I flagged her down between the Texaco station and the motel. I got in on the passenger side and broke down entirely. I sobbed. I howled. My heart tore loose inside my chest. I died in that car all over again.
“Omigod, Mort. Oh, no. What, what—?”
“Drive,” I said. “Reno.” The words didn’t sound human. They were something that bubbled up from the depths of the ocean, liquid sounds that tore out of my throat as if I’d choked them up.
Ma drove. She headed back south, back to Reno, and I just let the tears and the pain flow. We were well past Empire when I came up for air, still barely able to breathe.
“Jeri?” Ma asked. “Where’s Jeri?”
“She’s dead.”
Ma had feared it. What else could do this to me? Yet she had to pull to the side of the road and turn off the engine. She bawled. We performed a duet of pain the likes of which I’d never imagined two people had ever done before.
It was twenty minutes before she could drive again. We got going, doing no better than forty miles an hour. I tried to get my voice to work as I told her the last of it, Julia taking us into the hills, opening the rear hatch of that SUV, shooting Jeri without warning in the first three seconds, just pure outrageous murder. I didn’t tell her what had hit the seats, a red mist of what had been Jeri a hundredth of a second before—the stuff that had been Jeri, that had made her who she was, suddenly blown into eternity by the most evil bitch in the history of the world.
Ma couldn’t talk. She drove with tears in her eyes, swallowing often, sometimes letting out a faint mewling sound. I gave her a little more of it, when I could talk.
Finally, on I-80, ten miles west of Fernley, I said, “I want her, Ma. I’ve got to kill Julia. So we can’t go to the police. No one can know I was anywhere around Gerlach tonight.”
She nodded. “I figured. Don’t worry, we’ll get her. You and me, boyo. I’m in. That bitch is already dead.”
“Jeri can’t stay in that mineshaft, so . . . so how . . . ?”
“I know what to do,” Ma said. “You said the turnoff’s at mile marker forty-four?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll handle it.”
“I’m so sick I want to die, Ma.”
“I know.”
“Not until I get Julia, though.”
She turned to me. It was still dead dark outside. “I’ve got this, Mort. I know what to do. This is pure hell, but I know what to do. Have you got clothes at Jeri’s place?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, then. We’ll start there.”
She drove around back to a detached garage at Jeri’s house, didn’t pull the car inside. We got out and she told me to go to the back door and strip before I went inside.
“Strip, Ma?”
“Right down to bare skin. Your clothing will have dirt on it that could be used to prove you were at that trailer. If you’re shy, leave your underwear on until you get inside then toss it out the door. Go take a shower. Scrub everything—especially your hair, fingernails, and get between your toes. Do a damn good job of it, lots of soap. Then get dressed.”
I did as I was told.
I came downstairs in jogging shoes, blue jeans, a sweatshirt. Ma was pacing, thinking. She looked up when I came into the room. “Gotta get Jeri out of that hole,” she said.
“I wasn’t going to . . . to leave her there.”
“You can’t get her. No way. If you did, you’d get tripped up by a hundred legal issues. It’d be impossible to get her a proper burial unless you brought Julia into it, or tried to. That would be a mess like you wouldn’t believe. Julia wouldn’t be charged and they might put it on you. Only way to get Jeri out of there, is to report this. I’ll do it anonymously. Five minutes after they bring bodies up, fingerprints will be transmitted to the FBI. Ten minutes after that, this place is going to be crawling with cops, so we can’t stay here. Let’s get that shower upstairs completely dry, then clear out.”
I dried the shower with a towel. Ma packed it into a big plastic bag along with the clothes I’d worn while escaping from Julia. One last look around and no one could tell we’d been there in the past twelve hours, which was all that mattered.
Ma backed the Caddy out and headed east on Second Street.
“Where to?” I asked.
“You want to get Julia, right?”
“I have to.” Deep inside, in a place that would never fade or be forgotten, I was an unspeakable hell pit of fury. Julia had to die. I knew it was wrong. I knew the thought made me an evil person, a killer, a monster, but I couldn’t rid myself of it until I rid the earth of Julia. Then, maybe, I could be human again—if I could live with the knowledge. And if I couldn’t, then so be it, but Julia had to die.
“We’re not in too deep yet,” Ma said. “You can still let the cops do their thing.”
I shook my head. “I can’t think of anything that proves Julia was up there tonight or did the things she told us she did. Nothing implicates her. The Fernley house, that SUV we’ve been tracking, the trailer—none of it was in her name. Nothing is conclusive. If we went to the cops, she would end up untouchable. Right now she’s running. She’s vulnerable.”
“That’s the way I see it, too.”
“So where are we going? What’re we going to do?”
“This’s gonna be hard, Mort. Real hard. But you’ve got to go to Sarah’s place.”
“Ma—”
“You need an alibi for the time Jeri was up there when . . . when she was killed.” Her voice caught as she said it and her eyes got bright again. Finally, she said, “It
