3

Jerry Hobart and Tim Whitley were stuck on the road to Las Vegas. Interstate 15 was always just the first part of the pleasure, the incredibly clear sky and the bright yellow morning sun striking the pavement ahead of the car and making the tiny diamond particles pressed into the asphalt glitter. It didn’t matter that the diamonds were really bits of broken glass pressed into the hot asphalt by the weight of the cars passing at eighty or ninety. They were like the sequins on the little outfits of the waitresses and the girls in the shows. They weren’t diamonds either, and the glitter in their makeup wasn’t gold dust, and Tim Whitley didn’t care. All that would have done was add to the price. The thought of the women made him eager to get there.

When they had started this morning, the cars on the road to Las Vegas had seemed to skim the pavement, barely touching it. The air was hot and dry and clean. Whitley had sat in the passenger seat and stared out at the high desert, looking at the rocky hills sprouting yuccas and small, paddle-shaped prickly pears, and the vast flatlands with Joshua trees spread out like straggling migrations of men, the speed of the car making them appear to move.

But now it was after four o’clock, and they had been inching along at a walk, then stopping dead for a few minutes, then creeping forward a few feet for nearly seven hours. “Jesus,” he said. “This is the worst.”

Jerry Hobart’s head turned slowly toward him like a tank turret. His eyes were slits. “The day isn’t over yet.”

“If it would just either speed up, or stop,” Whitley complained. “Hell, if it would just stop. Then we could turn off the engine and save the gas for later, and take a decent piss by the side of the road.”

Hobart said nothing. The jaw muscles on the side of his face kept tightening and going slack.

“We’ve been climbing for the past hour or two. Maybe I can find a station with news on it now.” Whitley leaned close to the dashboard in spite of the fact that the speakers were in the door panels, and used a delicate touch to move the vertical line in minute increments from one band to the next. Once he managed to find the faint singing of Spanish voices that reminded him of a party inside a house far away. Once there was bandy music, and he heard an announcer say something about narcotnafccantes. “The whole fucking world is turning into Mexico.”

Hobart said nothing, and the silence bothered Tim. Hobart was older and more experienced, and he was one of those men who had a solitary self-sufficiency, a strength that Tim knew he lacked. Each time Tim talked, he regretted it afterward. He knew that it was unseemly to complain, and there was no use whining to the man who had been at least moving the car forward when the cars ahead of it moved.

But Tim was frustrated. Four days ago they had rented a suite in the Venetian, and then yesterday they had driven to Los Angeles to do some work. They had done their job last night, collected their pay, packed up, and headed back toward Las Vegas in the morning. Hobart’s establishment of an alibi was thoughtful: Check into a good hotel on the Las Vegas Strip, go out every day and every night, and then one night simply go out and drive to Los Angeles for the killing and drive back. Their suite was officially occupied while they were gone, and nobody was keeping track of anything else. Hobart had called the hotel a couple of times. Once he had complained that the water pressure in the shower wasn’t strong enough and asked them to fix it while he was out gambling. Hobart had left their cell phones in the room and made calls to them so there would be a record that they had received calls from a signal repeater that was in Las Vegas within a few minutes of the killing.

But Tim Whitley was feeling increasingly agitated now. They had expected to be back in the hotel by ten or eleven. Now it was after four, and they had not gone a mile in the past hour. Who expected a traffic jam in the middle of the desert? It was the worst jam Whitley had ever seen, and they weren’t even in a city. They were fifty miles from a real town, practically on the edge of Death Valley. The gas gauge looked from here as though the tank was barely above empty. He hoped it was just the angle making the gauge look that way. He wasn’t facing it head-on like Hobart was in the driver’s seat.

Of course, somebody would come along and help if they ran out of gas-there wasn’t much solitude on Route 15 today-but that would make their beautiful alibi problematical: There would be somebody who had seen the two of them stalled on the road from Los Angeles to Las Vegas at the wrong time. If they stopped, they were vulnerable. And there was two hundred thousand dollars in cash in the trunk. It wasn’t that people didn’t drive into Las Vegas with two hundred thousand in cash every day, it was that a pair of shitheels in a six-year-old Hyundai didn’t. If anything happened to separate them from the endless, anonymous current of traffic-if they had to get out to push the car to the shoulder and sit there with it while everybody stared at them in pity-then they would probably find themselves talking to a tow-truck driver or a cop. It wasn’t fair. This should have been simple.

