Unassigned Territory (24 page)

Obadiah approached the pile of humanity. He had in mind pulling Delandra to her feet. “You keep your ass out of it,” one of the men yelled. “It’s one on one.” The other man laughed.

Delandra had her head turned now, one side of her face mashed against the guy’s chest. She was trying to see Obadiah. “The gun,” she said. “The gun.”

“Whoa,” one of the men said.

“Whoa yourself, shithead,” Delandra yelled from the ground.

For a moment Obadiah stood looking at the men. The men looked back at him. It was a moment in which time stood still. And then they were moving toward him, to the left and right of where Delandra lay struggling with the man, and Obadiah began to run.

He reached the Dart ahead of them, jerked open the driver’s side door, and dove into the front seat. He got the revolver out of the glove box at about the same time the men reached the middle of the street. He did not believe that he was actually going to shoot at anyone but it occurred to him that he’d best look serious about it. He pulled the hammer back and swung the barrel around so that it was pointing toward the street over his outstretched body. He was sort of lying on his back, sighting down his stomach. The men stopped running when they saw the gun. They both stopped at the same time and there was something almost comical in the effect. They appeared to stop themselves by digging their heels into the pavement. Then they started backing up, their palms turned toward Obadiah. The guy in the polo shirt backed into a curb and went down hard on his ass.

Obadiah slithered out of the front seat, legs first. In the act of doing this he managed to bang his forearm against the wheel and the gun went off. He wasn’t holding it very tightly and it kicked with enough force to bring the barrel up against the roof of the car. The blast rattled his jaw. The man in the polo shirt put both hands over his head. Obadiah was standing by now, in the street at the side of the car. He could not believe the fucking thing had gone off. It was like some stupid thing he might have read about in the paper—one more moron blowing his own foot off with a gun he didn’t know was loaded. In this case he was the moron. He half expected to see some local grandmother dead on the street. There was no one there but the men, however, and none of them appeared to have been hit. He felt that he was floating rather than walking toward them. He wanted to disappear. He wanted to tell the guy in the polo shirt to “Dance, motherfucker.” The expressions on the men’s faces were really something and there was a moment in which he considered spraying the pavement with hot lead. The moment passed.

All of this happened very quickly, though it seemed to Obadiah as if it had taken a very long time, as if Delandra would never regain her feet. But she was up now and running toward him, her breasts bouncing beneath the T-shirt, and there was a wild sort of light in her eye he had not seen since she first suggested breakfast at the Chevron station. “You should know better than to mess with the queen of the roller derby,” she said to everyone.

“Come on back, sometime,” one of the men said, “without your friend.”

The man in the white jacket said something about fixing them both. Delandra gave everyone the finger and jumped into the car. Obadiah ran to the opposite side, the gun still in his hand. It was true, he thought, they were like Bonnie and Clyde. It was too fucking ridiculous to even think about.

Delandra drove like mad, laughing and hooting all the way. She tore through the ruined asphalt of the motel’s parking lot and parked the car in the back, hiding it from the road. After that they got out and ran to the room. They started out walking and then began to run. Delandra got there first and she tried to lock Obadiah outside. She was still laughing, though, and still drunk, and Obadiah managed to push past her and into the room and once they were both inside she threw her arms around his neck and pressed her body against his and held him that way for a long time. Finally they made love, on the floor, and then on the bed, and every now and then a car would go by on the highway and they would stop and listen and try to figure out if it was the men from the bar out looking for them, or maybe the Highway Patrol. But all of the cars went on by and the room grew dark with shadow and the sun appeared at an open bathroom window, an orange blaze beyond the turquoise tile.

They lay on the bed for a long time when they were finished, watching the light. Their clothes were strewn all over the room, the floor, the bed, the case of the Mystery of the Mojave, which was also covered with a bedspread and which Obadiah had not once looked at since returning to the room.

“You know,” Delandra told him. Her bare arm was pressed against his and her breath was soft and warm against his neck. “The thing is, we can’t afford to get bogged down in all of this. Do you know what I mean? We’ve got to make a break and the break has got to be clean. I’m beginning to believe there is something between us.”

