Bad Penny Page 8

  She had a good two-handed stance, the barrel lined up with her dominant eye, pointing, not at his head, but his chest. No one-eyed squinting. No hysteria. This was a woman well acquainted with firearms. And she’d know her rights too—know she’d be well within them to blow five or six inches right out of the back of an ugly intruder like him.

  Frank put his hands up. “Ma’am, I’m going to walk out this back door. I know I gave you a fright. I just had to be sure he wasn’t holding you hostage.”

  “Get out of my house.”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” Frank said. He sidled over to the door and grabbed the knob. “I’ll walk right to our vehicle, and then we’re gone.”

  The woman’s finger was on the trigger. She was breathing hard. One sudden move on Frank’s part, and she’d put him down.

  Frank turned the handle and opened the door. “Please accept my apologies,” he said. Then he turned his back on her—knowing how easy it was to accidentally pull a trigger when a tsunami of adrenaline was washing through you—pushed open the storm door against the wind and walked out and down the steps to the lawn. The hair on the back of his neck raised up: he knew she had that gun trained on him still, knew she was thinking about those kids on the tramp and the big intruder out there with them, knew a bullet was coming. Frank didn’t look back, didn’t want to startle her. The wind buffeted him. He marched past a rainbow-colored wind ornament spinning at high speed and then turned the corner around the garage.

  Maybe Kim had been right. Maybe he still carried too much of the distrust of prison with him. But what else could he have done? Call the cops? And all the while, if Ed had been down there, every second would have given the juices in his sociopathic brain time to come up with a plan.

  Frank strode past the garage. The whole incident had taken probably no more than a minute, but the husband, with the farmer’s tan and rangy goatee, was clearly angry now. He had his cell phone out and was dialing. He probably wished he had been carrying something in his knee-high gumboot.

  Frank said, “I’m leaving now.”

  “Who the hell do you think you are?” the farmer said.

  “Where’s the sheriff’s office?” Frank asked.

  The man looked Frank up and down, aggression and fury building in him. But Frank was a big guy, and the man knew it. “Straight down the main road toward Farson. Now get off my land.”

  “You tell them I’m coming,” Frank said.

  Then he and Sam got back into the minivan. This time Frank sat up front in the passenger’s seat. “Drive straight to the main drag,” Frank said.

  “Holy crap,” Sam said.

  “We don’t have much time,” Frank said.

  Sam cranked the ignition. “You going to bring the cops in?”

  “No.”

  “I think you raised some heart rates back there.”

  “Which is why we need to get the heck out of Dodge. Somehow, I don’t think the local sheriff is going to look kindly on an ex-con breaking and entering on a hundred kids and four stamping moms.”

  7

  Pinto

  SAM PUT THE van in drive and pressed the gas.

  “We need to get a map,” Frank said. “I think my brilliant plan just screwed the pooch.”

  Sam pulled out onto the road and headed back toward the main road and the Eden Bar, dust kicking up behind them. Frank popped open the glove compartment. “You got a map in here?”

  “I’m not going to flee the police, Frank.”

  “I’m not asking you to flee. Just proactively evade.” Frank flipped through the things in the glove box. Lip balm, a pen, envelopes, owner’s manual, a pacifier that was nowhere close to sanitary.

  “There’s an atlas in the pocket behind your seat.”

  Frank reached around behind him and pulled the atlas out of the wide pocket. It was an oversized thing with a picture of a black road running up a hill of yellow wheat on the cover. He flipped it open to Wyoming. Then he took the pen and envelope out of the glove compartment. He positioned the corner of the envelope on the mileage scale up at the top of the map and marked off seventy miles on the envelope, slid it, then marked 140. He put the corner of the envelope on Eden, and using the envelope as a compass, drew a light circle 140 miles out.

  And the circle showed him just about how hopeless this now was. By the time he and Sam got back to Rock Springs, if they made it that far, Ed could already be in Colorado, most of the way to Utah, or just pulling into Rawlins, Wyoming. If he’d actually come in this direction, he’d be well on his way to Jackson Hole.

