Part 17 (1/2)

'That's right. The ones with the Universal Product Code on them. It's a little block with a pre-set number of black bars in it.'

The kid surprised Hogan by nodding. 'Sure - they whip 'em over an electric-eye gadget in the supermarket and the price shows up on the cash register like magic, right?'

'Yes. Except it's not magic, and it's not an electric eye. It's a laser reader. I sell those, too. Both the big ones and the portables.'

'Far out, dude-mar.' The tinge of sarcasm in the kid's voice was faint . . . but it was there.

'Bryan?'

'Yeah?'

'The name's Bill, not m'man, not dude, and most certainly not dude-mar.'

He found himself wis.h.i.+ng more and more strongly that he could roll back in time to Scooter's, and just say no when the kid asked him for a ride. The Scooters weren't bad sorts; they would have let the kid stay until the storm blew itself out this evening. Maybe Mrs. Scooter would even have given him five bucks to babysit the tarantula, the rattlers, and Woof, the Amazing Minnesota Coydog. Hogan found himself liking those gray-green eyes less and less. He could feel their weight on his face, like small stones.

'Yeah - Bill. Bill the Label Dude.'

Bill didn't reply. The kid laced his fingers together and bent his hands backward, cracking the knuckles.

'Well, it's like my old mamma used to say - it may not be much, but it's a living. Right, Label Dude?'

Hogan grunted something noncommittal and concentrated on his driving. The feeling that he had made a mistake had grown to a certainty. When he'd picked up the girl that time, G.o.d had let him get away with it. Please, he prayed. One more time, okay, G.o.d? Better yet, let me be wrong about this kid - let it just be paranoia brought on by low barometer, high winds, and the coincidence of a name that can't, after all, be that uncommon.

Here came a huge Mack truck from the other direction, the silver bulldog atop the grille seeming to peer into the flying grit. Hogan squeezed right until he felt the sand piled up along the edge of the road grabbing greedily at his tires again. The long silver box the Mack was pulling blotted out everything on Hogan's left side. It was six inches away - maybe even less - and it seemed to pa.s.s forever.

When it was finally gone, the blonde kid asked: 'You look like you're doin pretty well, Bill - rig like this must have set you back at least thirty big ones. So why - '

'It was a lot less than that.' Hogan didn't know if 'Bryan Adams' could hear the edgy note in his voice, but he sure could. 'I did a lot of the work myself.'

'All the same, you sure ain't staggerin around hungry. So why aren't you up above all this s.h.i.+t, flyin' the friendly skies?'

It was a question Hogan sometimes asked himself in the long empty miles between Tempe and Tucson or Las Vegas and Los Angeles, the kind of question you had to ask yourself when you couldn't find anything on the radio but c.r.a.ppy synthopop or threadbare oldies and you'd listened to the last ca.s.sette of the current best-seller from Recorded Books, when there was nothing to look at but miles of gullywashes and scrubland, all of it owned by Uncle Sam.

He could say that he got a better feel for his customers and their needs by traveling through the country where they lived and sold their goods, and it was true, but it wasn't the reason. He could say that checking his sample cases, which were much too bulky to fit under an airline seat, was a pain in the a.s.s and waiting for them to show up on the conveyor belt at the other end was always an adventure (he'd once had a packing case filled with five thousand soft-drink labels show up in Hilo, Hawaii, instead of Hillside, Arizona). That was also true, but it also wasn't the reason.

The reason was that in 1982 he had been on board a Western Pride commuter flight which had crashed in the high country seventeen miles north of Reno. Six of the nineteen pa.s.sengers on board and both crew-members had been killed. Hogan had suffered a broken back. He had spent four months in bed and another ten in a heavy brace his wife Lita called the Iron Maiden. They (whoever they were) said that if you got thrown from a horse, you should get right back on. William I. Hogan said that was bulls.h.i.+t, and with the exception of a white-knuckle, two-Valium flight to attend his father's funeral in New York, he had never been on a plane since.

He came out of these thoughts all at once, realizing two things: he had had the road to himself since the pa.s.sage of the Mack, and the kid was still looking at him with those unsettling eyes, waiting for him to answer the question.

'I had a bad experience on a commuter flight once,' he said. 'Since then, I've pretty much stuck to transport where you can coast into the breakdown lane if your engine quits.'

'You sure have had a lot of bad experiences, Bill-dude,' the kid said. A tone of bogus regret crept into his voice. 'And now, so sorry, you're about to have another one.' There was a sharp metallic click. Hogan looked over and was not very surprised to see the kid was holding a switchknife with a glittering eight-inch blade.

