Kenneth Calhoun - Black Moon

He fluttered his fingers, as if to say, hand it over.

“License?” Jordan said.

“Let’s go,” the cop said. The fingers fluttered more impatiently.

Jordan retrieved his wallet from his back pocket and handed over the card. The officer shuffled back to his car without leaning in and inspecting the interior, without even seeing Chase imploding in the passenger seat. Jordan watched him in the rearview, then turned to Chase. “See? He’s just writing a ticket.”

Chase dared a glance over his shoulder. He could see the policeman’s form behind the windshield. Sitting in shadow, head bowed, he did seem to be writing, or reading. Maybe staring into a laptop as it crunched Jordan’s specifics.

“Don’t stare,” Jordan said, studying Chase out of the corner of his eye. “If he sees you, he’s going to want to search the car. You look guilty as fuck.”

“We are,” Chase said. “We are guilty as fuck.”

“I’m going to say you’re sick, you’re dying, and I’m trying to get you to the hospital. That’s why I was driving so fast.”

“Don’t say that. What if he decides to give us an escort?”

Jordan, still staring into the mirror, said, “You watch too much TV.”

They waited. A truck blasted by, then the occasional car, moving past with a flash of color and glare, a whoosh of air. They heard the piping call of red-winged blackbirds from the roadside grass, the whistle of wind passing over the bristled expanse. A hawk circled overhead and its shadow slid over the road.

“If he goes for the trunk, we have to distract him,” Jordan said. “You have to fall down and scream like you’re dying. Grab your side like you’re having an appendicitis or something.”

“Seriously?” Chase said.

“You have a better idea?”

Chase didn’t. The cop would have to be very motivated to find the stash, which was under the floor of the trunk in the spare wheel well. A good portion of the pharmacy was stuffed there, in their signature trash bags, both black and white. Anyone searching would first have to remove the tent, clothes, a camping stove, and some boxes of canned goods and pouches of dehydrated trail food. They had tossed in some blankets and comforters, along with Chase’s sleeping bag and some clothes, which formed yet another layer of hassle for anyone digging around.

None of this was of much comfort to Chase. There must be some kind of search going on for Jordan back home. This would come up on the cop’s dashboard computer. Dots were being connected, he sensed. He closed his eyes and waited to be ordered out of the car at gunpoint.

But the order did not come. After fifteen minutes of nothing, Jordan said, “What’s he fucking doing back there?”

Chase took a quick look. “He’s still just sitting there.”

“What the hell?”

They waited another ten minutes. When the officer failed to reappear at the window, Jordan opened the door and stepped out of the car.

Chase shook his head. “Dude. No.”

“Just wait here.” Jordan left the car door open, as if he might have to make a quick escape.

Oh, fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

Chase watched his friend raise his hands and slowly approach the cruiser. He heard him say, “Officer? Is everything okay?”

Jordan approached the driver’s-side window and peered in. Chase saw him wave his hand in front of the window, then give a one-knuckle knock. He bent over and practically pressed his face into the glass before stepping back and scanning up and down the stretch of highway. When he saw Chase looking, he shrugged and came back to the car. He slid into the driver’s seat.

“What’d he say?” Chase asked.

“He didn’t say anything. He just sat there.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s just sitting there, with my license in his hand.”

“Is he dead or what?”

“No, he’s moving. A little. Like when I knocked, he kind of flinched. I can’t see if his eyes are open because he has sunglasses on.”

“Well, fuck, what do we do?”

Jordan sat in silence for minute. Then he started the car. “Let’s go.”

“We can’t just go.”

“What else are we supposed to do, just sit here all day?”

“What about your license?”

“I don’t need it anymore. No one does.”

Jordan pulled away slowly. Both of them watched for a reaction from the patrol car, but there was none as it receded behind them. Jordan picked up speed and soon they were over the grade. The road shimmered with fumes behind them. There was no pursuit. They kept going.

“I bet he hasn’t slept in days,” Jordan finally said.

MAYBE there was something to this insomnia shit, Chase thought as they pushed on through Utah, the vast salt lake like a massive spill of light to their left. He couldn’t explain the behavior of the patrolman. “Maybe he got a call with some bad news,” Chase proposed, miles later. “Like his whole family was killed in a crash or something.”

“Nope. He wouldn’t just sit there,” Jordan countered. “I’m telling you, he’s gone sleepless and his brain is fried.”

It was the second inexplicable thing Chase had witnessed in twenty-four hours. During the drugstore heist, the cops had behaved in a more predictable manner, doing exactly what Jordan had hoped they would do. After Jordan had deliberately triggered the alarm by opening the loading dock door, the police showed up like good little monkeys to deactivate it and check the store for any signs of a break-in. Chase and Jordan watched them from across the lot, where they sat in the car, parked among the junked wrecks that formed a ring of automotive tragedy around the body shop. Through the dark storefront windows they could see the firefly bobbing of flashlights, the occasional sweep of beam, as the cops searched the premises.

Mel, the owner, played his part too. Failing to rise from his deathlike way of sleeping and drive to the store to reset the alarm. Chase couldn’t blame him. It was three in the morning, after all. The cops pulled out abruptly, right on cue, and they were left with silence.

Chase had driven back down the access road to the loading dock door and dropped Jordan off, and it was while Jordan was in the pharmacy pillaging the bins that Chase saw the second strange thing. He had looped back to their hiding place among the wrecks to wait for Jordan’s signal. From this vantage point, he saw that the lights in the music store were blazing, when only minutes before the place had been dark as a cave. He watched as his former boss, Sam, appeared in the lit showroom, wearing a T-shirt as he danced around the floor with a cello in his arms, his long beard swaying. Chase leaned forward, watching as Sam waltzed behind cymbal trees and stacks of amps, then reappeared in the window, close enough for Chase to see that he wasn’t wearing any pants.

Before he could begin to make sense of the scene, a flash of light had caught his eye. Jordan signaling from inside the drugstore. He said nothing of Sam’s behavior as they put their homes behind them, catching the 15 North, hot wind roaring in the windows when they dropped into the desert. They glided past suburban matrices of light as they cleared the planned communities of Victorville and Hesperia. Four hours later, after passing through a wide expanse of darkness, they saw the dreamlike city of Las Vegas blazing in the distance. It read like an illuminated monument of wakefulness—a hive of unsleeping souls all working under the assumption, however temporary, that there was no tomorrow.

THEY took a cheap room in Idaho Falls, at a motel across from the river park. They had been driving for eighteen hours straight, not counting the half-hour pause with the state trooper. They collapsed on the narrow mattresses and both slept until late in the evening, when a loud truck pulled from the lot, gears grinding.