  The van rumbled down the dirt road toward the main drag and bar. Behind them, the house grew small in the distance.

  Frank looked down at the map again. What was the math? How fast would they need to go if Ed was already eighty or a hundred miles ahead? “I need to make a decision. Pull in behind that bar so nobody can see us.”

  “I don’t think we want to do that.”

  “You’re not fleeing the authorities, just pulling into a parking lot.”

  “There’s a sheriff’s pickup in that parking lot.”

  Frank looked up. A white pickup with lights on top rested peacefully in the shade of the trees.

  “I don’t think anyone’s in it,” Sam said.

  Frank squinted. He didn’t think anyone was there either. Nor was it parked like it was waiting for them. The dirt road he and Sam were on continued on the far side of the main drag. There was a house and a metal barn about a hundred yards down that road. “Go straight across,” Frank said. “Park it behind that metal barn.”

  Sam pulled up to the main road. The Eden Bar and the sheriff’s truck both stood off to his right. There wasn’t anyone in the pickup, but if anyone came out, the first thing they’d see was him and Sam sitting at the stop sign. Sam looked both ways. There were no vehicles coming. Then he gave the van some gas and drove across the road.

  Frank turned around and watched the bar. Just as they got to the other side, the door to the bar opened. A deputy in a nice tan uniform walked out. Another man wearing a dirty baseball cap followed him. The deputy put on his dark pilot sunglasses.

  Frank’s heart began to beat like a drum. They were going to get detained, taken to the sheriff’s office, have to make some report. And then he never would catch Ed.

  Sam rumbled onto the dirt road, dust billowing up behind. The deputy walked round the corner, talking to the man in the baseball cap. They shook hands, and the deputy walked to his pickup. Sam continued down the road. The deputy got into his truck. In just a few seconds he’d check in. Or his box would squawk. Breaking and entering would be a big deal in a community so small the town didn’t even have one stop light. Sam’s evasion might be over before it even began.

  The deputy picked up his radio. Sam put on his blinker and turned left into the gravel driveway, the stones crunching under the wheels. A blink later the minivan slipped behind the metal barn.

  Frank’s mouth was dry.

  “You think he saw us?” Sam asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “We’re going to figure this out.” The deputy was going to come, or he wasn’t. That was out of Frank’s control. The farm house itself was dark, but a couple of dogs sat up by the porch. A wide gravel yard ran from the house to the street. It was big enough to turn tractors around on it, but there were no vehicles parked anywhere.

  Frank set the map up on the dash. “Where’s Ed, Sam?”

  “He had Colorado plates,” Sam said.

  Frank nodded. “Colorado’s home, at least for one of them. That is, if that car wasn’t stolen.”

  He thought back to the conversation. Ed had said they’d been in Utah, picking up an extra wife. At the time, Frank thought he was making a stupid joke. But he could have been talking about the girl he had in his trunk. And if they’d come from Colorado, then maybe they were on their way back. If all that was true, then they’d be heading east on I-80. Or maybe they were
heading south for Craig, Colorado to take the back way into Denver.

  Or maybe that was all just a pile of crap.

  Sam said, “You think that deputy saw us?” He was looking out his window through a gap between the metal barn and the last remnants of a stack of round ton hay bales. A slice of the intersection was barely visible through the gap.

  “Maybe he’s calling in backup,” Frank said.

  Sam ran his hand down his face. “Oh, brother.”

  Just then, back on the main road, the deputy’s truck accelerated hard, the engine roaring, lights flashing on top. It turned down the road to the house with the cute mom with her .45 and all her stamping friends.

  “We don’t have much time,” Frank said. “Two minutes. Three. By then every deputy they’ve got up here will be buzzing the roads like hornets. We need to get ahead of them.”

  “We going east, back to Rock Springs?”

  Frank looked down at the map. “That’s the problem. There are a couple of routes into Colorado, all more than a hundred miles apart. If I was still working for Uncle Sam, we’d get some eyes in the sky. Satellite, choppers. But we’ve got squat.”