Oh s.h.i.+t, Hogan thought. Now that it was here, now that it was right in front of him, he didn't feel very scared. Only tired. Oh s.h.i.+t, and only four hundred miles from home. G.o.ddam.

'Pull over, Bill-dude. Nice and slow.'

'What do you want?'

'If you really don't know the answer to that one, you're even dumber than you look.' A little smile played around the corners of the kid's mouth. The homemade tattoo on the kid's arm rippled as the muscle beneath it twitched. 'I want your dough, and I guess I want your rolling wh.o.r.ehouse too, at least for a while. But don't worry - there's this little truck stop not too far from here. Sammy's. Close to the turnpike. Someone'll give you a ride. The people who don't stop will look at you like you're dog-s.h.i.+t they found on their shoes, of course, and you might have to beg a little, but I'm sure you'll get a ride in the end. Now pull over.'

Hogan was a little surprised to find that he felt angry as well, as tired. Had he been angry that other time, when the road-girl, had stolen his wallet? He couldn't honestly remember.

'Don't pull that s.h.i.+t on me,' he said, turning to the kid. 'I jjjave you a ride when you needed one, and I didn't make you beg for it. If it weren't for me, you'd still be eating sand with your thumb out. So why don't you just put that thing away. We'll - '

The kid suddenly lashed forward with the knife, and Hogan felt a thread of burning pain across his right hand. The van swerved, then shuddered as it pa.s.sed over another of those sandy speed-b.u.mps.

'Pull over, I said. You're either walking, Label Dude, or you're lying in the nearest gully with your throat cut and one of your own price-reading gadgets jammed up your a.s.s. And you wanna know something? I'm gonna chain-smoke all the way to Los Angeles, and every time I finish a cigarette I'm gonna b.u.t.t it out on your f.u.c.kin dashboard.'

Hogan glanced down at his hand and saw a diagonal line of blood, which stretched from the last knuckle of his pinky to the base of his thumb. And here was the anger again . . . only now it was really rage, and if the tiredness was still there, it was buried somewhere in the middle of that irrational red eye. He tried to summon a mental picture of Lita and Jack to damp that feeling down before it got the better of him and made him do something crazy, but the images were fuzzy and out of focus. There was a clear image in his mind, but it was the wrong one - it was the face of the girl outside of Tonopah, the girl with the snarling mouth below the sad poster-child eyes, the girl who had said f.u.c.k you, sugar before slapping him across the face with his own wallet.

He stepped down on the gas-pedal and the van began to move faster. The red needle moved past thirty.

The kid looked surprised, then puzzled, then angry. 'What are you doing? I told you to pull over! Do you want your guts in your lap, or what?'

'I don't know,' Hogan said. He kept his foot on the gas. Now the needle was trembling just above forty. The van ran across a series of dunelets and s.h.i.+vered like a dog with a fever. 'What do you want, kid? How about a broken neck? All it takes is one twist of the wheel. I fastened my seatbelt. I notice you forgot yours.'

The kid's gray-green eyes were huge now, glittering with a mixture of fear and fury. You're supposed to pull over, those eyes said. That's the way it's supposed to work when I'm holding a knife on you - don't you know that?

'You won't wreck us,' the kid said, but Hogan thought he was trying to convince himself.

'Why not?' Hogan turned toward the kid again. 'After all, I'm pretty sure I'll walk away, and the van's insured. You call the play, a.s.shole. What about that?'

'You - ' the kid began, and then his eyes widened and he lost all interest in Hogan. 'Look out!' he screamed.

Hogan snapped his eyes forward and saw four huge white headlamps bearing down on him through the flying wrack outside. It was a tanker truck, probably carrying gasoline or propane. An air-horn beat the air like the cry of a gigantic, enraged goose: WHONK! WHONK! WHONNNK!

The van had drifted while Hogan was trying to deal with the kid; now he was the one halfway across the road. He yanked the wheel hard to the right, knowing it would do no good, knowing it was already too late. But the approaching truck was also moving, squeezing over just as Hogan had tried to squeeze over in order to accommodate the Mark IV. The two vehicles danced past each other though the blowing sand with less than a gasp between them. Hogan felt his rightside wheels bite into the sand again and knew that this time he didn't have a chance in h.e.l.l of holding the van on the road - not at forty-plus miles an hour. As the dim shape of the big steel tank (CARTER'S FARM SUPPLIES ORGANIC FERTILIZER was painted along the side) slid from view, he felt the steering wheel go mushy in his hands, dragging farther to the right. And from the corner of his eye, he saw the kid leaning forward with his knife.

