Endless Night (27 page)

“They’re not zombies,” Dad said.

“I know,” Jody told him. “But why would they smell like that?”

“When we get our hands on one, we’ll find out.” He drove in silence for a few seconds. “I didn’t smell anything like that tonight at the Zoller house. Just the usual. Nothing like a rotten carcass.”

“The shooter had to be one of the guys from last night,” Sharon said.

“Maybe I just didn’t pick up on it. The place was pretty whiffy. Or maybe the stink the kids noticed was a fluke and they don’t always smell that way. They might’ve just finished disposing of an old body, or something, before they paid their visit to the Clark house.”

“Or maybe they hadn’t disposed of it,” Sharon said. “Maybe they had it with them. Maybe they were keeping it.”

“Why would they want to keep a body?”

“For a mascot?” Sharon suggested.

Dad laughed.

“You cops are all a bunch of psychos,” Jody said.

“Ain’t that the truth?” Dad said.

“Hey,” Sharon said, “did you know Psycho Phelan?”

“Are you kidding? Psycho? Man, what a lunatic. Did you hear about the time ... ?”

And so it began.

They started telling war stories.

Jody listened eagerly to their tales of Psycho Phelan, then to one story after another about busts that went awry, amazing goofs, tight scrapes, practical jokes played on fellow cops, bizarre civilians they’d encountered, peculiar deaths that were awful but often hilarious.

To hear what they were saying, though, Jody had to sit on the edge of her seat and lean forward, bracing herself with her arms stretched atop the seatbacks. That way, she could keep her head in the middle of things and catch both sides of the conversation. After a while, however, the muscles under her arms began to feel the strain of holding her up. Her back and neck started to ache. All over her body, nicks and scratches, cuts and scrapes and bruises seemed to come awake and hurt her.

Finally, with a moan, she succumbed. She eased herself backward and settled down in her seat. She wanted to stretch out. “Okay if I put the shotgun on the floor, Dad?”

“Sure. Just don’t fire it.”

“Once was once too often,” she said. She slipped it out from under the blanket and set it carefully on the floor.

“Is my rifle in the way?” Sharon asked, looking back at her.

“No, I think it’ll be fine. Gotta get rid of this stuff, though.” She dug her hands into her jacket, pulled the pistol out of one pocket, then removed the loose magazine and box of cartridges from the other.

As she set them on the floor with the shotgun, Sharon said, “You like guns?”

“They’re okay.”

“She loves her little Smith & Wesson,” Dad said.

“I don’t love it. Jeez. It’s just a gun.” To Sharon, she said, “I do get a kick out of shooting it, though. I think that’s a lot of fun. I really like shooting—as long as I don’t have to shoot some sort of big old cannon. It sort of hurts to shoot the big stuff.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean.” She smiled. “I’ve got a Parker-Hale .300 Winchester magnum at home. Every time I fire it I end up with a big ugly bruise on my shoulder.”

“Why do you fire it, then?”

“I like it.”

“The power,” Dad said.

“That’s it.”

“I knew there was something I liked about you,” he told her.

She let out a gruff laugh. “Glad there’s something, Jack.”

“Maybe a few things.”

“My goodness.”

“You guys,” Jody said, and surprised herself by yawning.

“Someone’s sleepy,” Sharon said.

“Yeah. I’m gonna stretch out.” She lay down on her back and raised her knees slightly to allow her legs to fit on the seat. Her feet went nicely into the space underneath the tilted rifle case and pressed against the door.

“That looks comfy,” Sharon said.

“It is.”

Dad glanced back.

“Jeez, Dad, watch where you’re driving.”

“Okay. Sleep tight, sweetheart.”

Sharon’s hand appeared above the seatback and waved. It was a very dainty wave, hand open, closed fingers dipping downward a few times. The way a shy little girl might wave goodnight or goodbye.

Chapter Twenty-five

Jody opened her eyes, found herself on the back seat of the car, wondered for a moment where she was going, then remembered about Andy’s disappearance. Though she still felt groggy, she struggled to sit up.

Dad was behind the wheel. Sharon sat in the passenger seat, looking out the windows. From the radio came the quiet sound of Garth Brooks singing “The Dance.”

