Dennis liked to read the passing road signs out loud.
“Dawsville. Exit 42. One mile.”
“Boise. Exit 59. Quarter mile.”
“Roadwork ahead. Next ten miles.”
I became used to it and eventually stopped looking at the signs altogether since I had my own human OnStar satellite system sitting right next to me.
When the distance between signs stretched for miles, Dennis would switch to reading passing license plates.
“A6572G4.”
“M87GT2.”
As traveling companions go, he wasn’t bad. Except for the near-constant drone, he remained affably calm and even drifted off on occasion-though he nearly always awoke in time for the next road alert.
When I put on some music, he told me he used to play guitar in a Metallica knockoff band, and even sang two lines from “St. Anger” in fair facsimile of James Hetfield.
There were five VA hospitals south of Seattle.
If need be, we were going to visit each and every one of them.
Dennis was my guide. It might’ve been the blind leading the blinder, but he was all I had.
It had taken some doing to get him into the car.
He’d just broken out of a VA hospital; he didn’t particularly feel like going back. Mrs. Flaherty had looked at me as if I’d turned as crazy as her son when I told her what I had in mind.
Dennis was running out of meds, I told her. That was a fact.
He was still clearly disturbed-that was also a fact.
It might not have been the smartest thing in the world for Dennis to have escaped from a federal psych ward, either. I didn’t know if having voluntarily committed himself absolved him from anything-but if it didn’t, I wasn’t going to bring it up.
I needed him.
It was the meds that convinced the both of them. She had no money for psychiatrists. She was one of the 40 million or so Americans without health insurance. Dennis needed the U.S. Army if he was going to stay on his regimen of antipsychotics.
The hospital was the best place for him-sad but true.
I would take him back there.
If we could find it.
I called Norma from North Dakota.
I’d dipped into my dwindling ATM resources again and paid for two rooms at the Sioux Nation Motel, which sported a mini-casino in the check-in area.
“I have bad news for you, Tom,” she said. “Laura passed away last night.”
Hinch’s wife.
That was bad news, but in the scheme of things not the worst thing I’d heard recently. There was that gunshot from the speeding blue pickup, for example.
“How’s Hinch taking it?” I asked.
My suspension notwithstanding, Hinch had always been good to me. He’d given me a chance when no one else on earth would’ve even considered it.
“About the way you’d expect. You know Hinch-God knows what he’s really thinking half the time. He keeps it bottled up real tight. He was pretty devoted to her.”
“Yeah. How’s Nate doing?”
“Okay. He had a little infection yesterday so they put him on stronger antibiotics. His mom’s here.”
“Yeah, I know. I saw her at the hospital.”
“No, I mean she’s here. In my house. I’m putting her up.”
“That’s nice of you, Norma.”
“The least I can do for the poor woman. Where are you, Tom? You sound far away.”
“North Dakota.”
“What in God’s name are you doing in North Dakota?”
“We’re looking for something.”
“Who’s we’re?”
“Me and my traveling companion.”
“Who would that be, Tom?”
“That would be the deceased from the car accident on Highway 45.”
“You’re scaring me, Tom, you know that?”
“Okay. He’s not actually dead. Though sometimes he appears that way.”
There was a small silence-the only sound coming from The 100 Best Songs from the ’80s on the motel TV. They were up to number 22: “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.”
“Tom?”
“Yes, Norma?”
“All this stuff you’re talking about-I heard about some of it from Mary-Beth, who heard it from I don’t know who-you aren’t making it up, are you?”
“No, Norma.”
“I’ve never asked you about, you know… New York and all that.”
She hadn’t. For a long time, I’d wondered if she even knew. It wasn’t like she read the national papers-as far as I could tell, I’d never made Us magazine.
“I know.”
“I figured if you wanted to talk about it, you would.”
“Right.”
“So, you want to talk about it?”
“Not really.”
“Okay, Tom. You didn’t give someone your gun to shoot at you, did you?”
“No, Norma.”
“Yeah, I thought that sounded kind of nuts. That’s what they’re saying, though.”
“Are they saying why I would do something like that?”
