NIGHT CRUISING (33 page)

A huge truck bore down
next to Mark and honked as it passed.

Mark thought he might
have a chance with the truckers helping him. He'd have dozens of
pairs of eyes watching for the stolen rig. Someone would have to spot
it. You couldn't hide a vehicle as large as a goddamn semi-truck. Not
on the interstate highway system.

Every few minutes he'd
send out his message over the CB. The radio was supposed to get out
pretty good, with a long range. The antenna carried his voice as far
as three miles in all directions. He hoped to hear from someone
coming west who had seen the blue bobtail.

He picked up the mike,
depressed the button, began again to plead for help. At least this
way he was doing something more than driving blind. He prayed to God
it was going to do some good.

#

No matter what anyone
said to the contrary, time had a way of speeding up. Cruise pondered
the idea that he might be imagining everything, but discarded it
finally. Time really was moving him into the slipstream. As he
watched the white center lines in the highway they began to blur.
While he drove, holding onto the rig's steering wheel with both hands
now, cars zoomed past from the oncoming lanes until their headlights
turned into one long beam of light the way he'd seen them appear in
time-release photographs.

The engine shook and
roared so that he constantly bounced in the air-cushioned driver's
seat. He looked at the speedometer to see how fast he was going.
Fifty-five, is that all he was driving, fifty-five miles an hour? He
tapped the face of the speedometer with his forefinger to see if it
would change. No. It registered his speed accurately. Then it wasn't
the truck that was taking him speedily forward. It was time that must
be doing it, moving him so rapidly into the future that reality fell
behind in his wake.

It left him a little
short of breath. He never drank, never took drugs, but having tried
both when he was younger he knew that time telescoped the way it was
doing now. He wanted to believe that his perception was scrambled
from some other influence--a mental one?--but that notion did not
ring true when he tried it out.

Time. Speed. Moving him
toward what?

"I've got to
stop," he said aloud. Only then did he remember he had a witness
along. He turned to her and said again, "I've got to pull over
and stop."

She didn't say
anything.

He took the next exit
that loomed in the headlights. It led to a cross road and he turned
north, taking a ramp over the freeway. He had trouble going through
the gears. The truck jumped and leaped and spit like a bronco under
loose rein. He saw no other traffic on the road. He found a way to
slow the truck and pulled it over to the shoulder. He took it out of
gear and hit the button that released the hissing air brakes. He sat
still a moment. The white lines in the road had stopped moving past.
The world had slowed. He sighed with relief.

Think
, he told
himself. Hunted. They would know he had stolen the truck soon. Would
know what it looked like. What
he
looked like.

He turned in the seat.
All his bottled water was in the Chrysler, dammit. But he needed
water to shave the beard and mustache. Truckers must carry water. He
crawled onto the engine cover and searched the sleeper. In a deep
shelf on one end of the sleeper he began pulling out crumpled paper
grocery bags to glean their contents. One held two apples and an old
orange that was beginning to smell. Another contained a box of
crackers, a jar of peanut butter, a half loaf of crushed white bread.
He pulled out another. He found two cans of Dr Pepper and a quart of
mineral water. Ahhh.

From the other end of
the sleeper he drew his travel bag and rummaged in a side zipper
pocket for his razor and shaving foam. Holding the prizes to his
chest, he backed like a crab into the driver's seat.

"What are you
doing?" Molly asked.

"I'm shaving."

He rolled down the
window and angled the rectangular side mirror until he could see
himself in it. He found the switch on the dash for the inside lights
and hit it. The interior was flooded with a yellowish light. He
sprayed a handful of the shaving cream into the palm of his hand. He
paused before slapping it onto the hair of his face. He wouldn't know
himself once he did this. He'd be someone else, someone new.

They'd never recognize
him. He might even cut his long hair.

No. He couldn't do
that. That was going too far, asking too much. Where could he hide
the little knife if he cut his hair? Impossible.

