No Man's Land (12 page)

Corso pulled himself out from beneath Driver’s arm. “Guy’s a
stone killer, man. He snuffs out lives the way other people change
their socks.”

Driver nodded his agreement. “Prison breaks doth make strange
bedfellows indeed,” he said. He reached for Corso again, but Corso
stepped away.

“The guy I used to know didn’t stand around and let some
maniac do his killing for him,” Corso said. “The guy I wrote a
book about had a sense of honor, a sense of pride. He was a good man
caught in a bad situation. He—”

And then the barrel of the automatic was jammed hard against his
lower jaw, forcing the words to die in his mouth. Driver had his nose
about an inch from Corso’s. “That guy saw the reflections,”
Driver whispered. “Saw the light from the reflections.”

Something in his own words seemed to calm him. “You live in
front of a camera twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Never
seeing anybody else. Never talking to anybody else. Having people
watch you brush your teeth, watch you take a shit . . .”

Driver’s breathing had gone shallow. His eyes held a gleam Corso
had never seen before. “You either see the convergence or you die
there on the tile.”

“The convergence?”

“I don’t expect you to understand.”

“Does Cutter see the convergence?”

“Only thing Kehoe and I have in common is the fact that neither
of us is going back inside alive.”

The sound of approaching feet stopped him. A moment passed before
Kehoe stepped around the corner. “Got us a beater pickup, camper
and all,” he announced. “I cleaned up after myself. Put the
geezer who owns it in the back. That way we won’t have anybody
looking for the truck right away.”

Kehoe turned his feral eyes Corso’s way. “What about this
faggot?” he asked. “Way I see it, we got no need for this
motherfucker anymore.”

“I need him,” Driver said quickly. “I got something I need
to do, and I need him to tell the story.”

Kehoe thought it over. “What’s this thing you got about
tellin’ your story, Captainman?” he asked. “You thinkin’ you
some kind of hero people wanna read about?”

“Everybody wants to tell their story,” Driver said.

“Not me,” said Kehoe. “Other folks wanna talk about me when
I’m gone . . .” He waved a hand. “Fuck it. Let ’em talk all
they want.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Driver said.

Corso started to move. Kehoe stopped him dead with a hand on his
chest. Corso looked down. The hand was so big it looked like it must
have belonged to a much larger man “For now you comin’ along,”
Kehoe said. “You twitch . . . you fart . . . you do anything to
make me nervous”—he hesitated for effect—“and your ass is
dead. You understand me? Story or no story. Captainman or no
Captainman. You do anything but what we tell you and you’re dead.”

The overhead lights hissed. Corso nodded his understanding. Kehoe
turned and left. Corso followed along, with Driver bringing up the
rear.

Beater
was the right word for the pickup. An old Chevy from
the early seventies. All the hubcaps gone. Once blue paint had
oxidized to a dull satiny patina. Big old cab-over-camper. A caveman
camper, its friendly Neanderthal logo looking down in horror at the
trio standing at its back door.

Driver clapped Corso on the shoulder. “Got a driver’s license,
Frank?”

Corso said he did.

“Nice and easy then.”

Morning flickered like a flame. A spark alone in the darkness,
then, as if it had lost courage, suddenly gone, before showing itself
again, as two and three and four, until the sparks became a
full-fledged fire and the outline of the San Cristobel Mountains
stood sentinel in the east, grinning wild and crazy like some jagged
jack-o’-lantern in the sky.

Corso squinted, reached up grabbed the mirror and pointed it
straight down. Nobody’d spoken for an hour. The interior of the
truck smelled of men and motor oil.

The glint of sunshine pulled him from his waking dream. Somewhere
in his mind’s eye, he’d been riding in his father’s battered
Chevy pickup, rolling along Route 74 on a hot summer’s day with the
windows down and the thick air blowing around the cab like an
overheated hurricane. He’d been watching his farther’s hands on
the steering wheel. The hands . . . broken and twisted by the North
Koreans until they looked like ancient roots, like his real hands had
somehow been left behind in that POW camp, buried in the same cold
grave as whatever humanity and kindness he might once have posessed.
A single tear rolled down Corso’s cheek, He wiped it away with his
sleeve and glanced to his right, where Driver and Kehoe slept. No
Man’s Land The sights and sounds of freedom had mesmerized Driver
and Kehoe, reducing them to a state of slack-jawed awe as they’d
rolled west across the desert in the gathering light. The sun at
their backs and the movement of Corso’s hand seemed to stir them
from their stupor.

