The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [101]
“You know what makes me feel better when I have a bad day?” Ginny said, touching him on his sleeve, handing him a half-gone bottle of flavored water. Her eyes were glassy and unfocused. Wayne concentrated on the left one, which seemed to be looking at him. “That none of this matters. The world. It’s not real. It can’t be real.”
The car accelerated to sixty, seventy, eighty miles per hour. Wayne was still trying to guess how much the cops in Vegas knew about him. He asked himself if it was too soon for some detective or tech to have compared the fingerprints at Amoyo’s to the ones in his file. Or the DNA and fibers and whatnot he’d left at Nada’s, the blood when he’d nicked his hand smashing her window. Jesus. “Could you slow down?”
The white guy up front said, “Are you scared? Of what? Crashing? There’s nothing to crash into for miles.” He leaned into the back and stared at Wayne from up close, then flopped back into the passenger seat. “Don’t worry. James is an excellent driver.” He said it again: “Excellent driver.” He giggled. “What’s that from? A movie.”
“Rain Man,” said the driver.
“Yeah, that’s right! Rain Man!” He slapped James on the arm. “I’m going to call you Rain Man.”
Without taking his eyes off the road, James said, “No, you would be Rain Man.”
“What?”
“Rain Man was the one who said ‘I’m an excellent driver.’”
“I didn’t say I was an excellent driver; I said you were an excellent driver.” Without warning, his head spasmed and he hit it accidentally and hard against the window. “Fuck it. That’s okay. I want to be Rain Man.”
They drove another ten minutes or so in silence, across the Arizona state line. Wayne was nervous and wary, but every mile farther away from Vegas brought relief. Rain Man twisted the rearview so he could see Wayne’s face. “What are you afraid of?”
“Cops,” said the black guy in the backseat.
Rain Man and Ginny both gasped. “Is that right? Are you afraid of the cops? You never did tell us where you were going. Maybe that’s because you’re not going anywhere. You’re running away, aren’t you?” Rain Man put his feet on the dashboard and tapped his knees. He jerked his head around. “Is there a reward?”
“Nobody gives a shit about me.” Wayne tried to sound convincing.
“Oh, I doubt that,” Ginny said. “You know what I was just telling these guys? Okay, life—it’s like a video game. Nothing that happens in it really matters. There aren’t any true consequences for anything we do. But when you’re playing the game, you care about it very much, right? You play like it’s really life or death.” She reached in her pocket and took out a little round tin and opened it. There were half a dozen small pills inside, red and black and green. “You know what these are? These are like little cheat codes. They let you change the program. When things are really sucking, you can’t figure life out, these get you through.” She reached up and stroked Wayne’s cheek.
“Do you want to take one?” she asked him. “Do you need a cheat?”
He felt it sliding out, although he hadn’t felt it enter. A dull pain in his side that became sharper as the blade was withdrawn. What the hell? He reached over with his left hand and felt something wet. When he brought it back in front of his face, the tips of two fingers were painted red, like he had stuck them in jam. Wayne’s clothes were already damp with filth and sweat, but the blood that now leaked onto his shirt felt different. It felt thick and burned cool, like Bengay on an aching muscle.
“What the hell, Hale?” Ginny said.
Hale was holding a kitchen knife in his lap. The tip of it, about an inch and a half of blade, was dark and wet. Wayne grabbed the wrist holding the knife and the pain shot up and down his side. He elbowed Hale in the face, bloodying his nose. Hale hardly reacted, but he wouldn’t