“To give you… credibility. Is that the right word? Make you the center of attention.”
“I guess it worked, then.”
“Huh? Didn’t you just say they’re wrong?”
“Someone stole my gun. I was trying to be funny.”
“Ha, ha.”
“Can you call Sam Weitz and tell him I’m out of town? That I’ll be back in a week or so? He’ll want to know why I’m not at bowling.”
“Sure.” Silence. “Tom?”
“Yes?”
“What are you looking for?”
“Credibility, Norma. Just like you said.”
DENNIS WAS RIGHT ABOUT SEATTLE.
It was raining when we got there, a soft, steady downpour that caused clouds of steam to drift off the asphalt.
We drove through the downtown area because Dennis wanted to see Safeco Field where the Mariners played. Once upon a time Dennis used to be a baseball fan, but that was before reading the box scores began hurting his head. He used to be able to recite every player’s statistics by heart. Maybe that’s why he’d bunked out in the shadow of Detroit’s baseball park after he’d ended up on the streets. To feel the nurturing presence of America’s pastime.
We drove past the fish markets and restaurants that flanked the water and Safeco before we hit the highway going south.
The first VA hospital on our itinerary was on the border between Washington and Oregon-in the city of Tellings, population 159,000. At least that’s what Dennis read off the map.
“Sound familiar?” I asked him.
“Huh?”
“The city name. Tellings? Does it ring a bell?”
“Population 159,000,” he said.
“Right. I’m asking if you recognize the name-if maybe you were there?”
“Dunno.”
Dennis had begun swatting his face even though there were no actual bugs there. He sometimes whispered things to himself, but when I asked him what he said, he’d ask me what I was talking about.
I tried to imagine what we might look like to passing motorists.
A broken-down Miata sporting another car’s front bumper and a man in the passenger seat mumbling to himself when he wasn’t killing phantom flies.
Then I knew exactly what we looked like.
At least to one motorist.
THIRTY-NINE
It had gotten dark almost without me knowing it.
One minute it was light enough to easily make out passing license plates-Dennis had begun reading them off again in lieu of road signs-then it wasn’t.
He had to lean forward and squint, each license suddenly immersed in individual pools of sickly yellow light.
“Speed up,” he said. “Can’t see the last number.”
I told Dennis he might want to give it a rest-eventually it grated on you, being assaulted by the constant drone of numbers and letters, the only relief provided by vanity plates like IAMGR8T and LUV2BWL.
Dennis was oblivious to my entreaties; I didn’t press the matter since it gave him something to do, at least.
M65LK1…
RLN895…
I’m not exactly sure when it occurred to me.
L983HT4…
K61MN0…
Have you ever had the car radio on and begun listening to a certain song only when the next one’s already playing? Your mind meandering down its own roads, and the music far away as if it’s coming from a half-open window?
VML254…
HG54MT…
Dennis’s litany of licenses was a kind of music-steady, low, and rhythmic. A tune I mostly tuned out, but half didn’t.
QR327N9…
KL61WT…
At some point, I began to actually hear it, at least become cognizant of a certain repeat phrase.
MH92TV…
Something about those letters and numbers. They seemed, okay, familiar. As if he’d mumbled them before, and before that, too.
MH92TV.
Twenty minutes ago, maybe, then sometime later, and then now.
MH92TV.
So what? There were hundreds of cars on this highway going in exactly the same direction we were-even all the way to Tellings. Even as I attempted to placate a bad case of the jitters, I knew that I’d heard those numbers before twenty minutes ago.
Dennis had been reading license plates since Iowa.
“Dennis… that license plate-which car?”
“Huh?”
“MH92TV? Which car?”
He seemed pleasantly surprised that something I’d previously expressed annoyance at had suddenly captivated my attention. Cool.
“Over there,” he said.
“Over where?”
“There.” He motioned to his immediate left, but when I slowed to let the red Mitsubishi to our left inch forward, its license plate said GAYSROK.
“That’s not it, Dennis.”
He shrugged. “No, not that one. Behind us, I think.”
“Where behind us?” I scanned the side- and rearview mirrors, but it was pitch black and all I saw were vague shapes obliterated by crossing high beams.