“Where the hell are we anyway?” Kehoe asked.

“About fifty miles east of Phoenix,” Corso answered. Driver
stretched. “What’s the gas situation?”

“Just over a quarter of a tank.”

“I’m hungry as hell,” Kehoe said.

Driver reached over the seat back, tapping Corso on the ear with
the barrel of the automatic. “How much money have you got?”

Corso thought it over. “Not more than a couple of bucks,” he
said. “I’ve got a bunch of plastic, though.”

Kehoe rolled his neck. “Good. Let’s stop and get us some—”

“No plastic,” Driver interrupted. “We start using plastic,
they’ll run us down in a heartbeat. We need to do business in
cash.”

“Which we ain’t got,” Kehoe added.

“Then I guess we better get some,” Driver said.

“Whatta you got in mind?” Kehoe asked.

Driver considered the matter for a minute. “As I see it, the two
things we need most are guns and money. For where we’re going,
those two can’t be beat.”

“
Send lawyers guns and money.”
Kehoe sang the tune.
“
The
shit has hit the fan.”

“And where are we going?” Corso inquired.

“You mean geographically or philosophically?” Driver asked.

“I’ll settle for either.”

“East and straight to hell.” He looked at Kehoe. “What about
you? You going some place in particular?”

Took Kehoe a minute. “Ain’t thought about it. Only thing I
made my mind up about was I didn’t want to die inside. Just as soon
die like a bitch in the road as end up in one of them new wood boxes
they put ’em in.” His eyes glazed over for a moment. He seemed to
be staring at something far over the horizon. “Ain’t nobody
waitin for me or nothin’. Hell, I been down a long time.

’Cept for nine months I was out in eighty-four, I been inside
for the better part of twenty-five years. Anybody give a shit about
me probably dead by now.” He looked from Corso to Driver. “ I
ain’t headed anywhere in particular. I just wanna make a hell of a
lotta noise on the way out.”

“A noble calling,” Driver said. And then they went silent
again.

A series of crumbled buttes showed themselves in the brightening
sky. The two-lane road lapped out in front of the truck for as far as
the eye could see. The terrain would never make
Sunset
magazine.
No Monument Valley vistas. No regal saguaro cactus pointing the way
to heaven
.
No tiny desert flowers waiting for morning to show
their delicate petals. No. This was no-man’s-land. The land God
never got around to finishing, or maybe the land he’d used up
before moving on to greener pastures. Broken land, falling in upon
itself in a series of gulches and gullies, separated by discarded
appliances, burnt-out cars and pathetic patches of trash-littered
mesquite.

A tandem semi came hurtling at them through the semidarkness,
lights dimmed, engine roared, fracturing the air like an eastbound
freight, its blast sending the old truck rocking on its springs,
rendering its occupants short of breath and speechless.

“Fucker,” Kehoe spit.

Quarter mile ahead, a road sign announced FLINT . . . 1 MILE.

“Stop. We can throw whatever cash you’ve got in the gas tank,”
Driver said. “Maybe use the facilities.”

“I surely need to drain the vein,” Kehoe announced. The sign
read MAD MIKE’S CAFE, HOME OF THE THUNDERBIRD BURGER, a one-story
shack added on to so many times it looked like a lumber truck had
been involved in a pileup, and this was the result. An eye-level
window ran the length of the building. Stools along the counter.
Booths along the front wall. Half a dozen gas pumps outside. Chevron.
One regular, one high-test, four diesel. Three cars and a pickup were
nosed into the weeds hard against the building. Another five or six
big rigs were spread out across the expanse of gravel to the north of
the café. Looked like most of them were cooped up for the night.

Corso nosed the pickup close to the regular pump. Two dollars and
ten cents a gallon. Corso got out and frisked himself. Came up with
six dollars and fifteen cents in cash. Driver and Kehoe stepped out
onto the gravel, where they stretched and groaned and looked around,
while Corso tried to get the pump to work.

