Finally the rain was pelting hard enough that we retreated to the car, wet as the dogs. Brennan sat between me and Jason, quiet, his head sagging, shoulders stooped.
“What’s up, Ray?”
He did not respond.
“Disappointed? We’re disappointed, too,” I said. “We thought we could trust you, Ray. After driving out this far. You know, you don’t show us some results, we’re not taking you out for an airing anymore. Is that the game?”
“It’s not a game,” he said. “I just don’t know exactly where it is. Could I lie down? I’m feeling very stressed right now,” and laid his head in my lap.
Brennan’s hands were still cuffed and he was in ankle irons. His face was turned away so all I could see was oily hair, dark at the roots, spiked in all directions, and a small perfectly formed reddened ear.
“Sit up, pal,” said Jason, reaching for his collar.
Brennan dug his teeth into my thigh and hung on like a pit bull.
I screamed and pulled him off and slammed his forehead against the back of the front seat. In a moment Brennan was out of the car, facedown in the sand with two deputies kneeling on his back.
“The son of a bitch tried to bite her,” Jason gasped breathlessly.
“I’m okay.”
His teeth had not penetrated the heavy khakis.
Jason was peering at me from underneath his whipping hair. He wanted me to find his eyes and mark the message there.
“Get him up,” Jason said.
They hoisted Brennan to his feet. He was spitting mealy-colored gunk and shouting hoarsely that we were all spying for the CIA.
Jason spun from the hips and while they held him, smashed a fist full-force into the side of Brennan’s nose, and blood and teeth spurted out as if from a squirt bottle.
Then the young agent turned to see what I thought of this action. His breath was coming hard, and his face was red and shiny with rain. He wanted to know if it were done now, if his initiation were complete.
I would have answered that there was no beginning or end to this. The intimate desperation I had shared with Brennan in the house had meant nothing but a