Going Nowhere Fast Read online

  I was about to take my first step to rush him when Joe said, "What do you say we split the difference?"

  "How do you mean?"

  "I mean, you just said you'd accept the six hundred he's got, plus another two hundred and fifty to let him go, right? So what if we gave you half the two hundred and fifty? A hundred and twenty-five bucks?"

  While Meadows stood there and thought about it, I tried not to faint. Was this really Joe Loudermilk talking, offering up $125 of his hard-earned money for the life of our least cost-effective son? Or was he merely bluffing until a police unit could arrive in response to the report of four crazed black people threatening to riot that some horrified resident of this tranquil street had almost certainly called in by now?

  "I gotta have at least two-fifty," Meadows said at last, shaking his head to decline Joe's bid.

  "All right. We'll give you an even two hundred," Joe countered. "But that's it. Take it or leave it."

  Meadows fell silent again, agonizing over his decision. I used the time to look his body over for a vulnerable spot of attack. The best I could come up with was an ankle. Perhaps if I wrapped my entire body around one, and held on for dear life, I could distract Goliath for a full half second before being kicked into the nearby woods like a soccer ball at a picnic.

  And then again, perhaps not.

  "I'd need the money now, not later," Meadows said to Joe.

  "Sure. No problem."

  The big man thought about it a moment longer, then set Dog free again and said, "Okay. We've got a deal. Where's the money?"

  Joe turned to me and nodded his head, relegating the job of paying the man to me. I went to the truck to find my purse, and came back with $180 in cash. Bad Dog was still feeling around in his pockets when I handed the money over to Meadows.

  "Oh-oh," we all heard Dog say.

  "Oh-oh? Oh-oh, what?" Meadows asked.

  "Theodore, quit messin' around and give the man his money," Joe said. "A deal is a deal, already."

  But Bad Dog didn't comply. He just stood there frozen in time, a mask of abject terror solidifying on his face.

  "Theodore, the money," I said, feeling myself edging toward panic.

  "I don't have it," Bad Dog said.

  "Say what?" Meadows asked.

  "I mean, I don't have it on me. I just remembered. I left it back at the hotel."

  "Theodore, why in heaven's name did you do that?" I asked.

  "Because… I thought you guys might want to take it away from me. For safekeeping. And I didn't want the Doze here to catch me without it, so…"

  "You hid it in our cabin."

  "Yes ma'am. Inside the toilet tank in the bathroom."

  "And then you forgot about it."

  He shrugged, too embarrassed to answer the question any other way.

  "But what's the big deal? We just go back and get it, right?"

  "Uh-uh. No way," Meadows growled, shaking his shiny head. "The deal was, I get my money now or I get to tear your head off an' go home."

  Before we knew it, he had Dog in a headlock and was tensing his muscles to twist it off like a stubborn bottle cap.

  "Joe!" I screamed, looking to my husband for help.

  "What? It's only the boy's head. Since when has he ever had any use for that?"

  "Sorry, ma'am, but Doggy here has this comin'," Meadows said.

  "No I don't! No I don't!" Bad Dog protested.

  "All right. Go ahead," I told Meadows. "You want to hurt the boy, hurt the boy. We can't stop you. But you'd better be ready to hang up your Raider career for good if you do. You understand me? For good!"

  That gave him reason to pause. He kept his arm firmly around Dog's neck, but we could see him relax his grip. He had probably thought about all the potential consequences of killing our son but that one: no more football. At least until next season, a whole twelve months away.

  "Now," I said. "Stop all this foolishness and let's go on back to the Canyon to get your money."

  "Back to the Canyon?" Joe said. "Now, hold on just one cotton-pickin' minute—"

  "All right. I'll go," Meadows said, letting Bad Dog loose. "But this time, he's ridin' with me. Not with you."

  "Fine," I said. "Theodore, do what the Doozer says and go with him. Your father and I will drive ahead."

  "That's 'Dozer,' ma'am," Meadows corrected. "Like in 'bulldozer.' "

  "Oh? I thought it was 'Doozer,' as in, 'He's a real doozer.' "

  ''I'm not goin' back to the Grand Canyon," Joe said, still grousing.

