The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [28]
Her dad said, “You’ve got the wrong guy. Swear to God.”
The man showed him a black pistol under his belt. “Be nice. Your little girl, where is she?”
“Not here.”
But Annie ran from the closet, hurling herself at this man, knocking him off-balance. Quickly her father crashed the man’s head down onto the glass coffee table, cracking the glass. The man fell to his knees as abruptly as the Israelites had done when Moses parted the sea in The Ten Commandments. He rolled off the table and dropped unconscious onto the rug.
Grabbing their suitcases, Annie’s father hurried her through the motel parking lot. When they passed a cream-colored BMW with a Florida license plate, Annie said that just this morning she’d noticed the same car, with the same plate numbers, in the truck stop where they’d had breakfast in Memphis. Her father said, “Good girl,” and he used the gun to smash the BMW’s headlights.
Two hours later, they stopped at a service station and he bought her candy bars, so many that they fell out of his arms all over the seat, like a shelf had collapsed on a candy rack.
“Who was that man back there?” she asked him.
“The Crocodile,” he said, nodding, breathing carefully. “Tick tock tick tock.” The Crocodile who’d chased after Captain Hook was one of her father’s favorite names for their pursuers. “That was a little scary, wasn’t it? You did great, Annie. You did. A-plus. You saved us.” He pressed her small hands against his puffed-out cheeks, making a funny splattery noise as he pushed in on her fingers. Although she was still frightened, the noise made her laugh. She poked her fingers in his cheeks hard.
He asked, “Do you love me, darlin’?”
“No.”
“Oh for the love of Mike.” Reaching across the seat, he hugged her to him, close against the steering wheel. “Nothing bad’s ever going to happen to you,” he promised, pointing through the windshield at the white crescent of the moon tilted among the stars. “The moon is my witness,” he vowed. “The moon’s smiling because you’re so beautiful.”
“Be quiet,” she told him sternly. “I don’t want to go back to that motel.”
“Me either. Don’t like their room service.” He kissed the top of her head.
“Where are we going now?” she asked.
But he just sat there, his arms folded over the steering wheel.
His failure to move scared her. “Go,” she told him.
“Okay.” He nodded, turning the ignition. “Let’s go home.”
His proposal surprised her because she hadn’t ever formulated what home might be, other than this speeding car, and out its windows the blur of land and towns flying by them on the sides of the highways. “Where?” she asked. “Where I went when I was a baby?” For he’d told her often about the trip to his childhood town, Emerald, about his leaving the plane the King of the Sky at Pilgrim’s Rest with his sister, although Annie had no memories of her own by which to judge his stories.
“That’s right. Emerald City, darlin’.”
“You said Pilgrim’s Rest was a pit of snakes.”
“Oh no no. It’s the best place in the world.”
With the old familiar surge of speed, he headed up the ramp onto the interstate. She read a sign for 55 East. After driving a while, he told her, “Snuggle down. I’m the Wizard of Nod and we need to take your ruby shoes to bed.”
She held out her legs, braced the cowboy boots with their green lariats against the dashboard. “I’m not sleepy.”
“Sure you are.” He tapped a cigarette from his pack.
“How do you know?”
“Because you’re the queen of the world and queens need to rest.” He slipped the pink baseball cap onto her head like a crown.
The next day he left her in the yard at Pilgrim’s Rest.
***
Out on the Pilgrim’s Rest porch,