“Be back,” Kehoe announced.

Kehoe was most of the way to the front door when Corso finally
caught sight of the faded little card taped to the pump.

“We’ve got to pay first,” Corso said.

Driver walked to the far side of the truck, where he checked the
safety and transferred the automatic from his pants pocket to the
front of his belt, which he tightened a couple of notches before
patting his shirt down over the front of himself.

“Nobody trusts nobody anymore,” Driver lamented. Melanie
Harris used the back of her hand to hide a yawn. Right at the end,
her ears popped, causing her to wonder how long they’d been stopped
up and whether she’d missed anything important as a result.

Marty Wells ran one hand through his thinning hair while patting
Melanie’s shoulder with the other. “Looks like the party’s
over,” he said.

As usual, Marty was the master of the obvious. The prison yard was
nearly devoid of life. Only the firefighters remained, standing vigil
over the steaming pile of smoke and refuse that had once masqueraded
as the Louis Carver Administration Building. The ranks of once-naked
cons had been stuffed into bright orange coveralls and returned to
their cells, a few kicking and screaming, but mostly under their own
power, escorted back inside by pairs of burly Arizona State Patrol
officers. The hostages had first been separated from the eighteen or
so cons who were found to be secreted among their number. After that,
a consensus of prison officials, fellow workers and loved ones had
been required for release. Wasn’t long before the sounds of tearful
reunions rose in the predawn atmosphere. The media rumor mill was
reporting prisoner casualties at somewhere in the low one hundreds
and National Guard casualties as zero, but nothing official had been
released and probably wouldn’t be until midafternoon.

“I’m headed for the motel,” Marty said, “Nothing going on
here.”

“Been a long time since I stayed up all night,” Melanie
offered.

“We got some great footage.”

“Nothing everybody else hasn’t got.”

“Are you forgetting the other?”

A shiver ran through her.

“I didn’t tell you, did I?”

“What’s that?”

“Networks’ not gonna wait till Wednesday evening. They’re
gonna run it as a special edition tonight.”

She looked wan and haggard. He made a mental note to have a word
with makeup and wardrobe, then did what he always did at times such
as this: tried to cheer her up. She saw it coming and looked away.

“Got some new material on the way,” he said.

“Oh yeah?”

“Same source as the other.”

“Something a little less morbid, I hope.”

“Everything they’ve got on this Driver guy.”

She stifled another yawn. “I don’t catch a few winks I’m
gonna look like the Bride of Frankenstein tomorrow,” she said. He
made it a point not to agree. “See you later,” he said. She stood
in the fresh light and watched him walk away, wondering how he
managed to keep his optimism. How he managed to keep from drowning in
the drek.

When no lightbulbs came on, she grabbed the handle and stepped up
into her trailer.

Six minutes before nine on a bright desert morning. Parked in a
self-service car wash diagonally across the street from Crosshairs
Guns and Ammo. FINEST INDOOR SHOOTING FACILITY IN THE GREATER PHOENIX
AREA the sign proclaimed. Driver was using the wand to spray water on
the windshield while they waited for Kehoe to return from casing the
place.

“Just so we’re clear, Frank. You do anything to mess this up
and I’ll put one in your spine,” Driver said.

“I don’t want any part of this,” Corso insisted.

“Don’t fuck it up.”

“Come on, man.”

“Did you hear me?”

Corso was working his way up to another plea when Kehoe came
skipping back across the street. “Two of them,” Kehoe announced.
“They came together. Parked out back by the loading dock. Both of
them packing heat on their sides.”

“One of them probably runs the range while the other works out
front,” Driver theorized.

“Place got alarms up the ass,” Kehoe said. “Coupla big bells
on the outside of the building. Probably a silent too.”

“We’re going to have to be quick and dirty,” Driver said.
“In and out in three or four minutes tops.”

“With nobody left behind to be pushing buttons,” Kehoe added.

The words turned Corso’s stomach upside down, sending the scald
of bile to his mouth, causing his head to spin for a moment. He
braced himself on the fender of the truck and shook his head in an
attempt to clear his vision.

“She looks like she’s gonna be sick,” Kehoe said.

“You let me worry about him,” Driver said.