At first everything had been quick and easy. He and Hobart had been working together for about a year, and they were sure of each other. There was no indecision when they saw Philip Kramer come out of the house after the meeting. Hobart said, “We’ll take him in his car so we don’t have a body lying on the ground that we have to drag out of sight. Go find a place with a clear shot at the left side of his car.”

That was not as easy as it sounded. A parked car has to be stopped with its right side to the curb and its left to the street. That didn’t suggest a lot of hiding places. But Tim knew that Hobart never spoke idly, and not doing what he said was the same to Hobart as refusing to do it.

Tim Whitley ran down the street toward the place where Phil Kramer had left his Toyota sedan, and searched. The only hiding place he could find to the left of Kramer’s car was inside the van parked across the street. Tim was a car thief, and he had his slim-jim with him. By the time Kramer came up the dark street, Tim Whitley was crouched down in the back of the van right behind the driver’s seat. When Kramer’s door opened, Tim heard it. He went to the window of the van and fired.

Tim felt good about it. It wasn’t Hobart this time, with Tim only there to steal a car to use in the job and drive away afterward. This time Tim was the shooter. Hobart’s only part in the job had been to walk up the street behind Kramer to keep him preoccupied and under the impression that he knew what to be afraid of.

Tim Whitley sensed a change in Hobart, who was shifting in his seat, trying to see around the car ahead. “What do you see?”

“Cars are getting off up there.”

“That’s probably good, isn’t it?” Whitley said. “We’ve finally come to what’s holding up the traffic. It’s got to be an accident. Once we get past that, we’ll be home-free.” He kept watching Hobart for a reaction.

“I don’t see an accident. They’re just getting off. Like a detour.”

Tim could see it now, too. There was an exit ramp far ahead, and cars were moving to the right to take it-not a huge stream of cars, but maybe one in ten. They climbed to a narrow road above, turned left to cross an overpass, and drove off somewhere to the left and away into the rocky hills.

He knew that Hobart was going to take that road, just from looking at his face. Nine out of ten drivers were staying on the interstate, but the one-tenth that were willing to veer off onto a road that was only two lanes at its widest would surely include Hobart. He had the peculiar, rare quality of absolute confidence in himself and depthless contempt for everybody else.

Hobart took the exit ramp and accelerated up the incline to the other road. He stopped only for an instant, not because he had to look to the right-nobody was coming from that direction, nor had there been since Whitley had first seen the exit-but just to look at the desert from up here.

“Jerry?”

“What?”

“Do you happen to know where this goes?”

“No. But you can get anywhere from anywhere else, if you’re moving. Those people back there aren’t.”

Tim knew it wasn’t a good idea to ask anything else for the moment. He knew that it wasn’t manly to keep expressing uncertainty, to keep demanding information that he had not earned by waiting and seeing. He did not want to squander the precious respect he had gained by taking Phil Kramer with one shot from the van. Doing that had shown he was calm and unafraid.

Still, Tim wanted to voice the concern he had that this might be a road that didn’t go where Hobart imagined. He recalled hearing there was one road off Interstate 15 that people took to drive up and around to come out on the north side of the Grand Canyon, the side where there were practically no people. And he knew there was another exit that took you north into Death Valley.

Tim went back to fiddling idly with the radio tuner. It was a fake activity now, and he was just doing it to change the number on the digital indicator, to keep Hobart thinking he was doing a job, like the sonar man in a submarine movie where everybody stood around sweating while he listened for enemy ships. The radio should be picking up something intelligible, but it wasn’t working right.

Hobart kept driving up the road between the dry, rocky hills. As the minutes passed and personalities reasserted themselves, the distances between the cars that had left the traffic jam lengthened. There were some drivers who just stomped on the gas pedal and tore through the desert as though the jam were chasing them. Others seemed to wonder if they had made the wrong decision to leave the only major highway in the desert and drive off hoping that the new road would magically take them to Vegas, where they wanted to be. They went slowly, looking back at the interstate as long as they could, hoping to see some improvement so they could go back.

Hobart flashed past a dozen of these cars and kept going for a half hour before Tim Whitley began to feel that he was going to have to speak. He considered various things he could say, but rejected each of them. Any reference to the time that had passed, the distance, or the traffic might sound like whining, and Hobart didn’t respect whining. He had already foreclosed any talk about their destination. Hobart had said he didn’t know where the road led, but seemed to think he could take it to Las Vegas even if it didn’t go there.

