The man rocked back on his heels, his eyes locked on Sten’s, and for a moment Sten thought he was going to spit at him the way the prisoner had in Costa Rica, but that didn’t happen and a good thing too because he was a beat away from losing it. Here was guilt. Here was the shit of the world come home to roost right here in the redwoods. The man scuffed his boots on the pavement, then swung round without a word and started back for the truck, his arms outstretched to usher the other three along with him. Sten watched them climb back in. The doors slammed. Sun glinted off chrome. And the truck sat there—and so did Sten—till the minutes became hours and Carey, in over his head, talked himself hoarse on the theme of giving it up, of getting out of there before somebody got hurt, because they weren’t vigilantes, were they?
Finally, and by now it was past noon, the pickup’s engine roared to life and the driver cut the wheels hard even as the man in back—the acrobat—leapt down and started up the road on foot. He was lithe, tall, rabbity, and by the time the driver had turned the truck around and started back down the hill, he was jogging up the road, the bill of his cap pulled down tight now, fashion sacrificed to exigency. “Where’s he going?” Carey wondered aloud.
Sten didn’t answer. He just put the car in gear, swung a U-turn and followed the pickup back down the road, all the way down, past the supermarket and back out onto the Coast Highway, where it turned north and kept on going. At speed. And here was where the big engine had the advantage, though Sten tried gamely to keep up. By Cleone, they’d lost them, but Carey got the 911 dispatcher on the phone as soon as they were in range. “What do I tell them?” he asked, his face blanched and the armpits of his T-shirt soaked through with nervous sweat.
Sten went silently through the list of crimes—Being Mexican; Driving a New Ford XLT; Buying Too Many Groceries; Acting Suspicious—but he was already signaling, already looking up the road for the next left so he could turn round and head home. It was one-twenty in the afternoon. The meat was rotted, the milk gone sour. And the eggs. Nothing worse than the smell of rotten eggs. He turned to Carey, Carey with his bouncing knee and too much white in his eyes, Carey in his jogging togs, Carey the vigilante. “Just tell them they were brandishing a weapon,” he said. “That ought to do it.”
PART V
The Noyo
15.
“DOESN’T HE SCARE YOU?”
She was in the kitchen of the house on the banks of the Noyo, a weak sun sifting through the trees, and Christabel, who didn’t even know him and who was probably jealous—definitely jealous—had called to see how she was getting along in exile.
“No,” she said, “not at all.” And that was the truth. Adam could be as strange as strange got, no doubt about that, but what Christabel didn’t understand was that underneath there was an essential sweetness to him, a boyishness, an innocence you didn’t find in the types that took up space in the bars and stomped up and down the aisles of the hardware store with the oh-so-pleased-with-themselves smirks on their faces, which, sadly, seemed to be the only types available to women like her and Christabel. Plus, he was young. And handsome. A whole lot handsomer than her ex, Roger, who’d let himself go till he wasn’t much more than a belly with pants on it—or anybody she’d dated since. And built. She told Christabel that, as if she needed any justification, because who she dated was nobody’s business but hers, not even her best friend’s.
“He’s like a rock. I don’t know what he does—I don’t see him lifting weights or anything—but he’s hard all over.”
“Don’t get dirty on me now.”
She laughed. “I’m not. Really, I’m not. Just stating the facts.”
There was a long exhalation on the other end of the line, Christabel blowing out the smoke of her cigarette, and she could picture it, the way she threw her head back and pursed her lips as if she were channeling the smoke through an imaginary portal in the sky and sending it right on up to heaven, to God Himself, who, after all, was the one who invented nicotine. “You’re just a cougar, that’s all.”
She didn’t deny it. In fact, it brought a smile to her lips. “Who me?” she said, and they both laughed. Then she said, “I thought you gave up smoking?”
“I did.”
“So what’s that puffing I hear?”