  I gave him a short, unappreciative glance, then turned to Meadows again and said, "Dozer, would you be good enough to escort Mr. Loudermilk to our truck? And see that he gets safely behind the wheel? He'll be doing the driving for us today."

  "Yes ma'am. It'd be my pleasure."

  The big man reached out for some part of my husband to latch onto, but too late: Big Joe was already in the truck's cab, all buckled up and ready to go.

  Saying a lot of things under his breath I didn't think I'd want to hear.

  9

  It wasn't practical, but we went and picked up Lucille from the sheriff's office before starting for the Canyon. I suspected just having her back in tow would have a therapeutic effect upon Big Joe, and I was right. He only ranted and raved for the first forty minutes of the ride, then ran out of steam and fell silent. Maybe the fact that I drifted off to sleep somewhere near the end of his tirade had something to do with that, I don't know.

  In any case, we made good time. We were back on the Grand Canyon grounds by seven o'clock, just as the last layer of red was being swallowed up by a jet-black night sky. We had called ahead to make sure the trailer park still had a space available for Lucille, but we needn't have bothered; this was mid-October, well into the park's offseason, and accommodations were plentiful. We even ended up in our original space.

  Naturally, the only thing Dozer Meadows had on his mind upon setting the parking brake of his car was getting his hands on his money, but I wouldn't let Bad Dog take him over to the hotel until I had made a phone call first. It had been a good two days since I had last talked to Mo, and I knew she deserved an update on our situation. She was a worrier, like me, and worriers tend to lose their minds if they aren't kept abreast of what's happening with their loved ones. Especially if all the news that fits is bad.

  While Joe was busy fitting all of Lucille's hookups at the trailer park and baby-sitting Bad Dog and his oversize friend, I called our daughter from a pay phone in the lobby of the Bright Angel Lodge and told her everything that had happened to us since Wednesday night, when she'd last heard my voice. When I was through, she said exactly what I'd known she would say:

  "Mother, I'm coming down there."

  "No, Mo, you're not," I said.

  "For heaven's sake, you've meddled in an ongoing police investigation! Impersonated a murder victim, forged his signature, stolen the contents of his safety deposit box, withheld evidence. . . Am I leaving anything out?"

  "I don't know. Does lying to the authorities count?"

  "There's nothing funny about this, Mother. If I don't fly down there to stop you now, you and Daddy will be pressing license plates until the end of the next century!"

  "You're exaggerating."

  "I am not."

  "Listen, sweetheart. I didn't call you to get a lecture. I called you to hear your take on all this. What do you think is going on?"

  She paused, took a deep breath, and said, "I have no idea. What you're describing is so… so…"

  "Weird?"

  "Yeah. That word will do. Weird." She didn't say anything for a moment, then: "Mom, you say the house in those photographs had been razed from the site? Completely?"

  "There wasn't a trace of it to be found anywhere, Mo. Even the mailbox was gone."

  "You couldn't have been at the wrong address?"

  "No."

  "You're sure?"

  "I'm sure."

  "Did you talk to any of the neighbors to see i
f they knew anything?"

  "I wanted to, but your father wouldn't let me. Besides, your brother's homeboy Meadows showed up right about that time, and we had to leave."

  "I see." Mo got silent on me again. "Well, listen, do you think you could find a fax machine around somewhere? I'd like to see those photos, if I could. And that drawing you talked about too. Something about that foot, the way you describe it—it sounds familiar to me, somehow. Like I've heard about it, or read about it, somewhere before."

  "You too? I've had that feeling about it myself. I just haven't been able to figure out why yet."

  "Well, maybe I can, given the chance. See if you can fax that stuff out to me tomorrow, huh?"

  "I'll do it first thing in the morning," I said.

  Then I promised her I'd be careful an even dozen times and hung up the phone.