What's the matter with you, are you crazy? He wanted to scream at the kid, but it would have been a stupid question even if he'd had time enough to articulate it. Sure the kid was crazy - you only had to take a good look into those gray-green eyes to see it. Hogan must have been crazy himself to give the kid a ride in the first place, but none of that mattered now; he had a situation to cope with here, and if he allowed himself the luxury of believing this couldn't be happening to him - if he allowed himself to think that for even a single second - he would probably be found tomorrow or the next day with his throat cut and his eyes nibbled out of their sockets by the buzzards. This was really happening; it was a true thing.

The kid tried his level best to plant the blade in Hogan's neck, but the van had begun to tilt by then, running deeper and deeper into the sand-choked gully. Hogan recoiled back from the blade, letting go of the wheel entirely, and thought he had gotten clear until he felt the wet warmth of blood drench the side of his neck. The knife had unzipped his right cheek from jaw to temple. He flailed with his right hand, trying to get the kid's wrist, and then the van's left front wheel struck a rock the size of a pay telephoneand the van flipped high and hard, like a stunt vehicle in one of those movies this rootless kid undoubtedly loved. It rolled in midair, all four wheels turning, still doing thirty miles an hour according to the speedometer, and Hogan felt his seatbelt lock painfully across his chest and belly. It was like reliving the plane-crash - now, as then, he could not get it through his head that this was really happening.

The kid was thrown upward and forward, still holding onto the knife. His head bounced off the roof as the van's top and bottom swapped places. Hogan saw his left hand waving wildly, and realized with amazement that the kid was still trying to stab him. He was a rattler, all right, Hogan had been right about that, but no one had milked his poison sacs.

Then the van struck the desert hardpan, peeling off the luggage racks, and the kid's head connected with the roof again, much harder this time. The knife was jolted from his hand. The cabinets at the rear of the van sprang open, spraying sample-books and laser label-readers everywhere. Hogan was dimly aware of an inhuman screaming sound - the long, drawn-out squall of the XRT's roof sliding across the gravelly desert surface on the far side of the gully - and thought: So this is what it would be like to be inside a tin can when someone was using the opener.

The winds.h.i.+eld shattered, blowing inward in a sagging s.h.i.+eld clouded by a million zig-zagging cracks. Hogan shut his eyes and threw his hands up to s.h.i.+eld his face as the van continued to roll, thumping down on Hogan's side long enough to shatter the driver's-side window and admit a rattle of rocks and dusty earth before staggering upright again. It rocked as if meaning to go over on the kid's side . . . and then came to rest.

Hogan sat where he was without moving for perhaps five seconds, eyes wide, hands gripping the armrests of his chair, feeling a little like Captain Kirk in the aftermath of a Klingon attack. He was aware there was a lot of dirt and crumbled gla.s.s in his lap, and something else as well, but not what the something else was. He was also aware of the wind, blowing more dirt through the van's broken windows.

Then his vision was temporarily blocked by a swiftly moving object. The object was a mottle of white skin, brown dirt, raw knuckles, and red blood. It was a fist, and it struck Hogan squarely in the nose. The agony was immediate and intense, as if someone had fired a flare-gun directly into his brain. For a moment his vision was gone, swallowed in a vast white flash. It had just begun to come back when the kid's hands suddenly clamped around his neck and he could no longer breathe.

The kid, Mr. Bryan Adams from Nowhere, USA, was leaning over the console between the front seats. Blood from perhaps half a dozen different scalp-wounds had flowed over his cheeks and forehead and nose like war paint. His gray-green eyes stared at Hogan with fixed, lunatic fury.

'Look what you did, you f.u.c.k!' the kid shouted. 'Look what you did to me!'

Hogan tried to pull back, and got half a breath when the kid's hold slipped momentarily, but with his seatbelt still buckled - and still locked down as well, from the feel - there was really nowhere he could go. The kid's hands were back almost at once, and this time his thumbs were pressing into his windpipe, pinching it shut.

Hogan tried to bring his own hands up, but the kid's arms, as rigid as prison bars, blocked him. He tried to knock the kid's arms away, but they wouldn't budge. Now he could hear another wind - a high, roaring wind inside his own head.