Jeffery Deaver - Speaking In Tongues

“I was driving down sixty-six and this Mercedes cut me off, ran me off the road. Nearly killed me.” (This had happened to Sidney Poitier in In the Heat of the Night. More or less.) “Did it on purpose. The driver, I mean.”

“Don’t say.” The man yawned.

“Front end’s all screwed up now. And see what kind of bodywork I’ll need?”

Thank goodness, LeFevre thought. He’d never fixed the damage after he’d scraped the side of the car on a barricade when he’d dropped his mother off at Neiman Marcus in Tysons Corner last month.

The attendant looked at the car without a splinter of interest.

“So you want me to look at the front end?”

“No, I want the license number of that Mercedes. He came by here five, ten minutes ago. I was hoping he stopped here for gas.”

This had seemed like a good way to break the ice-asking for the license number. It made things official-as if the police were going to get involved. LeFevre believed this trick was definitely something that Sidney Poitier would do.

“Why’d he run you off the road?” the man asked abruptly.

Which brought LeFevre up cold.

“Well, I don’t know.” LeFevre shrugged. Then he asked, “You know which car I mean?” He remained respectful but asked this firmly. He’d decided not to be too polite. Sidney Poitier had glared at Rod Steiger quite a bit.

“Maybe.”

“So he stopped here for gas.”

“Nope.” The scrawny guy looked at the money. Then he shook his head; his slick grin gave LeFevre an unpleasant glimpse of bad teeth. “Fuck. Why’re you bullshittin’ me? You don’t want that tag number.”

“Um, I-”

“What you want is to find out where that sumvabitch lives. Am I right?”

“Well…”

“An’ I’ll tell you why you want that.”

“Why?”

“‘Cause he was drivin’ his big old Mercedes and he thunk t’himself,

Why, here’s a black man-only he was thinking the N-word-driving a little shit Jap car and I can cut him off ‘cause he don’t mean shit to me and he don’t got the balls to complain to nobody ‘bout it.” A faint laugh.

“And you don’t want no tag number for State Farm Insurance or the po-leece. Fuck. You wanna find him and you wanna beat the shiny crap outta him.”

So, end of story. Well, it was a nice try. LeFevre was about to put the money away and return to his car-before the man called some real-life Rod Steigers-when the attendant shook his head and said, “God bless you.”

“I’m sorry?”

“That frosts me, what he done. Truly does.”

“I’m sorry?” LeFevre repeated.

“I mean, I got friends’re black. Couple of ‘em. And we have a good time together and one of ‘em’s wife cooks for me and my girlfriend nearly every week.”

“Well, is that right?”

“Fuck, yeah, that’s right.” The twenties were suddenly in the man’s stained fingers. “I say, more power to you. Find him and wail on him all you want. I know that sumvabitch.”

“The man in the Mercedes?”

“Yeah.”

“Dr. Hanson, right?”

“I don’t know his name. But I seen him off and on for a spell. He comes and goes. Never stops here-probably thinks my gas ain’t good enough-but I seen him. Pisses me off royal, people like him. Moving everybody down the mountain.”

“What do you mean, ‘moving down the mountain’?” Sidney Poitier asked politely, smiling now and giving the man plenty of thinking room.

“See, what happened was, when folk settled here they moved to the top of the Ridge. Naturally, where else? That’s the best part. But they couldn’t keep the land, most of ‘em. Money troubles, you know. Taxes. So they kept selling to the government for the park or to rich folks wanted a weekend place, and families kept moving down the mountain, Now, most everybody’s in the valley-most of the honest folk, I mean. Pretty soon there won’t be no mountains left ‘cept for the rich pricks and the government. ‘S what my dad says. Makes sense to me.”

“Where’s his place?”

The skinny young man nodded toward one narrow road.

“That’s the way he goes but I don’t know where exactly his house is. Only place I know of up there’s the hospital. Been for sale for years. He probably bought it and’s gonna put a big fancy house on the land.”

“What hospital?”

“Loony bin. Closed a while ago.”

“How far is it?”

“Five miles, give’r take, At the end of Palmer Road yonder.” He pointed. “Now, you ain’t going to kill him, are you? I’d have some problems with that.”

“No. I really do just want to talk.”

“Uh-huh. Uh-huh.” The man squinted then offered his bad-tooth grin again. “You know, you remind me of that actor.”

“I do?”

“Yeah. He’s a good one. Don’t exactly look like him but you sorta hold yourself the same. What’s his name? What’s his name?”

LeFevre, grinning himself, answered his question.

The man blinked and shook his head. “Who the hell’s Sidney Poitier?”

LeFevre said, “Maybe he was before your time.”

“What’s that guy’s name? I can picture him… Kicked the shit out of some ninjas in this movie with Sean Connery. Wait! Snipes… Wesley Snipes. That’s it. That man can act.”

LeFevre walked to the edge of the tarmac. The smell of gasoline mixed with the scent of spring growth and clayish earth. Palmer Road vanished into a dark shaft of pine and hemlock, winding up into the mountains.

The young attendant stuffed a strand of slick hair up under his hat, “You stay away from that hospital. I wouldn’t go there for any money. Hear stories about it. People sometimes get attacked. By wild dogs or something.”

Or something?

“Kids find bloody bones sometimes. Probably deer or boar but maybe not.”

LeFevre’s anger was turning to concern. Megan, what’ve you gotten yourself into? “I just follow that road?”

“Right. Five miles, I’d guess. Keeps to the high ground. Then circles back on itself like a snake.”

“A snake,” LeFevre said, absently staring into the murky forest. Thinking of the quote from Dante’s Divine Comedy:

Halfway through life's journey I came to myself in a dark wood, where the straight way was lost.

Recalling the story too: the author’s guided tour of hell.

“Listen,” the attendant said, startling him, “you stop on your way back, okay? Let me know what happens.”

LeFevre nodded and shook the man’s oily hand. He climbed into his car and sped along Palmer Road. In an instant, civilization vanished behind him and the world became black bark, shadows and the waving arms of tattered boughs.

The things we do for love, LeFevre thought. The things we do for love.

Aaron Matthews pulled the Mercedes into a grove of frees beside the asphalt and climbed out, looking back’ over Palmer Road.

No sign of the white car.

He was sure he’d tricked the boy-friend just fine when he’d sped off the highway beside the truck. The kid was probably in West Virginia by now and even if he managed to figure out which exit they’d taken and backtracked he’d have no way of knowing which way Matthews had gone into the maze of back roads here. Although Matthews had been coming to the deserted hospital for the past year, ever since he’d brought his son here, he’d made a point of never stopping for gas or food at the service station or grocery store near the exit ramp off I-66. He was sure the local hicks knew nothing about him.

He climbed back in the car and continued on to the Blue Ridge Mental Health Facility.

Just past the cleft where the road passed between two steep vine-covered hills, the ground opened into the shallow bowl of a valley. Through a picket line of scab by trees a sprawl of low, decrepit buildings was visible.