  * * * *

  Fifteen minutes later, Bad Dog and I were standing on the porch of our former hotel cabin, waiting for someone to answer the door. He hadn't liked it one bit, but I'd made Dozer Meadows stay behind at the trailer park with Joe. I felt imposing upon the cabin's new tenants to root around in their toilet tank was going to be hard enough to pull off without having a one-man death squad shadowing our every move. I was thinking at the time that we were going to have the hotel manager retrieve Dog's money for us, but the manager was out of his office when we got there and I didn't want to test Meadows's patience waiting for his return.

  So it was just Dog and me standing there when the cabin door eventually opened and a squat, square-shouldered little man in a floral red kimono said, "Yes? What is it?"

  There were a hundred different ways to answer that question, but I told him the truth. Flat out. I told him we were looking for jewelry and not cash, but other than that, I gave it to him straight. And he bought it. He asked us to wait a few minutes for his wife to come out of the bathroom; then he let us right in.

  "Don't be embarrassed. I've got a couple of rugrats at home myself," he told me. "They do this kind of stupid stuff all the time."

  I was afraid Dog might answer that, so I pushed him into the bathroom and shut the door behind him before he could get his mouth open. The little man in the lovely kimono only made it halfway through explaining things to his wife before Dog emerged again, patting his pockets and grinning at me victoriously.

  "Well?" I asked him a few minutes later, when we'd said all our thank-yous and good-byes and were standing back out on the porch again.

  "I got it."

  "All of it?"

  He pulled the roll out of his pocket and started to count it.

  "Theodore, don't do that now. It's too dark to see what you're doing, and I'm freezing out here. We can do that back at the trailer."

  It was one of those orders a child hears but chooses to treat like elevator muzak. He shook me off and kept counting, breathing the numbers aloud as he did so. "Three-forty, three-sixty, three-eighty—"

  "Come on, Theodore," a familiar voice implored, dripping with unmistakable venom. "Be a good boy and do what your mother tells you."

  Dog and I looked up to see Ray and Phil, our two old friends in the newspaper business, standing just below us at the foot of the porch. They were still dressed like Brooks Brothers mannequins, only more so this time; complementing each man's ensemble was a tan, full-length woolen coat with brown leather accents, pieces so exquisite they nearly took my breath away.

  As did the gun I immediately noticed Phil was holding in one hand.

  "Please don't make a sound, Mrs. Loudermilk, or Phil here will be forced to kill you," Ray said. "And your son." He sounded like a tour guide at Disneyland: pleasant, rehearsed, and thoroughly artificial.

  "We've been looking all over for you people," he continued. "We were afraid we'd missed our chance to talk to you again."

  "Ray was in a panic. But I told him you'd show up again, sooner or later," Phil said. Only now did I notice that his gun had a silencer on it.

  "You forgot your camera," Bad Dog said.

  Ray's partner grinned and shrugged, as we'd seen him do before, and said what we expected he'd say: "It's in the shop."

  "What do you want with us?" I asked, directing the question to Ray.

  "For the moment, we want you to step this wav and come along with us. ]'ow."

  "Where are we going?"

  "Not far. Get a move on, Mrs. Loudermilk. We're in a hurry here, all right?"

  There was nothing appealing about the thought of following these two anywhere, but Ray's brand of salesmanship had managed to convince me of one thing at least: He and Phil were prepared to kill us both if we didn't go along with the program.

  "Let's do what the man says, Theodore," I told Dog.

  We were led around the backside of the cabin to the rim of the Canyon itself, beyond the dark walking path and behind a small stand of trees. To get here, we'd had to pass by a few people still wandering about outdoors, a couple of young kids holding hands, and a pair of joggers running in opposite directions, but for the most part, we had gone undetected; every other visitor in the park seemed to realize that the Grand Canyon wasn't much to see at night, and had turned in accordingly. Phil had put the gun in one of his coat pockets, in any case, so that had anyone actually taken notice of us, they would have dismissed us as benign. Odd-looking perhaps, but benign.

  So here we were, poor Dog and me: hidden from everyone's view, alone and unarmed, facing the least friendly end of a maniac's gun on the one hand, and a three-thousand-foot drop on the other.

  Does that sound like a bad hair day to you, or what?

  "Step farther back, if you would," Ray said, directing us to back up until the jagged edge of the Canyon was less than a yard behind us. "There. That's fine. Just fine."