  “Maybe I’ve got some guys.”

  “What kind of guys?”

  “From a ward I used to live in.”

  “Ward? Like a mental hospital?” Holy cow, this was a total cluster.

  “A Mormon ward,” Sam explained, “is a church congregation.”

  More with the church ladies and missionaries. Frank shook his head. “No disrespect, but we need more than a bicycle brigade and a bake-off.”

  “How about an airplane?”

  Frank looked at him.

  Sam looked back like he was dealing with someone who, the Lord love them, had a somewhat pointy head.

  “Talk,” Frank said.

  “Brother Korea. Just outside of Lander. He’s got himself a Cessna, takes people around, spots lost cattle, whatever.”

  Frank looked down at the map. Highway 191 and State Road 28 crossed each other like a big X in Farson. 191 led up to Jackson Hole or back to Rock Springs. 28 led north-east to Lander, about fifty or sixty miles from their current position. It was not at all on their route, but they could cover a lot of ground in a plane, even in a small Cessna. “Make the call,” Frank said.

  “You got it.” Sam put the van in drive and began to turn around on the gravel. Then he made the hands-free call.

  Frank’s hopes began to rise a bit. “So this Korea, does he have a cookie racket too?”

  “Actually,” Sam said, “Brother Korea has a very nice snickerdoodle.”

  Mormons were just too weird. “Is this like part of your religion?”

  “Dude, what do you think those temples are? They’re big bakeries.”

  “No, they’re not.”

  Sam smiled. “The Holy Order of Cookies. We wear baker’s hats.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Actually, we do.”

  Sam was such a liar, except he didn’t look like he was lying. “Whatever,” Frank said. “Let’s just get on the road. If I recall, there was a deputy and flashing lights.”

  Sam exited the gravel drive and turned north on the dirt road, away from the bar. A moment later the person he called picked up. Sam put him on speaker. A deep, but faraway tinny voice said, “Cartwright, you mad man. How you doing?”

  “I’ve got a massive cow in the mud, Pinto. You at home?”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I’m about fifty minutes out; I’ll tell you when we get there, but we’re going to need your plane.”

  “Yolanda’s not doing so well,” Korea said. “But don’t you worry about that. You just get your bookkeeping kiester up here.”

  “I’ll call you when we get close,” Sam said. He turned to Frank. “Looks like it’s a go.”

  “Who’s Yolanda?”

  “His plane.”

  “If we get up there and have to turn around—”

  “He’ll have it fixed.”

  “Falling out of the sky can kind of put a damper on your day.”

  “We won’t fall out of the sky. Cessnas can glide.”

  Frank pulled out his phone and brought up the phone locator. The push pin showed their current location on Google Maps. Frank zoomed in. The roads of Eden appeared in a rough grid. But there was a river between them and State Road 28 that led to Lander. They could go back to the main drag and then on to the center of Farson, but that was too risky, too out in the open.

  Frank dragged the map and saw their escape. “Follow the road we’re on to the end of the line and then turn left,” he said. “We’re going to get on a Ryepatch Road and skirt right around Farson. It will take us over the river and dump us out on 28.”

  “Right,” Sam said, but he was checking his mirrors, looking out over the fields for the deputy, ignoring the road. The van started to veer toward the shoulder and the ditch beyond.

  “Sam!” Frank said.

  Sam snapped his attention back to the road and pulled them back from the shoulder.

  “You keep your eyes on the road. I’ll scout for our boys in brown.”

  Sam focused on the road.

  They passed a half-dozen fields and houses. Some with big pivots to irrigate them, others with long wheeled or hand lines. Frank scanned the horizon.

  “I’ve got binoculars in the back,” Sam said. “Nothing spectacular. I got to help the older scouts with their bird study merit badge.”

  Frank clambered into the back and dug past the spud gun and the other crap that was there. The binoculars were all nice and tidy in a case. He flipped the case open and pulled them out. They were a dull pine green set of bird watchers, straight roof prism design with 7x32 magnification and objective diameter. Nothing like the target acquisition glasses he used in the good old days, but it was not like he was going to be doing any sniping.

