T. Boyle - Talk Talk

That was behind him now. The scenery was improving. He cranked the music, let the wheels roll under him. After a while he found himself singing along, keeping time with the flat of his hand against the dash, the adrenaline slowly draining from his veins even as the road climbed and the trees thickened and the naked faces of the mountains began to catch and shape the light. He hit the accelerator to blow past an RV sleepily towing a car behind it and made himself a promise: there was no way anybody was ever going to find him again.

ANGER DIDN'T BEGIN to describe what she was feeling. It was rage, cold and clear-eyed, unwavering, ecstatic, the rage of the psychopath, the soldier under fire, the wielder of the blade. Never in her life had she felt anything like it, not when she was a child sitting across from her mother at the kitchen table in her witch's black rags and the ghoul-green facepaint she'd spent half an hour on, burning to fly out the door on her broom and go trick-or-treating with her school friends, and her mother making her sit there through ten repetitions of her vowel drill, ten full repetitions, though it was Halloween and she pleaded and spat and stormed up to her room and felt the house shudder with the violence of the door splintering the frame; not when she'd been locked up in the county jail with the drunks and degenerates and no one to listen to her; not when she'd stood in the hallway at the courthouse and watched her lawyer's face go slack as they took her back into custody though she'd been cleared of all charges and everyone knew it was a farce and she could have screamed till the walls came crashing down around them. This was different. This was incendiary.

Just the sight of him, that was all it took. The look on his face, the way he walked, the clothes he was wearing. After all the tension and anticipation, after working herself up so she could barely breathe, after taking it out on Bridger and feeling her stomach clench with loss and hate and frustration, there he was, standing right there in front of them-Frank Calabrese, or whatever his name was-in his pin-striped designer shirt and buffed red leather Docs, his jacket thrown carelessly over one arm, his wife the liar and their kid at his side, and “he” tried to stare “them” down as if they were the ones who'd stolen from him. And then he'd turned his back and ignored them, ignored their shouts and accusations as if he were deaf too-“Thief!” she'd screamed, over and over, bursting from the car and charging across the lot, her arms waving as if she were calling down an airstrike, and she thought they had him, finally had him, because people were beginning to turn their heads and somebody would call the police, she would, Bridger would, and he was trapped there in the parking lot in the unforgiving blaze of nine-thirty in the morning and nothing he could do about it. She felt a thrill go through her. He was doomed. Dead in the water. “Dead meat.”

Yet everything about him, from the sway of his shoulders to the thrust-back arrogance of his face, said it was no trouble at all, no problem, somebody else's affair. He was steady, brisk, steering his numb-faced wife and the kid toward the car with quick efficient strides, for all the world no more concerned than if he were out taking a little exercise after church in the languid hundred-degree heat. She and Bridger were nothing to him, less than nothing, and the thought of it made her seize with hatred. If she'd had a gun, she would have used it. Or she could have. She really believed she could have.

She had something on him, though-evidence, a totem, an artifact. Even as he mounted the cement curb in the Mercedes and took off across the vacant lot, she saw it lying there on the pavement, right where he'd slid into the car and slammed the door behind him. His jacket. Marooned in the rush to escape. Dropped. Forgotten. She was sweating, her heart pounding, already shortening her stride, and she bent without thinking to snatch it up before reversing direction and breaking for her own car with everything she had.

All the while, caught behind the Winnebago as Bridger pounded the horn and she leaned out the window shrieking and gesticulating as if she'd come unhinged and the road opened up and the Mercedes pulled steadily away from them until it was a faint gleam in the distance and then, heartbreakingly, gone altogether, the jacket lay on the floor at her feet. It was there as Bridger swerved in and out of traffic, dialing 911 to shout lies to the dispatcher-“Drunk driver!” he yelled into the phone, “Drunk driver!”-there all the way through the long ascent to South Lake Tahoe while she fixed her eyes on the road, rounding each curve with the expectation of seeing the blinking lights of the highway patrol and Frank Calabrese up against the car with the handcuffs on him. Then they were in the town itself, cruising the streets, scanning the parking lots and back alleys, rolling in and out of motel lots, scrutinizing every red car they came across, and she was so intent on the chase, so wound up in what she was doing, she never gave the jacket a thought. Or the slash on her head either. It was just there, part of the world in its new configuration.

The altitude at Tahoe was 6,225 feet, according to the sign posted at the town limits, and the weather was radically different here. There were streaks of snow on the mountains above the lake, the sky was socked-in and the air coming through the vent felt chilly against her face. Bridger was hunched over the wheel, steering with his wrists, looking beaten. For a long while they said nothing, the car creeping past shops, supermarkets, gas stations, condos, one street after another. “Let's face it, we lost him,” he said finally, his eyes rimmed red with exhaustion. “He could be visiting a friend in one of these condos, he could be in a casino in Stateline, he could-” He shrugged, said something she didn't quite get. “The license-you know, the dealer plates-do you remember what they said, I mean, the dealer name? I think it was Bob-Something Mercedes?”

“Bob Almond Mercedes/BMW,” she said. “Larkspur.”

He'd put on his thoughtful look. They were going so slowly they might as well have been walking. “Because I was thinking-I mean, this isn't getting us anywhere-we could call Milos and he could maybe check out the dealer and see who bought the car, what name, I mean-”

“I don't want to go back there,” she said, surprising herself. “And besides, he wouldn't use his real name, would he?”

“Get a serial number or something-a vehicle identification number.”

“What good's that going to do?”

He didn't answer. Instead, he said, “What about the jacket?”

The jacket, yes. It was flung at her feet like one of those mats they put down to protect the carpet. She reached for it, smoothed it in her lap: raw silk, in black, with red detailing. A smell of cologne rose to her nostrils, and something else too, something deeper, denser: the smell of him, the smell of his body, his underarms, his skin. “Hugo Boss,” she announced, turning over the label. “Nice to know the bastard has taste, huh? Did you see him,” she said, running a hand through the inside pocket, “the way he looked at us? The balls?” There was something there, something hard-sunglasses, Revo, two hundred fifty dollars a pair. She held them up so Bridger could see.

He gave them a cursory glance and then his eyes jumped suddenly to the mirror-someone must have beeped at him-and he hit the blinker and pulled into a No Parking/No Standing Zone as a little black car, a Mini, shot past them. After a moment, he took the glasses from her and held them at length as if examining some dead thing he'd found under the sink, then clapped them on his face. They were wraparounds, metallic silver. “Yeah,” he said, checking himself out in the rearview, “I hear you.”