He jumped from the cab's last step to the ground. "Check it out," he said, pointing over his shoulder with his thumb.
Bristle-jawed Harley stood and looked at him for a moment, then walked past; he dropped the hammer and mounted a couple of steps up the side of the cab so he could look in its open door.
"Shit!" Harley jumped back down. His face had been red and sweaty before; now it blackened with anger as he confronted the trucker. "Who the fuck's that?"
He shrugged. "Found 'im. Out on the road."
Harley's buddy, with the welder's mask pushed up on top of his head, came around from the other side of the shack and looked in the truck. He was smiling, gaps showing in his yellow teeth, when he came over to them.
"Looks like somebody doesn't like him too much." Harley's buddy scratched his bare chest, grinning away.
"Shit. Jesus fucking Christ." Harley shook his head. "What the hell did you bring him here for?"
"What was I supposed to do?" The trucker gestured toward the Peterbilt and the slumped figure visible inside. "Leave him out there?"
Harley put his hands on his hips and nodded. "Yeah, actually. That's
exactly
what you should've done. This stupid fucker, whoever he is, he gets his ass in a jam, it's no skin off our noses."
These assholes
… The trucker kept his face impassive as he listened to Harley.
How the hell did I get hooked up with them
?
"Why do you think somebody like that gets dumped off in the middle of nowhere? Huh? Tell me."
The trucker shrugged.
Harley looked over his shoulder, then back to the trucker. "He probably burned somebody in some fuckin' dope deal. So he gets what he deserves, the stupid shit."
The other ape laughed, just thinking about that.
"Yeah, but… come on…"
"Don't give me that shit." Harley's face looked as if it were going to explode. "I don't want to hear it. What the hell do you think we're doing out here, man? We got thirty, forty tons of scrap to break up and get hauled out of here before somebody finds out what we're doing. This is
illegal
, man. You know what that means?"
"I know what it means." The shit he had to take from this guy; it wasn't worth it.
"No, you don't. It doesn't just mean that if we get popped, you don't get your share of the profits. It means that if we get popped, me and my buddy here, we go back in. And I've been in before, and I don't want to go in again-you got me? We get popped, the D.A. hits me with the fucking bitch-you know? Fuck, man, I'll get fucking seven just for breaking my fucking parole. And you want to haul some beat-up, dying dope dealer in here? You're out of your fucking mind."
"So what the hell am I supposed to do with him, then? Look, the guy's gonna die anyway-"
Harley cut him off. "Hey, I don't give a fuck. So let him die somewhere else, okay? Just get rid of him. Haul him back out to where you found him…"
***
The voices woke him. Shouting, somewhere in the distance.
He managed to drag his eyes open, a slit that let in stinging light. His face was against glass, the side window of the truck's cab. He turned his head-slowly; there was a rod of dull fire under his spine-until he could see where the voices came from.
Through the open door of the cab, he saw them. The man who had been driving the truck, who'd picked him up. And another one, with a red, sweating face. That one's voice was louder, angrier. He could just make out the words.
…
get rid of him
…
haul him back out
…
found him
…
The voice twisted in his ear, echoing. At the same time, the faces blurred and doubled, the truckdriver's and the red, angry one. He couldn't see them anymore. He closed his eyes, and part of him, the small part that heard and remembered, drifted in night over a blind world. The darkness welled beneath him, in synch with the heavy tide of his pulse, carrying him farther from the earth.
Farther away. The last thing, before there was nothing.
…
get rid of him
… The echo…
rid
…
***
He looked at Harley in disgust.
"Oh yeah, that's a great idea." The trucker's own anger was starting to rise. He shook his head, one corner of his mouth twisting up. "With my goddamn tire tracks rolling right by there-"
"Well, just dump him anywhere, then." Harley gestured off to the distance, to the dirt road behind the truck. "Some place out of sight. Find some flat rock to stick him under." He rubbed the dust from his hands onto his trousers, already filthy. "And then get your ass back here. We got plenty ready to load up." He turned away and walked toward the metal shack.
