Paul Kavanagh - Not Comin' Home to You

Cops. There they sat, filling their car with gas and theirselves with coffee, while he drove right on by them. And they would never know it.

There was another station on the other side of town. It was closed, but he had already decided that a station closed for the night was safer. There were several cars parked in back to the left of the station itself, a little building elaborately constructed to resemble a log cabin. He pulled the wagon in line with the others, and when he turned off the ignition Betty opened her eyes.

“According to the radio,” he told her, “you’re dead.” When she wrinkled her forehead at him he explained. “It was on the news. Said they found four bodies at your house, so unless somebody crawled in and died there for the pure hell of it, somebody made a mistake. Found out there were four in the family and added up two and two and look what they got.” He leaned over and kissed her. “You look pretty healthy for a dead girl,” he said.

“Don’t say that.”

“About looking healthy?”

“About the other. I don’t want to think about it.” She stretched her arms over her head. “Where are we?”

“Nowhere special. A gas station. It’s closed, but I mean to open it up.”

“What if there’s a burglar alarm?”

“In the middle of the country?” He opened his door. “You wait here. They maybe locked the pumps, but they maybe left the key around. I’ll have a look.”

The pumps were locked, as he’d half-expected. People just didn’t trust their fellow man nowadays. He broke a pane of glass in the door of the simulated log cabin, reached through and turned the lock. He searched carefully, but if there were any keys for the pumps he couldn’t find them. On a board near the door there were a few sets of car keys. He guessed they probably belonged to the other cars parked outside and thought of switching vehicles. It stood to reason, though, that those cars had been brought in for repair, and there was every likelihood that they hadn’t been worked on yet. With his luck he would pick one with no brakes or with an engine that would die on him after thirty or forty miles.

He rang up “No Sale” on the cash register. The last man to leave had taken all the bills, but he helped himself to change for the vending machines. He went back to the car with an armload of sandwiches, several packages of crackers, and two styrofoam containers of coffee.

“Breakfast,” he said. “Compliments of the management.”

“I don’t know if I’m hungry.”

“And I don’t know when we can stop again. You better eat.”

“All right. Aren’t you going to eat anything?”

“I had a pack of crackers. And I’ll have some coffee.”

He went back to the station and scooped the car keys off the board. He turned the ignition switch of each in turn and watched the gas gauges. Two of the cars had around half a tank each. He got a red plastic bucket from the station and rummaged around trying to find a length of hose. There was a piece of plastic tubing but it was much too short. Eventually he got a hacksaw from the work area and cut off a few yards of the air hose. Anybody who wanted to fill his tires was in for a disappointment. He siphoned gas from the two cars. The air hose had a small diameter and the process was a slow one. He would fill the bucket, pour it into the wagon’s tank, then go back and siphon some more. Each time he was unable to avoid getting a mouthful of gasoline. The taste was awful, and there was a sore spot on his lower gum that it irritated.

While he worked she sat in the car with the door closed so that the dome light would not shine. There was very little traffic on the highway. He looked up at one point to see a police car pass, probably the one he had seen at the other station. It never even slowed down.

After he had poured a final bucket of gas into the wagon, he got a can of Coke to rinse the gasoline taste out of his mouth. He kept getting a repeat of the taste, though. He went to the men’s room and was sick, then drank the rest of the Coke to settle his stomach. He went back to the car just as Betty left it to use the ladies’ room. While he waited for her he loaded the gun. He started to return it to the glove compartment, remembered the police car, flashed a scene of being stopped for speeding or running a light or just because the cops were bored and had nothing better to do. He saw himself agreeing to produce the license and registration, and reaching over to unlock the glove compartment, and coming up with neither the license nor the registration but with the gun, his body shielding it from the cop, and then spinning around quickly, snapping shots through the open window—

Then he began to flash all the ways it could go wrong. Better to keep the gun closer to hand. He jammed it down between the seat and the seat back and practiced reaching for it. It was in just the right place, but he kept practicing the move so that he would be familiar with it when he had to be.

She came back, got into the car beside him. She had washed her hands and face but she looked drawn, exhausted. She wanted to know more about the newscast. He went over it again as he got the car started and pulled back onto the highway.

“You can hear it yourself in a few minutes,” he said. “We missed the two-thirty news but they’ll have it again at three o’clock.”

“I didn’t know it was so late.”

“You been sleeping.”

“You must be exhausted yourself.”

“I’m all right.”

At Big Springs he turned onto Route 138 and drove southwest. The three o’clock news came on just as they crossed the Colorado line. The announcer was still calling the family Reinhart, but they had the number of victims right this time. Betty was mentioned by name, with the information that she was missing and police theorized that she had been abducted as a hostage by the killer or killers.

“‘Killer or killers,’” he said. “Told you they’d guess you were a hostage. You sure you don’t want to make an escape from the killer or killers?”

She giggled, and he asked her what was so funny. “The way you said that,” she said.

“Well?”

“I always want to be with you,” she said.

She dozed off again, woke up when he pulled off the road to consult a Colorado road map he’d picked up at the station, then slipped back into sleep once the car was moving again. He decided to keep on following the Platte until he came to something called Brush, then head straight on south. Otherwise he’d be driving straight into Denver and he wanted to stay away from big cities. They always made him uncomfortable anyway, and now he felt their chances would be better in open country and small towns.

He started to wonder, for the first time since he had killed the man and woman in the tourist cabin, as to their ultimate destination. She had mentioned Mexico again, back at the gas station, and he wondered if that was a good idea. It seemed to him that people on the run always made for the border, one border or another, and that the police had undoubtedly figured out this particular pattern and took special pains to guard border areas. It didn’t seem likely that they could patrol an entire border effectively. They would watch the roads, of course, but anyone going cross-country could likely get through. In movies set behind the Iron Curtain they always showed borders protected with miles of barbed wire and packs of guard dogs. A border of that sort would be difficult to cross, but he couldn’t believe they had any comparable system of fortification between the United States and Mexico. There was a river at the border, he seemed to remember, but he also seemed to remember that the river did not form the entire boundary. They could ditch the car, cut through fields or desert or whatever they had down there, and walk right on into Mexico.