  He climbed back to the front seat. “These aren’t so bad,” he said and brought them up to his eyes. “A lot better than squinting.”

  He scanned the main road as well as in front of them across the river. No deputy, just regular cars, houses, and some horses in a pasture.

  The road they were on met up with Ryepatch and then wound around a barren ridge, and crossed the river, which was so low you could see all the rocks along the bottom. About two miles later, they drove through an opening in the barbed wire fence and dumped out onto State Road 28.

  There was nothing out here. The irrigation hadn’t come this far, which meant the land was flat and dry. The trees of Farson were small in the distance. Frank looked through the glasses. Nothing was on the road.

  “Time to get hopping,” he said.

  Sam pulled out onto the road and accelerated. “One of the deputies could be ahead of us. It’s not like there are a lot of roads around here to patrol.”

  “We do the best we can,” Frank said. He’d spent years of his life learning how to hide from men who wanted to kill him. If Frank could get thirty yards off the road, he could blend in just fine. The problem was the land here was miles and miles of flat pan. He might be able to hide, but the van could not. It would be visible forever. They were like sitting ducks.

  Sam got up to seventy-five, then eighty. The miles of dry land flew past on either side of them, the road running straight as far as the eye could see. The Wind River mountain range rose in the distance on their left.

  Frank picked up Tony’s phone. Maybe Tony had taken a picture. Maybe he’d left a note. Frank slid it open. The screen lit up, and an electronic note did indeed appear. It was yellow, like a Post-it, with blue script. It said, “Strike one, Jockstrap. Hope you enjoyed the ride :)”

  Frank clenched his teeth and closed his eyes. Tony. Dude, I’m so sorry. But he was going to make it right.

  “You okay?” Sam asked.

  “Fine,” Frank replied.

  Sam made calls to a client, his office, and his wife. Frank checked the roads ahead and behind. Some time later they came to the
end of the broad flat pan of the valley, and the land began to gently rise as they approached the tip of the big mountain range. A few minutes after that, they entered the softly rolling foothills at the outer edge of the range. Cedars, aspen, and pines grew in the distance on the slopes. The road ran on. Visibility stretched in all directions for miles.

  He checked his phone. It was 3:45 p.m., well past the time he should have received a call from Tony. Obviously, Ed wasn’t going to call on the hour. Not a good sign.

  Frank dialed Kim. The phone rang and went to voicemail. He told her to call him. Then he sent her another text.

  They continued on and the landscape became greener. The road no longer ran straight, but bent through the gentle hills. They passed two separate herds of pronghorn antelope out in the sagebrush, grazing on whatever small bits of grass they might find there. Frank liked the pronghorns. They had exotic horns and coloring—tan backs, white bellies, and an interesting series of white and black bands on their necks and faces.

  But pronghorns didn’t just look pretty; there was nothing that could touch them. Pronghorns ran faster than anything on land except the cheetah. And while the cheetah could run up to seventy mph, it could only maintain that for a few hundred yards before it had to stop and pant in the grass. Pronghorns on the other hand, could sprint almost as fast, sixty-two mph, but then they could kick it into travel gear and cruise at thirty or forty mph for mile after mile. These bad boys evolved to outrun Pleistocene mega-predators like the dire wolves, giant bears, and the extinct American cats. They’d not only outrun their old predators, they’d outlived them, which, when you thought about it, should make them into some kind of herbivore gods. A testament to peaceful grass munchers everywhere. Of course, some predators you couldn’t outrun. Some predators just needed to be removed from the face of the earth. Frank was thinking about pod people like Ed.

  They came around a bend, and about two miles ahead an RV moseyed along. It had mountain bicycles on the back. It didn’t take Sam long to catch up to it. He put on his blinker and pulled up along side. A sunglassed grandma was at the wheel. Frank lifted the binoculars and looked down the long road.