“Dunno, man. Maybe it’s in front of us.”
“Okay. What kind of car is it?”
I knew what his answer would be before he said it.
I was Karnak the Magnificent, the answer already pressed against my forehead, even though I was praying for something else, any other car on earth, really. A Honda Accord, a Saturn or Caddy, a sensible Dodge minivan or VW bus or Volvo.
No such luck.
“Pickup,” he said.
My hands gripped the steering wheel so tight that my knuckles went white.
“You’re sure?”
“Uh-huh. He’s been following us since we left, man.”
“Since Iowa? Why didn’t you say something?”
“Well, you know. Maybe I wasn’t seeing what I was seeing.”
“Okay. What color? What color pickup has been following us since Iowa?”
“You’re getting kind of specific, man.”
I threw out pretty much every possibility I could think of, every color in the rainbow-Dennis shaking his head at each one, uh-uh, nope, don’t think so-until the inevitable process of elimination led me to the last color I wanted to hear.
“Blue? Was it blue, Dennis?”
“Uh-huh,” Dennis said. “That’s right, sure. Blue.”
You’re it.
Standing at the bottom of the stairs with a metal tool in his hands.
Playing Auto Tag with me on a desert highway.
Trolling down Third Street while he sighted a.38 Smith amp; Wesson through the window. My Smith amp; Wesson.
Bang.
I checked the rearview mirror.
Then the sides. Right, then left.
My heart was jackhammering. It was going to do an Alien and burst right out of my chest. I veered into the next lane, nearly got obliterated by an eighteen-wheeler hauling toilet fixtures, swerved back, slowed down, worked my way to the exit lane.
“Hey… what are you doing? We stopping?”
The next exit was coming up. Dennis had dutifully read it out loud two miles back.
Wohop Road.
“I need to pee,” Dennis said.
Back to my left side mirror. I wanted to see if someone crossed lanes. There were several cars in the next lane-two separate and distinct pair of headlights. Then, suddenly, there was one.
I squinted into the mirror. What happened?
“I need to pee like a motherfucker, Tom.”
He’d turned off his lights.
There were two pair of headlights and now there was one.
He’d turned off his lights.
I floored the gas. Passed eighty and kept going.
“I don’t need to pee that bad,” Dennis said. “I won’t do it in the car.”
Eighty-five… ninety… ninety-five…
“Maybe I will.”
When the turnoff for Wohop Road appeared, Dennis didn’t bother reading it. He couldn’t. He was crouching down with his hands up over his eyes-the crash position familiar to any airline passenger.
Wait… wait…
Now.
I yanked the steering wheel hard to the right.
I’d almost passed the exit-on my way to the next one for sure. I took the turn on two wheels-my first wheelie since fourth grade-barely held the curve, then flipped back on all fours and rolled onto a mercifully empty service road where I kept right on going.
Listen.
Nothing.
How was it possible?
How could he know I was here?
At the trailer park in Iowa?
On the road to Tellings?
How?
Think.
Okay. There was one way. Sure there was. Assuming he hadn’t followed me all the way from Littleton-one way.
My ATM withdrawals.
My credit card.
The one I’d used at gas stations, at the Nevada Stop ’n’ Shop and the Sioux Nation Motel in North Dakota.
Like big, fat crumbs any good bird dog could follow with his eyes closed.
All the way from Iowa to Seattle to here.
Only…
You would need a special kind of access.
To get that kind of information-private bank records, credit card receipts, the kind of stuff they’re supposed to guard with their lives-you would need a special sort of access for that.
“Uh, I really got to pee, man.”
“A few minutes, Dennis.”
I was getting there-I was close. I’d sat down on a stool at Muhammed Alley and begun drawing something, and now it was beginning to emerge. If I peered really hard at it, maybe I could even whisper what it was.
I had to move faster. I had to Texas two-step.
As far as I could tell, the plumber hadn’t made the turnoff.
I’d shaken him.
I drove another twenty miles before I gave in to Dennis’s increasingly pitiful demands-I have to goooo, man-and turned in to a twenty-four-hour Exxon station.