Obadiah studied the ceiling. In one corner there was a brownish stain and the light from the bathroom lay across it in narrow golden rectangles. Once he felt Delandra shiver at his side. He thought about what she had said, about there being something between them. Sometimes he thought there was, and sometimes he didn’t know. It was a difficult thing to get hold of. And then he started thinking about his conversation with the old lady in the bookstore and the date he had written on the flyleaf of Ceton Verity’s book. He was considering saying something about it when the phone rang.

They both jumped. Finally Delandra sprang from the bed and grabbed at the receiver. “Yes,” Obadiah heard her say, “this is Delandra Hummer.” He propped himself up on his elbows and watched her at the foot of the bed. She had her back to him and the orange light caressed her hip and thigh and one naked shoulder and there was a long, curving shadow in the middle of her back so that she reminded him of a painting in which exquisite use had been made of light.

When she returned to the bed she looked upset about something. “Fucking Jack and Lyle,” she said. “They can’t make it until tomorrow.” She lay down facing the curtains which blocked their view of the lot. “They’re trying to fuck with me,” she said. “I really hate it when people try to fuck with me.”

At some point Obadiah noticed that she had begun to shake, softly at first, and then more violently. He moved his body up to hers, curving himself around her back and circling her with his arms and she lay there for a long time without saying anything and finally she stopped shaking and went to sleep. Obadiah didn’t say anything either. He lay there holding her, feeling his heart beat against her back. He felt that he was protecting her from something, though he couldn’t say what it was, but the very idea of it moved him to tears. He wondered if in the morning he would get around to telling her what he had learned in the bookstore, that Ceton Verity had died in a remarkably similar way to Sarge Hummer, that he had simply been found dead near the site of his museum within the same month that Sarge Hummer had been found dead in back of his.

O
badiah found that his arm had gotten numb and he realized he had been sleeping. At first he thought it was his arm which had wakened him. Then he realized it was something else. Someone was knocking on the door.

Delandra went from being asleep to sitting bolt upright at the edge of the bed. It was dark in the room and he couldn’t see her face. He saw her head moving from side to side. She went to the corner of the window on her hands and knees and looked outside and for a moment a pale white light from the parking lot crossed a piece of plastered wall. Delandra let the curtain fall and crawled back to bed. “Shit,” she said, “it’s them.” Someone knocked again.

“Them?” The first people Obadiah thought of were the men from the bar.

“It’s Jack. I told you those fuckers were screwing around. We should have split. This is fucking stupid.” She was pulling on her pants and then her T-shirt, seemingly all in one motion. She also managed to throw Obadiah his jeans. “Where’s the fucking gun?” she said.

Obadiah was waking up fast now. It was like waking to a bad dream. He pulled on the jeans and started feeling around in the dark for the gun. He had remembered leaving it on the dresser. Delandra was now at the door. The door was still closed and she was saying something through it, waving at Obadiah to get into the bathroom and out the window. Alternate plan B. Obadiah couldn’t find his shirt and there was not time for his shoes. He placed the gun on the windowsill. He stood on the toilet bowl and went out the window one leg at a time so that for a moment he was straddling the sill. He slid over onto the back of one thigh, squeezed his body through, and then dropped to the ground. The gravel bit at his feet and the night air was cold on his back. He was in the act of removing the gun from the sill when he heard a voice issue from the darkness above him. When he brought himself to look, what he saw was the twin black mouths of a double-barreled gun and above that the long, bony face of Lyle Blackledge grinning unpleasantly down on him from the roof of the Blue Heaven Motel.

Lyle’s face was lit from the underside by a single naked bulb which burned at the rear of the motel. Behind him the night sky had acquired a faintly bluish tint from the neon which burned somewhere on the other side of the building. “Guess what?” Lyle said.

Obadiah shivered. He was still in the act of reaching, his hand still covering Delandra’s pistol.

“Whatever you’ve got in your hand there,” Lyle said to him, “put it on the ground.”

Obadiah put the gun on the ground at his feet. It looked quite small, he thought, not anything like what had given him the power earlier that afternoon at the Corner Pocket Bar. It occurred to him that that was what he was paying for now.