He lathered his face,
grinning into the side mirror so that his teeth showed. Pulling a
long face, he took off the mustache first with careful strokes of the
razor. He cleaned the razor between swipes by pouring water from the
quart jug over it outside the window. There went his hair onto the
earth. His upper lip cooled in the night air. Naked. Naked now.
Almost.

He began on the beard.
He started at the top of his face, near his cheekbones, taking down
the hair from first one side and then the other. It was a long
process, delicate. He cut himself more than a few times unused as he
was to shaving. Holding out his chin, he worked diligently and as
carefully as he could to finish the job. As the skin of his face was
revealed, a new man emerged in the side mirror. It was a man with a
square, hardy face, sensitive lips even though it seemed to him the
upper lip was a little too full, but to offset it he had a strong
chin. The face in the mirror was a handsome man were it not for the
cold look of the eyes. They stared straight out upon the world
without the camouflaged face to disguise them. They were hard,
unrelenting, the eyes of a predator of the night. He thought he saw
the little man in the depths of his eyes gesturing to him, but he
dismissed that with a wave of his hand.

Cruise turned to face
his witness, to gauge her reaction. "What do You think?"

He saw her bite her
lower lip in contemplation. She didn't want to say. He didn't blame
her. He had seen the new naked person's face, and handsome as it was,
the cool green eyes could freeze a flowing river within its banks.

"Never mind,"
he said, putting away the shaving gear in the grocery bag and stowing
it on the sleeper bed behind him. He ran a hand over the smooth
cheeks and chin, trying not to smile. He knew it would scare her even
more if he were to give himself over to the urge.

After realigning the
side mirror, rolling the window tight, and flicking off the interior
lights, he sat with his hands on the wheel while the engine idled
like a chained beast. "Now let's see if I can get this rig
turned around so we can get back on the freeway. We'll get off for
good in New Mexico. It isn't far."

He talked to hear
himself speak. Did the words come out easier now he had shed the
facial hair? He thought that they did. He
sounded
cleaner.
Neater. Surer.

Would this change stop
time from speeding beyond his grasp? He didn't know yet. He hoped for
all things to fall into place the way they should.

Before grinding the
transmission into first gear he said to Molly, "I guess you're
stuck with me to the end. I'm going to need someone to see me through
it. I wouldn't want to be alone if they caught me."

He thought she might
have sighed in relief, but he couldn't be sure. By then he was
hauling on the big wheel to turn the rig around in a half circle that
would take them south again to the I-l0 entrance ramp.

The next miles were
covered in split seconds. A sign at the state border welcomed them to
New Mexico. The white center lines blurred. The oncoming cars made
one endless ribbon of colored light. The slipstream had him firmly in
tow.

During the next hundred
miles Cruise turned on the radio and found out the body of the truck
driver had been discovered at the Arizona truck stop. They knew he
drove off in the blue semi-cab, leaving the trailer behind. Even as
fast as he moved away from his pursuers, he knew they might catch
him. He had to flee the freeway, get off I-l0 completely.

At Deming he took l80
north. When he saw the sign for highway 6l east he turned again, no
true destination in mind except that of escape.

#

Mark Killany was twenty
miles west of Deming, New Mexico, when he got a break. He had just
broadcast his plea for help from the truckers for maybe the hundredth
time without effect when the CB static broke up and a voice said,
"Hey there, Killany, this is Gold Nugget. You talking about a
blue cab-over? Dark blue bobtail?"

'"That's right. It
could be an International. There's a man driving and my daughter is
his passenger--she's a hostage."

"I didn't get no
look at who was in the cab, but I saw a blue bobtail about fifty
miles back on Highway l80. I remember because not many trucks take
that route. I was surprised to see anyone and when I sent him a
hello, he didn't answer me. Must not have had his ears on."

"Highway l80?
Where's that?" Mark could hardly contain his excitement. Fifty
miles ahead somewhere, he thought.

"You catch it
outta Deming. It heads north. This blue rig, now, it ain't on l80 no
more."