There wasn’t much traffic on the freeway. They seemed to be in a desert area, a few buildings off to the sides, but not many. This certainly wasn’t the outskirts of a city, but it didn’t look completely desolate, either.

“Where are we?”

“Coming up on Cabazon,” Dad said.

“Really?”

“You were out for a long time.”

Sharon said, “We were just talking about whether to wake you up. You wouldn’t want to miss the dinosaurs.”

Sharon was right; she would’ve hated to be asleep when they drove past the dinosaurs. “Oh, they’re cool,” she said.

“Have you ever stopped at them?”

“Yeah. A couple of times. We went into one of them.”

“You can go inside?” Sharon sounded surprised.

“Yeah. I don’t know if you still can. Didn’t they shut it down, Dad?”

“I think so. Seems to me there’d been some vandalism.”

“But we got in once, maybe about five or six years ago. There was a little souvenir shop right in the stomach of the apatosaurus. You could buy dinosaur coloring books, and rocks, and stuff. It was pretty junky, actually, and the guy who ran it was sort of funny.”

“It sounds neat, though,” Sharon said.

“Yeah, it was. You know,
knowing
you were way up high inside this gigantic monster.”

“There they are,” Dad said.

Off to the left, not far beyond the westbound lanes of the freeway, the two towering concrete creatures stood brightly lit against the night. They looked as if they might have wandered out of the desert and halted in shocked amazement to find themselves confronted by Interstate 10. The apatosaurus with its humped back and long neck looked gentle and perplexed. Maybe it wanted to turn around and hurry back into the wilds. The Tyrannosaurus rex, huge teeth bared, looked savage—looked ready to head for the freeway and tangle with the big rigs.

“Awesome,” Sharon muttered. “I remember how really weird it seemed, the first time I saw them. I couldn’t believe my eyes.”

“They look like they belong in a place like this,” Dad said.

“Yeah,” Jody said. “But like they’re out of place, too. Like they’re surprised to find themselves here.” She turned her head and watched the creatures shrink into the distance.

She realized that Andy must’ve come by here in the car with his uncle. Had he noticed the dinosaurs?

He could hardly miss them, she thought.

Being a guy, he was probably
into
dinosaurs and stuff like that.

Maybe they outgrow it, though, by the time they hit twelve.

She tried to remember if she’d seen any dinosaur models or pictures or books in his bedroom last night.

But when she thought about Andy’s bedroom, she could only see the door creeping open and the guy sneaking in, feel how the baseball bat had landed solid, see the awful way it had caved in the top of his head, see him sprawled on the floor wearing somebody else’s butt and legs, watch Andy barf down on him from the bed.

God, Andy, where are you?

Just a few hours ago, he’d been right here. Right where we are now, she thought. Except maybe in a different lane.

Unless Willy’s lying about everything.

But that doesn’t make sense, does it? The guy is a doofus, but he’s not one of the killers.

What makes sense, she told herself, is that Andy couldn’t stand him and used the first chance he found to escape.

Unless the killers got him. Followed their car until it stopped, followed Andy into the john
...

That didn’t seem very likely. Why would they waste time tailing the car for like a hundred and fifty miles, then wait for it to stop at a gas station and then make off with Andy when he went to the men’s room? That’d be ridiculous.

Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen that way.

It didn’t, Jody told herself. Andy saw his chance to ditch Uncle Willy, and he took it.

“How far are we from Indio?” she asked.

“Maybe thirty-five, forty miles,” Dad said. “We’ll be there in half an hour or so.”

“I sure hope Andy’s okay.”

Sharon looked over her shoulder at Jody. “He’s probably turned up already.”

“I don’t think he’ll get found unless he wants to be.”

“I wouldn’t count on that,” Dad told her.

Jody remembered how Andy had tricked and outmaneuvered the killers last night while she’d been trying to get the old woman to open her door. “He’s pretty sharp for a little kid.”

That old woman is dead. She got killed because she let us into her house. If I hadn’t gone to her door ...

“Well,” Dad said, “if Andy’s trying to get back to L.A., he can’t just lay low and hide. If he tries to thumb a ride, there’s every likelihood he’ll be spotted by the Highway Patrol or the local cops. He won’t last long.”

