She stopped moving and looked at him, her chest heaving.
He held up the phone so she could see it, and hit the ON button. The phone came to life with a series of chimes. Then he walked over to the bar and set it on the counter. They’d trace the signal. But it might take hours or days. He could have called Henry, but he didn’t want them to find him too soon, before the pills had had a chance to do their work.
He reached into his pants pocket and put the key to the cuffs next to the phone, where Henry could find it.
Then he poured the contents of one Vicodin bottle out onto the bar. The pills made a satisfying sound as they skidded across the granite and then stopped at his open hand. So here it was, finally. He’d thought about this so much over the past few years that it seemed almost anticlimactic. It felt familiar, natural. He’d been killing himself slowly ever since he’d been released from the hospital. Now he was just going to speed things up a little. The trick was to pace himself so that he kept enough of them down to kill him. He put one pill in his mouth and let it sit on his tongue, sucking on it until the bitterness filled his sinuses. He wanted to taste it. Eyes wide open. He wanted to experience every part of it. If he was going to die, he might as well know it. Gretchen had taught him that.
He scooped another couple of pills into his hand and put them in his mouth, licking the bitter chalky powder off his fingers.
“Archie,” he heard her say. “Don’t. There’s a forest fire. Can’t you smell it?”
He sniffed the air and smelled it then, like a campfire burning. He laughed. They were in the path of the forest fire. Fucking perfect.
“You can’t leave me here,” she said.
“They’ll find you,” he said. “And if they don’t, then we’ll both be dead.”
CHAPTER
59
You’re not going to vomit, are you?” Henry asked Susan. She had her window down and was leaning her head against the car door. They had wound an hour up Highway 22, through the woods and occasional one-gas-station towns, and Susan felt carsick. The air was dry and hot, and the wind blowing through the open window blew hair in her eyes and chapped her lips. Every bump in the road reminded her of her broken nose.
“I’m fine,” she said in a nasal voice, swallowing some warm saliva that had pooled at the back of her throat. She didn’t know if it was Henry’s driving or the carbon monoxide poisoning, but her money was on Henry’s driving.
They had made good time. There was a caravan of cars coming down the mountain, but with the exception of Forest Service vehicles and fire trucks, very little traffic headed up. She’d seen no evidence of the fire yet.
Susan saw a green highway sign that read MILLS CROSSING, POPULATION 52, PLEASE DRIVE CAREFULLY, and sat up. “This is it,” she said. Mills Crossing appeared to be a gas station, roadhouse, a few old houses, and an “antiques shop” consisting of old dishes and paperbacks laid out on sheets in the roadhouse parking lot.
Henry flipped on his turn signal to pull across the highway to get to the gas station, but the line of cars coming down the mountain continued at a solid pace. Finally he put the siren on the hood, hit a button on the dash, and the siren whooped once. The cars immediately parted to let him through.
“Must be nice,” Susan said.
“It is,” said Henry.
He pulled up and parked next to the gas station. Susan counted eight cars waiting to get gas. A single attendant was manning the station’s two pumps. Oregon hadn’t had self-serve gas since the state had passed a statute against it in the 1940s. Back then the state was afraid people would blow themselves up. Now the statute was supposed to protect the environment, jobs, and old people who might succumb to fumes.
This guy looked like he would have been fine letting the customers risk it.
Henry and Susan got out of the car and moved between the bumpers of two SUVs to get to the gas pump. The attendant was Susan’s height, and didn’t weigh much more. His skin was tan and tough. He wore a T-shirt that read SPOTTED OWL TASTES LIKE CHICKEN.
“You Big Charlie?” Henry asked.
“Yep,” the little man said. He had a toothpick in his mouth and it rotated from one corner of his mouth to the other while he talked. “Cash only,” he said to a man in a VW bus. “Visa machine’s down.” The man in the bus handed Big Charlie a crumpled ten and Big Charlie inserted the nozzle into the bus’s gas tank and hit a lever on the pump. The pump’s dial meter began to rotate slowly. A woman in a Honda Element waiting for gas on the other side of the pump honked her horn. Big Charlie ignored her.