"It isn't?"
Mark's spirits dropped down like a sack of wet laundry falling from a
high window. "Where is it then? You know?"

"I was passing it
just as it turned off l80 onto 6l. Hell, ain't no trucks take 6l. I
thought it was damn stupid at the time. I asked the guy, I asked him
where he was dead-heading, but like I say, he didn't have his ears
on, I guess."

"Where's 6l?"
Mark tried to get it all straight in his mind so he could follow the
directions. Take l80 north out of Deming, look for 6l.

"6l's a two-laner
this side of Bayard. It only goes east, but you gotta watch for it."

The trucker's voice was
fading, moving out of the antenna's range. "Okay, thanks a lot.
Listen, do me a favor and get on channel nine to tell the police,
will you? They want this guy almost as bad as I do."

"Check, Killany.
This is Gold Nugget signing off."

Fifty miles. The last
sign he saw for Deming said it was fourteen miles distant. That meant
6l had to be more than thirty miles on l80 north. Not so far. He was
close now and it was doing strange things to his heart. He had been
driving flat out for hundreds of miles, driving like a man on the way
to a fire. Or a preventable murder.

If he could just catch
up with them in time. If only he could save his baby.

If only time would stop
and allow him to reach her before she was taken away from him
forever.

#

Molly was swept along
with the tide of Cruise's rushing madness. The stories he told were
disjointed and pointless. They dropped off before reaching any
conclusion. There was a story about when he was a boy and something
about an incident with a lawn mower that ended before she could get
the sense of whatever meaning it held for Cruise. There was another
story about a fishing trip with his brothers that veered off into a
different tale about going hunting for deer in the Arkansas woods
when he was just twelve years old.

There were stories of
people he killed and robbed, nameless people he remembered only
because of the places they died. Memphis. Chicago. Seattle.
Jacksonville. Cincinnati. Austin. Sacramento. Little towns she'd
never heard of, colorful names of places that sounded like they
shouldn't exist within United States borders. Selah. Chewelsh.
Brillion. St. Johnsbury. Carizo Springs.

The people were
hitchhikers and kids on the run and store clerks and travelers with
car trouble and gas-station attendants and one was just a girl riding
a horse along a rural back road on an Alabama summer day.

Her head whirled with
the names and the people. How could she ever remember all this to
tell the police if she survived the trip with Cruise? She'd never
remember it all. There were too many places, too many people. Years
and years of madness and dying that left her astonished and trembling
with outrage. How could one man cause such destruction and loss of
human life? It was one long horror story that stretched the mind to
its limits of understanding. Her mind rebelled at the carnage left
along Cruise's trail. He might be the most dangerous man in the
entire country. Had she not been frightened before, she was now
petrified and speechless before his revelations.

He told her all these
secrets while driving steadily through the night. After he stopped
and shaved off the beard and mustache his stories came in a flood
told in a voice that chilled her to the very bone. Each new admission
scored her mind with bright new pathways of fear. She feared to move,
to speak, to break into his reverie and remind him she was there.

He not only looked like
a different man after shaving the beard and mustache, but he sounded
like a different man. He wasn't the same Cruise that offered her
Cokes and paid for her shower room in the truck stops. He wasn't the
Cruise who held her in the circle of his arms in the Mexican cemetery
as if she were a fragile bird with a broken wing. Ever since he had
heard on the radio reports that he was being hunted, he had become
more and more unstable. He was like a star flying out of orbit,
disintegrating into trailing fire as it sped through space. He was a
comet burning itself out as it slammed into the earth.

She despaired when the
stories faltered to a stop near Deming, New Mexico. He left the
interstate and took a smaller highway north. She had hoped he would
remain on I-l0 where a patrol car might spot them. The silence
unnerved her more than his admissions of murder for the next forty
miles. She cleared her throat a couple of times, wishing to question
him about where they were going, but she just couldn't get the words
out. If he was a burning comet, his fire could burn her to cinders at
any moment. She could say the wrong thing, move the wrong way, and
she knew her life hung by a slender filament.