“What happens if they
do
find him? Will he still have to go and live with his jerky uncle?”

“I don’t know, honey. The way it looks, his jerky uncle might want nothing more to do with him. But that remains to be seen. Once he’s had some time to consider how his wife is likely to react, he might change his tune.”

“1 hope he
doesn’t
want Andy.”

“Well, there’s no point in worrying about it. Let’s just worry about finding him, okay?”

“Where do you think we might find him?” Sharon asked her. “After what the two of you went through, you must have a fairly good idea about how he reacts to things.”

“I guess so. Let me think for a minute.”

Jody settled back against her seat, rested her hands atop her thighs, and stared forward. She pictured herself in Andy’s place, sitting next to Wilson Spaulding as he steers his car into a filling station. Willy climbs out of the car. She waits until he sticks the gasoline nozzle into the tank. Then she opens her door and says, “I’ve gotta use the john, okay?” He says something like, “Go ahead, but make it snappy.” So then she walks fast to the restroom.

Did Willy say it was on the side of the gas station? Or in the rear? Whichever, she would go to it. But not go in. After making sure that no one was watching her, she would bolt.

Bolt where?

That would depend on what was around.

Maybe you run away from the gas station, run across the street, drop down and hide in a ditch or duck behind something or keep running until you’re a few blocks away.

Or maybe there’s a truck, something like that, stopped at the gas station. And you can sneak aboard and hide when nobody is watching. And it drives away with you.

That’d be the best thing. Especially if it happened to be going in the right direction. How would you know where it’s heading, though? You stow away on a truck, no telling where you might end up.

“He might’ve just run for it,” Jody said. “I don’t think he’d be dumb enough to stow away on a truck, though. He wouldn’t know where it might be going.”

“What about asking someone for a ride?” Sharon asked.

“He wouldn’t. Not at the gas station, anyway. He’s a kid. People are gonna wonder why he isn’t with an adult, so he’d be afraid they might turn him over to his uncle.” •

“What about thumbing a ride later, once he’s clear of the station?”

Would he try that? Jody wondered.
Would I?

“I guess it’d depend,” she said. “Normally, I bet he wouldn’t. I mean, I
know
Evelyn would never try to hitch a ride in a million years. We used to talk about stuff like that, and she thought anyone who hitchhiked was an idiot just begging to get raped and murdered. She must’ve gotten that from her parents. So that’d mean Andy got the same sort of lectures, so you wouldn’t think he’d try hitching a ride. But on the other hand ... His whole family’s dead and he’s out in the middle of nowhere trying to get away from his creepy uncle. I guess maybe he might try
anything.
He might not even care how dangerous it is, you know?”

“Well,” Dad said, “assuming he doesn’t want to take up permanent residence in Indio, he’s either got to find himself a ride, or start walking.”

“If he decided to walk,” Sharon said, “he’s probably already been picked up by the cops.”

“God, I hope so,” Jody muttered.

“Do you have any idea how much money he’s got?” Sharon asked.

“On him?”

“Yeah.”

“Jeez, I don’t know. None.”

“He has twenty,” Dad said.

“He does?” Jody asked.

“I sort of slipped it to him. It didn’t seem like a good idea to let him go off without any cash.”

“So he has the means to pay for a ride,” Sharon said.

“Afraid so. Twenty won’t get him far in a taxi, though. And any cops with half an ounce of sense would’ve checked out the bus station first thing. If there is one. If any buses are running. Wouldn’t be a bad thing if he
did
get onto a bus. At least he’d be fairly safe as long as he stays on board.”

“Andy wouldn’t even know how to find a bus station,” Jody pointed out. “Not unless he asked someone. I don’t think he would go around and ask anyone anything. He’d be afraid of getting caught.”

“With twenty bucks,” Sharon said, “he could bribe someone to give him a lift.”

“That wouldn’t be much different from hitchhiking,” Dad pointed out.

“It’s a little different,” Jody said. “I can see him trying something like that. It’s still awfully dangerous, but it’s not the same. It’s like paying your own way, you know? Instead of begging. He wouldn’t try that at the gas station, though. He’d want to get away from there. I think.” In the silence that followed her words, a new thought occurred to her. She grimaced. “What if he
did
get a ride? He could be back in L.A. right now.”