The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [93]
He drove toward the exit with one eye on the rearview, his right foot gently pushing the accelerator past the legal limit. He didn’t really know if they were after him yet, but it felt like seconds counted. The mile markers rolled past him in slow motion.
Finally, down the ramp, an old-fashioned sign for the Tornillo Blue Chip Casino begging visitors to stop for the “Hottest Slots East of Vegas.” Even small casinos were oases of anonymity, and he needed to disappear quick. “You don’t want to just abandon your car on the side of the road,” Peter had told him. “That’s giving them a clue. A direction. Even setting it on fire to get rid of evidence is a bad idea because it attracts the authorities. If you can, leave it in a bad neighborhood. With the keys in it. Let someone else strip it or drive it away, hopefully in a direction away from you.”
Wayne didn’t know if Tornillo was big enough to have a neighborhood constantly patrolled by car thieves. In Wayne’s hometown, hardly anyone locked their doors, and you could leave car keys in the ignition for a month without anyone noticing.
He figured Tornillo was small enough to employ only a handful of cops, though.
It was coming up on dusk and he maneuvered toward the lights of downtown, really a long four-lane strip of hotels, restaurants, car dealers, and fast-food joints. Fed by the Virgin River, trees and shrubs and grass decorated the roadside, and all around were the red hills of the desert. At a stoplight, cars were overloaded with teens, boys at the wheel, girls in the passenger seats, painted toes out the window. He remembered summer nights just like this, cruising up and down the streets, asking bored girls if they wanted a ride to no place just so you could spend a few minutes sitting next to them. His gearhead friends would pass all day fixing up their cars, installing the loudest speakers, the plushest interiors, the freshest paint.
Wayne’s best fortunes with women had not been in high school, but college. Football had made available a class of women that he otherwise would have had no chance with. Good looks are currency for the young and unattached, and there were women on campus who were willing to spend it. To “trade up.” Dating a football player meant joining the most exclusive sorority on campus. It meant being envied and talked about. It meant good parties. It meant hanging out with the temporarily famous.
Some girls had been mercenary. They were often the ones who knew football best, who studied it and even, like sports magazines, ranked the prospects and determined which players had a shot at an NFL career. The best of them were clever. They didn’t look twice at the quarterbacks—there were only a couple dozen starting quarterbacks in the pros and the competition for their affection was fierce. A pro quarterback was much more likely to leave his college sweetheart for this actress or that country singer. Smart girls played the odds. Linemen. Offensive linemen, defensive linemen. Big men, even fat men, whom the other girls ignored. Those boys were easier to get, easier to please, easier to hold on to, and they were an even better ticket to a glamorous postgraduate life.
The longest relationship Wayne had ever had was his five-semester one with Evelyn Burdett. She was impossibly cute, with short, layered brown hair and a tiny athletic body, even though her exercise was limited to a mostly social version of Pilates. She was so small, smaller even than Nada, that they became something like campus celebrities. The cartoonist at the school paper even created a pair of characters modeled after them—an enormous football lineman named Walt, whose body could hardly be contained in the strip’s frame, and his demanding girlfriend, Stacey, whom Walt carried about campus under his arm like a football.
A knee injury and his rising moon weight deflated his pro stock senior year and Evelyn started thinking about a future without him. Many college romances fade around that time, and perhaps it