The trucker stared after him. Harley's buddy was already plopped down in the little bit of shade, working on a beer he'd taken from the cooler inside. He handed it up to Harley, who guzzled it nearly empty, his red-creased throat beating with each swallow.
Fuck these guys. For the hundredth time, the trucker wondered why he'd let himself get hooked up with them. Fuckin' yardbirds. He turned on his heel and headed for the Peterbilt.
***
Now it was dark outside as well: he could tell even without opening his eyes. The sun must have set. Under the edge of his eyelids he could just make out the green, spectral glow of the truck's dashboard lights, making the driver's hands into skeletonlike forms clutching the wheel. He squeezed his eyes closed tight, the corner of his forehead against the cold, vibrating glass of the side window. Black inside…
He came to again when he felt the truck come to a stop. Or it had been still for a while; he had no way of knowing. Except that the driver was gone from behind the wheel, leaving him alone in the dim, green-lit space.
The pain had gotten worse. Every breath brought a stab of fire around his chest. The one arm, his right, was useless; he couldn't move it from where the weight of his body pinned it against the door. That had been the first place he'd gotten hit, when he'd raised up his forearm to ward off the blow swinging down on him. A metal pipe, just under three feet long, with one end wrapped in electrician's tape for a better grip; he'd seen it before, propped up in a corner by the front door of Aitch's apartment, and had suspected what it was for. Now he knew.
The double vision had let up for a moment. He could see outside the truck, through the window his cheek rested against. Some big shape blotted out the bottom part of the night sky, closer than the low hills and made up of straight lines. The truck's headlights weren't aimed toward it, but enough of their glow leaked to the side that he could make out the size of the building, a big one, with a double row of windows. A couple of the windows on the top story were broken out, leaving jagged teeth glinting with the moon's cold blue light.
He saw the truck driver, or somebody, moving around the front of the building, a human shape stepping off what looked like a covered porch running across the front of the building. The man walked back toward the truck.
He closed his eyes and waited. He was too tired to care where the hell this was.
***
"There you go, buddy." The trucker had stripped the blankets off the narrow bed in the Peterbilt's sleeper and wrapped the guy up in them. He'd laid him down by a section of wall where the windows were all still securely boarded over and the chilling night wind couldn't get through, or at least not much of it. An angle of moonlight reached down the big flight of stairs at the far end. The guy's face, white underneath the bruises and crusted blood, gazed up at the old lobby's ceiling, breath dragging in and out of his open mouth.
The trucker peeled off his denim jacket, wadded it up and slid it under the back of the guy's head. The unfocused eyes screwed down in pain, then relaxed but still stayed closed as he lowered the fragile skull onto the makeshift pillow.
"There's water in here now." He set the thermos bottle down, with the plastic cup, already filled, next to it. He'd dipped the water up from a stagnant puddle he'd stepped in outside. But it was better than leaving the guy with nothing at all. "Right here, where you can get to it. Okay?"
The guy managed to move his head. "Yeah… thanks…" His voice sounded a million miles away.
If this sorry bastard didn't want to go to a hospital, the trucker figured, it was no skin off his ass. It would've been less trouble if he'd just left the guy at the side of the road, out where he'd found him. Taking him in to an emergency room, he might have had to come up with a cover story about why he was working his rig out in that butt-end of nowhere. Especially since this guy hadn't gotten so banged up by falling out of bed. And he didn't feel like explaining to the police his little business with the two cons at the pit mine. So if this fellow wanted to take his chances without benefit of medical attention… that might save everybody a lot of trouble.
"Hope you make it." He rubbed his chin as he looked down at the guy. "Look, uh… I got a good idea why you didn't want to go to a hospital. You're not the first dumb sonuvabitch somebody's found out there like that. You're just the first one-least that I ever came across-who was still alive."
The guy tried to raise his head; he grimaced, teeth clenched, and let the back of his skull hit the wadded-up jacket. He sucked his breath in through his teeth.
