“Here? He’s coming here?”
“I’ll make sure. He’s not far away now.”
“He’s going to be so angry.”
“Probably, yes. Do what he says, and he’ll get you out of this.”
“I know. I mean… I didn’t do anything.”
“I know. Marcus…”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t let this get to you. Don’t worry… I mean, I’m guessing that’s hard to hear when you’re in custody but…”
“Yeah. Keeping my head down, keeping to myself. There’s—”
A hand came down on his shoulder. “Time’s up, let’s go.”
“I have to go,” he said. “Thank you.”
“Of course. I love you, sweetie. Stay safe,” Dawn said.
The holding cell was slightly more crowded when he got back, a biker type who looked like he could cause an eclipse taking up one of the benches. He had a shaved head, a spider-web tattoo around his right eye and a nose ring through his septum. No one was sitting or standing within ten feet of him.
Marcus took the hint, making his way to the last bunk and sitting on its edge, a roomful of men trying to pretend it wasn’t tense.
“HEY!” the new arrival bellowed his way without even raising his voice.
Marcus looked to each side. “Me?”
“Yeah, you. You afraid of me?”
He felt his stomach turn. “I… uh… yeah. You’re pretty big.”
The giant glowered at him, but only for a second. Then his face softened to disappointment. “I ain’t going to hurt anyone,” he said. “I just lost my head, is all.”
Marcus scanned the room again. The other prisoners didn’t look any nicer than the big man, just smaller. And there were a lot more of them. He got up and crossed the room, gesturing to the bunk. “Mind if I sit?”
The bigger man’s expression barely changed. “Why?”
“I don’t know. It’s boring, yo. I’ve been in here for, like, sixteen, seventeen hours already. And you said I don’t have to be afraid, so…”
His new cell mate extended a baseball mitt-sized paw. “Lawrence Cresswell. I have a slight problem with methamphetamine at present, and I owe my dealer quite a lot of cash. Sorry. Most people ain’t nice to me, and I should be better. So… yeah. Sorry.”
“Ah. Cool. Marcus Pell.” They shook.
The balding biker looked crestfallen. “My wife has a slight problem with infidelity. Unfortunately for this week’s boyfriend, I came home early from work and was pretty tweaked.”
Marcus figured he understood. “You beat him up?”
“I chased him down the street and smacked him around a little too much, yeah. He’s in hospital.”
“And… how do you feel about that?”
“Less sympathy for him than I probably should. I mean, he’s a dick for sleeping with a married woman, if he knew. But… mostly I’m just sad… Mostly. Wish she’d stop breaking my damn heart.” A morose, distant expression overtook him. He rubbed his giant palms together nervously. Then he sniffed hard, shook it off. “Wish I’d never left Susan, my ex, for her. Worst mistake I ever made. You?”
That was your worst mistake? Not the meth problem? “They think I killed a guy.”
Lawrence sat up straight. “Okay, then.” He began to shuffle slightly further away, then caught himself. “Sorry… didn’t mean it like that. You… didn’t do it, right?”
“Nah. Literally walked around a corner, saw a car, looked inside it, Five-O rolls up.”
Lawrence shook his head and leaned back against the bars. “It’s a cruel-ass world, Marcus Pell, a cruel-ass world. I tell you what, though. You were nice to me, and sometimes that’s what I need. So don’t get too worried. I got your back.”
The drive to Bakersfield had been bleak, a four-hour trek through badlands and scrub, across flat desert and through winding mountain passes. It was rare to see another car, and there were no people. The car’s dash readout said it was 118 F.
He’d dumped the Challenger in Shoshone, a tiny town in the Nopah Mountains that served a handful of wilderness tourists and campers daily.
A pickup truck with “truck nuts”—literally a pair of steel bull’s testicles hanging from its tow bar—had taken the yellow sports car’s place.
It had carried him for two more hours, through the merciless desert terrain of Death Valley, past a string of towns long abandoned—Tecopa, Baker, Dunn. Each had been a mining center at some point. Now, they were nothing but the odd dilapidated building or trail marker. The collective memory of the Old West was long dead, descendants swept away by new opportunities like so much sagebrush.
Barstow was the only notable city along the stretch, cut out of the foothills of the Calico Mountains, where the air a century earlier had been filled with the clink of pickaxes and the promise of silver. It had been saved from obscurity by railroads, as the only stopping point between Las Vegas and Los Angeles.
But it had been decades since Barstow thrived. Route 66 was gone. The rust-mottled petroleum storage tankers on the edge of town betrayed its current role serving the businesses of the nearby Midway-Sunset fields, America’s most productive wells.
He’d found a beater online, a 1996 Buick Skylark that the owner had parted with for five hundred in cash. He’d left some cash under the driver’s seat of the pickup, along with a note of apology.
