He fished them out of his pocket.
“Which one’s for the trunk?”
He held it up. I took the ring and opened the trunk.
“Get in and lie down.”
He looked at me with pleading eyes. I grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and spun him around and sat him down hard in the trunk. I motioned with the gun and he swung his legs over the rim, curling his butterball body around the spare tire.
I slammed the trunk. It was 10:08, and the enemy himself had delivered us from evil.
I got Eleanor moved over and threw the guns on the seat between us. We careened down the ramp in the fat man’s car. Eleanor sat frozen, gripping her knees like a kid on her first roller-coaster ride. I reached the street just as the shuttle pulled out. I pealed rubber turning north into Sixth Avenue. I was soaring, I was high enough to hit the moon. I had to rein myself in, force myself to stop for a red light. The last thing I needed, now that I had the game all but won, was to get stopped by a traffic cop, and me with a car full of guns.
I was trolling the side streets looking for an on-ramp. I stopped for another light. “Darkman,” Eleanor said, but I looked and the street was empty.
“He’s gone. We kicked his ass, Rigby. It’s time to start thinking about what you’ll do when you get to New Mexico.”
I leaned over the wheel and looked at her. She looked like a stranger, mind-fried with fear.
“We won,” I said.
She looked like anything but a winner. She looked like the thousand and one women a cop meets in a long and violent career. A victim.
“Darkman…”
“Is he your stalker?”
She looked at me. “He’s everywhere. I can’t turn around…”
“He’s a wrong number, honey, a guy in a gorilla suit. He’s only scary if you let him be.”
“He was in New Mexico.” She closed her eyes and quaked at some private demon. “No matter where I go he finds me. I pick up the phone and he’s there, playing that song.”
The guy behind us blew his horn. The light was green. I moved out, giving her shoulder a little rub, but she seemed not to notice.
“He’s there,” she said. “I saw him.”
I scanned the street in my mirrors and saw nothing.
“Oh, God,” she said. “Oh God oh God oh God…”
“We beat him. We’re gettin‘ out of here.”
“Take me back to jail.”
“We’re going to New Mexico.”
“No!…No…take me back to jail…”
“I want you to listen to me.”
“Take me back to jail…take me…take me…”
No more talk, I thought: the less said at this point the better. I thought if I could get her on the plane, I could win her back: then we’d have the whole ride into Albuquerque to calm down and start digging the truth out. I gave her a long sad look. She had covered her face with her hands, but I could see her eyes looking at me through her fingers.
I gunned the car and banked south into the freeway. I was almost up to thirty when she wrenched open the door and, with a shriek of madness, jumped.
17
I hit the brakes and the car spun across the wet pavement and slammed into the guardrail. I leaped out on the rim, running along the edge of a dark gulf. She was somewhere down in the street: I couldn’t see her, but I heard her scream as I skidded down the slope. I had a long clear look at the street running back downtown: she hadn’t gone that way, so she had to have ducked under the freeway to the east. This led me into a dreary neighborhood of shabby storefronts and dark flophouses. The rain had kept people off the street and the hour was late…the block was as dead as an old graveyard. The wet clop of my feet punctured the steady hiss of the rain, but I was chasing a ghost. She was gone.
I reached a cross street still clinging to a shred of hope. She could be blocks away by now, going in any direction. Guess wrong and kiss her good-bye: the next time she stuck her head up, she’d be scouting books in Florida. She could make a pauper’s living forever in that anonymous subculture, never pay taxes, never have her name recorded on any official docket, never be seen again by friend or foe. I pushed on into the rain, as if she had suddenly