"Yeah… well…" The words barely crawled out. "Whatever…"
The trucker shook his head.
"I gotta take off now." With the toe of his boot he pushed the thermos closer to the guy's hand. "I'll send somebody around when it's light, to check up on you."
He turned and walked away, his footsteps echoing from the bare wood floor. He wondered what would be left of the guy by the time he came this way again.
***
The truck rumbled away; Mike heard the grinding of its gears as it headed down whatever road had brought him here.
He was in a room, someplace inside: he could tell that much. Stiffly, he pulled his arm, the left one that he could still move, out from under the blankets swaddled around him. A curtain dangled to the floor beside him. He clutched at it, and the white rotten stuff came away in his hand. The dust from it drifted in the faint blue light.
He managed to rise up on his elbow. The room tilted around him, blurring and doubling. The pain binding his chest sang, rolling up his spine and battering at the pivot of his skull.
The window behind the curtain was boarded over. There was only a small gap through which he could see outside: night, and the darker hills blotting out the stars; blackness layered on top of itself.
Something moved out there, or inside his head; it was hard to tell which. He thought he saw two red points, set close as though they were eyes. And then others like them, moving at a slow pace in the unseen footing of the hills and turning their gaze toward him, sensing him in his frail shelter, the scent of his blood carried to them in the dark air.
The red points blurred, becoming gaseous and cloudlike, overlapping each other. The pain and dizziness sucked the strength from his arm, and he collapsed back to the floor and the nest of blankets.
He tried to listen as the soft darkness welled over him, but he could hear only the laboring step of his own pulse. Then nothing, as he fell and kept falling.
THREE
They hadn't gone back to the apartment-Aitch's place, though Charlie lived there, too-when they returned from dumping Mike off. Which bugged Charlie; he was hungry and tired, tired from all the driving in this goddamn Detroit gunboat that Aitch had latched onto. Next week, or tomorrow, it'd be something different, but just as big. Right now, though, he felt as if he were drowning in the soft world of the Cadillac, or whatever it was, that Aitch had made his own with all that fucking boo music on the stereo.
Aitch lounged back in the passenger seat, one arm thrown along the top, his fingers almost touching Charlie's shoulder. Slumped down behind the steering wheel, Charlie watched-what the hell else was there to do?-the apartment building across the street and a little way down the block.
They were parked somewhere over in the northwest section of the city. He knew vaguely his way around here. There was a health food co-op a couple blocks away, he remembered, which had been full of hippie types with hair straggling down to their asses years ago, and which was now considerably more upscale. He'd had a girlfriend, off and on, back when he'd been taking classes at the campus downtown, who'd make him drive out here so she could buy huge sacks of whole grains that'd looked to him like the stuff you'd feed to horses. She was probably still out here, schlumpfing around in her Indian print skirts, getting maybe some grey streaks in her hair, living in some Lesbian poetry-writing commune in one of the funkier old houses-he didn't want to know. A huge crock of lentils soaking, and a dozen cats. This whole area, he knew (Aitch had told him; info some of Aitch's customers had passed on), all these ratty houses with sagging porches and peeling fish-scale shingles-it was all slated for being bulldozed and replaced with skinny packs of row houses. What's-her-name would have to migrate, with her cats and lentils, down the I-5, to Eugene maybe.
Those were the kinds of thoughts that came drifting by-thoughts about old girlfriends-hanging around late at night in a pilfered Caddy. At least Aitch had burned out finally on those goddamn cassettes; now they had the graveyard shift on the classical station oozing out of the speakers. That was okay-he just had to be careful not to nod out to all that Mozart shit. All this driving back and forth-you figured it up, it was like ten, twelve hours of driving-along with all that pounding away on Mike beforehand… no wonder he was tired. Plus-he rotated his hands on the steering wheel to look at them-he had a really nasty cut across the back of his left hand, deep enough to have drawn blood and scabbed over by now. He'd gotten it from one of Mike's teeth, he supposed, from giving him a crack in the mouth when he'd still been trying to fight and yell.