Lyle swung himself from the roof and dropped easily to his feet. He picked Obadiah’s gun up and looked at it. “Gee,” he said, “let’s go inside.”

Together they walked around the end of the building. Obadiah entertained the hope they would run into something—the old woman who ran the place, new guests, anything that might change in some way what was coming down. They saw no one. The night was silent except for the wind and the distant yapping of some dogs. They passed beneath the neon sign which leaned toward the highway and for a moment both men were bathed in a delicate blue light. The moment passed. They reentered the land of shadow and started down the narrow concrete walkway which led to Apartment B. For Obadiah, it had been quite a journey. Reaching the room, he felt that they had been walking for days, across the most difficult of terrains.

Jack was there with Delandra. She was now wearing jeans to go with the black T-shirt and boots. She was seated at the edge of the double bed. Jack was seated by the door in a wooden, straight-backed chair. Obadiah sat next to Delandra.

“Dipshit here had this,” Lyle said. He handed Delandra’s pistol to Jack.

“Well, well,” Jack said, “not expecting trouble?”

“Fuck you,” Delandra said.

Jack laughed. “That’s not a bad idea,” he said. “I’ve heard worse. What do you think, Lyle?”

“Fucking whore,” Lyle said. “I’ll have her beggin’ for mercy before I’m done.” He looked serious about it. Obadiah felt something go slightly numb somewhere in the middle of his body.

“Let me tell you something about all of that,” Delandra said. She was looking at Jack. “You try anything twisted and you’re going to have to kill both of us. You understand? You kill both of us and you won’t get far with what you came for.”

Jack was leaning forward in his chair. He was dressed in a pair of dirty jeans, work boots, a faded cotton work shirt with the sleeves rolled up on his forearms. His dark brown hair looked greasy and uncombed and his glasses seemed to have slipped a bit toward the end of his nose. There was perspiration around his neck and across his forehead. Jack looked for a long moment at Delandra. The door to the room had been left slightly ajar and through the crack Obadiah could see the dark blue pickup. He could see the fat woman he had seen at the trailer sitting behind the wheel. The truck hadn’t been there when he and Lyle made their walk. The woman must have parked somewhere closer to the highway, then driven up when she saw Lyle and Obadiah go into the room. It occurred to him that Delandra was probably wrong. Jack and Lyle could do something twisted and get away with it. They could haul them out into the desert somewhere and no one would ever know. This seemed so obvious to him he almost said something. But he didn’t.

“Well now,” Jack was saying, “I guess that all depends on just how far we want to get with it, doesn’t it? I mean maybe we won’t want it at all. Maybe it’s just some damn pile of junk your old man threw together. What then, honey?”

Jack got to his feet and walked to the case. He pulled the sheet away from the glass. Lyle came a step off the wall he’d been propped against and looked down, his long neck held at an odd angle. Jack looked at the Thing for a moment without saying anything. Then he opened the lid. The hinges squeaked loudly and a peculiar though by now, Obadiah thought, oddly familiar odor seeped into the room.

Suddenly it was very quiet. Jack and Lyle stood side by side, staring into the case. Beyond the doorway Obadiah could see the reflection of blue neon on the fender of the truck. A moth which had become trapped between the window and the curtain fluttered against the glass. Lyle, Obadiah saw, had laid Delandra’s gun on top of the dresser, in nearly the same spot it had been before Obadiah had taken it to go outside, and a certain sequence of action presented itself to him. A man might, he believed, throw himself at Lyle, knock him into Jack, grab the gun, and come around shooting. It seemed both suicidal and plausible. His heart beat faster and for a moment he felt himself coil for the move. Anything, he thought, but a shallow grave in the desert.

“I’ll be damned,” Jack said. He looked from the case to Delandra, then to Obadiah. Obadiah remained at the edge of the bed. The opportunity had passed.

Lyle was still arranged in the pose he had taken with his first sight of the Creature. There was a vein bulging out on the side of his neck where it arced toward the light and Obadiah fancied he could see it pulsing. He found himself wanting suddenly to laugh out loud. Seen many of those, hick? He kept his mouth shut.