“HEEL AND TOE, SON! HEEL AND TOE!”
He looked to his right. The man yelling looked thirtyish, in an “AC Delco” ball cap, with shaggy light brown hair and sunglasses. He was watching the ride intently. “Dang! Pushing the line again,” he muttered.
He pulled off his cap and slapped it against the rail.
Bob nodded toward the vehicle. “Friend of yours?”
Annoyed, the man put his cap back on and nodded. “My younger brother. His ride, his team. But I taught him to drive. Or I thought I did, anyhow.”
“Big racing town?” Bob asked. A pink, heavily sponsored Nitro Funny Car sat in the infield, next to its trailer. Between various corporate logos, the word “JENKINS” was spray-painted on the hood in futuristic, boxy italicized capitals.
The other man followed Bob’s line of vision. “Yeah… not at the Valley. No, sir. They just race stocks here, modifieds. Too rough for Nitro, too short on the straightaways. That’s just a promo the Jenkins team does.” Then the man frowned, puzzled. “Mind, they do fuel it up here sometimes. Have that big ol’ tanker in the lot on Fridays. That’s kind of weird, ‘cos it don’t run here, just down at Ron Fellows…”
Bob let his ignorance show. “Ron Fellows…?”
“Spring Mountain, the operation down the road,” the man said. “Long story short, Ron Fellows is a driver, ran in NASCAR, endurance races like Le Mans. He’s got a school based out of it. Anyhow… real nice place, real good layout, lots of different track setups, clean concrete surfaces to handle the heat. So all the high-level stuff, when it comes into town, goes there. Team Jenkins runs Nitro there, does testing and driver training.”
It couldn’t be a coincidence, Bob supposed. “Jenkins… is that related to Jenkins Mechanical, in Bakersfield?”
“One and the same. Dick Jenkins is old school.”
“I have a friend working there.”
“Uh huh.” The man directed his attention back to the track. “OH, HEY NOW! COME ON, LES! FOOT DOWN!” He glanced back at Bob. “Takes the perfect line out of the second turn, barely steps on it coming into the straightaway. I swear, he’s got talent, if he could ever learn to concentrate.”
Bob nodded, but had half-tuned him out.
If his friend Dawn had had her way, he’d have gone to Bakersfield instead of heading to Seattle by bus via Pahrump. She wanted him to see Marcus, her adopted stepson, give him some encouragement from another male voice. He was apprenticing at Jenkins, a daunting first trip for the nineteen-year-old.
“He’s a sensitive kid, and he looks up to you,” she’d said. Then she’d gone quiet for a moment, the way she did, and said gently, “He talks about you all the time. I think he sees you as family now, and he needs one. We all do.”
Dawn and Marcus had seen him at his worst, when he was living on the street, and then when they’d been on the run, fleeing the killers of Marcus’s parents and Bob’s CIA past. But she didn’t believe there was a risk anymore; he could sense it.
Even though he’d been on the road for nearly a year, she fixated during their calls on the fact that no one hired by his former bosses had tried to kill him since Memphis, six months earlier.
“If I didn’t care about both of you,” he’d reminded her, “this wouldn’t even be a discussion. There’s a reason we use burners and don’t see each other.”
And so it had gone, Dawn trying to erode his will to keep moving, urging him instead to settle and build a life for himself; Bob trying to get her to understand that he didn’t want to keep running but he had no choice.
Thus, Seattle.
He watched the stock car complete another lap, the older brother clapping and cheering an improved performance. Seattle was for a second opinion. The specialist in Las Vegas, Dr. Michael Strong, had diagnosed him as having ADHD and complex PTSD.
The first part he could handle. That was all fine, such as it was.
He watched the stock car break too late, almost skidding out. The chatty brother was wringing his hair out.
But then he kept on with the PTSD nonsense.
The stock car was pulling up to the pits. The bearded man hopped the rail and headed in its direction, leaving Bob on his own. He looked around, realizing he hadn’t checked his perimeter in ten minutes.
He scolded himself for being so lax.
He headed towards the parking lot and exit. The speedway had been a distraction, but he still had two hours before his bus was due to leave.
Pahrump made sense. There were more direct routes from Las Vegas, but anyone hunting him would check larger destinations as a matter of course. Most people hide out in crowds.
Being counterintuitive—using buses, avoiding traffic and airport cameras—had served him well for close to a year. But eventually, someone would cotton on.
The town was an hour northwest of Las Vegas, perched on the edge of Death Valley, where the daily temperatures bleached bones until they cracked. A pastiche of small homes with zero-scaped front yards and red-grey dirt, the only greenery easily visible was the odd cactus.
It didn’t exactly scream “friendly.” There wasn’t much there, that he could tell: some housing developments, a Walmart, a few casinos, a couple of brothels. If the town had thirty thousand residents, it was hard to see where.
Or, maybe, why, Bob figured. It was the kind of frontier town that usually died out with the closure of a local mine or rerouting of a rail line, long before the Great Depression. It was dusty, scorched daily by temperatures above 110 F.
People didn’t go to Pahrump to draw attention, Bob figured. They went there to disappear. Maybe that’s the real reason you chose this route; maybe you were looking for another Tucson.
Somewhere to just disappear.
The speedway was a twenty-minute walk from the bus stop. Bob had always been curious about stock cars. He’d figured they’d have burgers, at least.
But he’d found on arriving it just wasn’t that busy, the track often rented during the day by individual outfits like the chatty brothers.
The dirt-and-gravel parking lot was almost empty, a half-dozen cars set back a few dozen yards from the back of the bleacher seating. A couple of pickups, a sedan and…
Bob whistled under his breath. The Dodge Challenger had arrived while he was watching the run, its throaty engine drowned out by the stock car. It was near the entrance, a ’73 in bright yellow, with black rally stripes.
Serious muscle. He approached it and crouched slightly to study its lines. So pretty, he sighed.