  "If it's the money you want, take it," Bad Dog said, holding his roll of bills forward for Ray to accept.

  "Thanks, no. But that was a nice thought." He and Phil turned to each other and had a good laugh.

  "Well, if you don't want money, what do you want?" I asked, starting to feel more angry than afraid. "You certainly aren't doing all this just to get a newspaper story."

  "That, dear lady, is quite true," Ray said. "We're not after a story. And as you might guess, we never were. What we're after is information. Some simple answers to a few simple questions."

  "Like what?"

  "Like where is Filly Gee?" Phil jumped in.

  "Who?"

  "Filly Gee, Mrs. Loudermilk," Ray said, his voice getting a sharp, unexpected edge to it. "The man Mr. Bettis told you about before he died. Remember?"

  "I don't know what you're talking about. Mr. Bettis never told any of us anything. He was dead when we found him, we've told you that a thousand times."

  "He never mentioned the name Filly Gee to you? Or told you where he might be hiding?"

  "No. We don't know any Philly Gees. Who or what is Philly Gee?"

  "Just a man worth a lot of money to whoever helps us find him. Does that refresh your memory at all?"

  "How much money are you talkin' about?" Bad Dog asked.

  I would have stuffed a bar of soap down his throat if I had had one.

  "Oh, I don't know," Ray said, pretending to be mulling it over. "Say, fifteen grand?"

  "You could offer us fifteen million, and it wouldn't make any difference," I said. "We don't know this Philly Gee of yours. We'd never even heard of him until this very minute."

  "He's got three toes, right?" Bad Dog asked.

  Ray gave Phil a brief glance, then turned back to Dog and nodded. "That's right."

  I suddenly wished my husband were here; nothing would have suited the moment better than a good "Jeez Looweez."

  "Then you do know him," Ray said.

  "No. We don't," I cut in, slapping a hand over my son's open mouth.

  "Mrs. Loudermilk, if the young man wants to talk, I think you should let him talk."

  "He doesn't know what he's saying! You dangled fifteen thousand dollars in front of him, so he
said the first thing that came into his head. He was guessing."

  "Guessing? He was guessing that the man we're looking for just happens to have three toes? Please, Mrs. Loudermilk. You're insulting my intelligence."

  "Mine too," Phil said.

  "Look. We saw a picture, that's all," I told them. "Of a foot with three toes. But we know absolutely nothing about who it belongs to."

  "What kind of picture?" Ray asked, sounding very skeptical.

  "It was a drawing. A sketch."

  "Whose sketch? Who drew it?"

  "We don't know, but… we suspect Mr. Bettis drew it."

  "You suspect?"

  It was a risky thing to do, but I told them everything. It seemed pretty clear to me that they were going to hear it all anyway, one way or another, so rather than oblige them one answer to one question at a time, I just filled them in all at once, barely pausing to take a breath. I figured that once they were made to understand how little we knew about Bettis and "Philly Gee," they'd let us go, and take their inquisitive little minds elsewhere.

  But I figured wrong.

  "What do you think, Phil?" Ray asked his partner when I'd told them all there was to tell.

  "I think she's telling it straight. They can't help us."

  "Yeah. That's what I think too."

  "What about the pictures she talked about? Shouldn't we go get them?"

  "Naw." Ray shook his head. "She says the house isn't there anymore, and I believe her. What are we going to do, drive down there to stare at an empty lot?" He turned to me. "I'm very sorry for all the trouble, Mrs. Loudermilk. But Phil and me, we had to be certain you weren't holding out on us. I hope you understand."

  "Frankly, I don't," I said. "But then, I don't really want to. I just want to go back to my husband and forget this whole thing ever happened. Now, if you gentlemen will excuse us…"

  I took Bad Dog's hand and started to walk away, but Phil stepped smoothly to one side to bar our way.

  "I was afraid he was gonna do that," Bad Dog said.

  "I wish I could trust you and your son to keep quiet about all this, Mrs. Loudermilk, because if I could, it would not be necessary to kill you," Ray said. "But I can't. I don't know either of you that well."