“Go now!”
“Get out of my fucking—-” As I turned, I saw a red truck pulling up behind us. Curiosity quelled my anger temporarily. Hadn’t it been going the opposite direction down Main Street only moments ago?
“Hey,” I said. “Here comes Randy King’s—-”
Petty dove to the floor of the cab, curled into a smaller ball than I would have thought possible, and pulled her bag on top of herself.
“Petty, why—-” I looked up in time to see Randy pull up beside me, the passenger window level with mine. In the seat was Keith Dooley. He rolled his window down and grinned expectantly at me. I was ready to signal with my eyes that Petty was on the floor of the Toyota, because surely she wouldn’t shoot me in front of two witnesses. But something stopped me.
“Hey,” Randy said around Dooley. I’d always known who Randy King the Militia Man was but had never actually met him.
“Hi, Dekker,” Dooley said. “How are you today?”
“Fine,” I said out the window, my tongue thick and abraded from puking. I wondered if the lawyer could smell the fresh vomit on the road directly below his face, and the thought horrified me.
“Was that Petty Moshen I saw in your truck earlier?” Dooley asked.
“Yeah,” I said without hesitation. “She needed a ride.”
“A ride? From where? To where?”
“From her house to . . . town, I guess.”
Dooley glanced over his shoulder at Randy, whose mustache twitched.
“And what happened when you got to town?”
This was strangely reminiscent of TV court cross--examinations, and my guts started rolling again. “She got out of the truck.”
I watched Dooley rise almost imperceptibly in his seat, trying to see into the Toyota. Maybe Stockholm syndrome had already set in, because I was careful not to shift my gaze, not to look at my passenger hiding on the floor, and my eyes watered with the effort.
“Where is she now?” Randy asked me.
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Where’d you leave her off?”
“On Main Street.”
“On Main Street,” Randy said, almost mockingly. “Where on Main Street?”
“Son,” Dooley said. “You need to know something about Petty Moshen. She’s not well. She’s not right in the head. Sad but true. I advise you to not take any more delivery calls from her. She’s unstable. You might have heard about the incident a few years back at the dump. She can be dangerous.”
Of course I remembered the incident at the dump. Everybody did. Justin Pencey and a few of his brain--dead pals went out to the dump to torment her but got more than they bargained for. Justin had told everyone that she’d attacked them for no reason, but no one who knew Justin actually believed this. Still, it hadn’t stopped everyone from embellishing the story to paint Petty as a monster freak.
So “dangerous” seemed a bit of an overdramatic interpretation. “Defending herself” was more like it. This further put me on alert.
“She’s actually retarded or autistic. Something like that,” Randy put in.
Dooley looked back at Randy, annoyed. “In any event,” he said, “if you know where she is, you need to tell us so we can help her.”
Randy put his hand on Dooley’s arm. “We’re wasting our time,” he said. “Don’t worry. We’ll find her. She can’t get far.”
His weird confidence seemed to confirm my intuition. I knew Petty was strange, but it wasn’t like she hadn’t been provoked that day at the dump. It wasn’t like that behavior came out of nowhere. And I got a major bully vibe off Randy. Plus Dooley was a lawyer. So fuck them.
My phone buzzed again. Candace would be throwing a rod back at the grocery, wondering where I was, what was taking so long.
“Aren’t you going to answer that?” Dooley said.
“Nope,” I said.
We stared at each other until the phone quit buzzing.
“Well,” I said, taking a Camel from the console, lighting it up and blowing a lungful of smoke into the Ram. “I don’t know what to tell you. I’m just out making a delivery. So I’m going to go on ahead now. Good luck to you.” I rolled up my window and, without letting my eyes drift downward, accelerated out from the roadblock of the Dodge Ram and back onto the two--lane highway.
Neither of us spoke for several minutes, and Petty didn’t rise from the floor.
“So what kind of trouble are you in?” I said. “Come up here. The coast is clear, or whatever.”
Petty climbed up in the seat and looked out through the back window. She turned, sat and buckled up.
“That was, like, beyond weird,” I said.
Petty was silent.
“Do you want to hear what they said?”
“No.”
Why didn’t she want to know? I’d never met someone so untalkative. So literal and awkward. So uninquisitive. I, on the other hand, was burning with curiosity. But I held off for a while. Finally, I said, “Why is . . . Randy King so interested in where you are?”
Petty winced.
“I mean, he really, really wants to know where you are. I mean, really.”