Whitley let the miles slip past. As he looked out at the rock shapes and colors and the brightness, he conceded that the desert was beautiful. But it was beautiful in the same way the ocean was, in a hostile, treacherous way. If the boat were to spring a leak or the car to break down, the scenery would not be just a sight anymore, but a vast harshness. One was deadly cold and the other was deadly hot, and they were both too enormous for a person to slight in this thoughtless way. It was almost bad luck not to give the desert the fear it deserved.

He felt the car’s engine stop racing. In the new silence, Hobart whispered, “Shit.” Whitley could see his arm muscles straining as the car coasted. The power steering had cut off, and each adjustment Hobart made to the front wheels meant fighting the dead mechanism. He aimed the car at the shoulder of the road, brought it onto the gravel, and stopped. A second later, the cloud of dust they had kicked up drifted over the car and away.

Tim knew they were out of gas, but he had to say it anyway. “Out of gas?”

“Uh-huh.” Hobart turned to look into Whitley’s eyes.

“What are we going to do?”

“Walk to get some gas.”

Tim Whitley turned and looked back at the long, empty road behind them, a thinning black surface that dissolved into shining pools of mirage water in the relentless sunshine. He tried to calculate. They had been driving for about a half hour. No, more. It was at least fortyfive minutes. He didn’t know how fast Hobart had been driving, but it had to be at least sixty miles an hour. That was a mile a minute. “We can’t walk back that far. It’s more than forty miles.”

Hobart said, “No, we can’t. We go in the other direction. There’s a town up ahead.”

“How do you know?”

“I happened to see it on a map. I think it was on the place mat in that diner in Baker. I know the road goes north this far. To the left is Death Valley, and the road swings off to the right to where the town is. We’ll buy a three-gallon can of gas and pay somebody to drive us back here with it.”

“Do you happen to know how far it is?”

“Well, if you walk on the road, it could be ten miles, but the road hooks to the right, so we can take a shortcut across country and meet it. I’d guess it would be four miles that way, maybe even two.”

“Jesus, Jerry,” said Tim. “Walk across the open desert like that?” The car’s air conditioning had cut off with the engine, so the windows were heating the enclosed space like a greenhouse. “It must be over a hundred out there.”

“Sure it’s over a hundred. It’s the fucking desert!” Hobart set the hand brake, wiggled the gearshift to be sure it had clicked into Park, and wrenched the steering wheel to lock it. He took the keys, got out and slammed the door.

The idea of waiting here alone in the car tried to form in Tim’s mind, but he couldn’t grasp and hold it. Being here was unthinkable. It wasn’t that something terrible would happen if he were alone, being alone was terrible. He opened the door and got out. The air was so hot it hit the nerves of his skin like something sharp. He stood looking down at the black pavement with swirls of sand on it.

The road was only a layer of asphalt that some crew had dumped from a truck and rolled flat one day. It wasn’t safety. It was only a sign that some men had been here once a few years ago.

Tim began to walk away from the pavement toward Hobart. After a few steps into the dirt, his tie to the road wasn’t as strong, and he began to trot. When he caught up with Hobart, he was already sweating. They kept walking to the northeast between hills that were just piles of rocks. Tim knew that he needed to be smart and use the few advantages he had. There was the sun, and it was getting lower, so he could identify the west with his eyes closed. He knew that time was important.

He concentrated on keeping up with Hobart. It shouldn’t have been difficult because he had longer legs and he was younger. But Hobart sometimes seemed to be something that wasn’t quite human anymore. It wasn’t that he hadn’t started as human, but that he just wasn’t as weak as a man anymore. He had burned the softness out of himself a while ago. Hobart kept going straight as though he were walking a surveyor’s line. Tim supposed that was a kind of good news. If they went straighter, they’d go farther and meet the curve of the road sooner.

After walking until his shoes had gotten full of sand, Tim noticed that his face was dry. The air was so hot and parched that his sweat dried before it could form drops. He looked at his watch. “We’ve been walking for fortyfive minutes. At this pace I make that three miles, give or take.”

“That ought to be far enough,” said Hobart. He took a gun out of his shirt and shot Tim through the chest, and then stood over him and shot him through the forehead.

He put the gun back into his belt under his shirt, grasped Tim’s ankles, and dragged his body to the side of one of the innumerable piles of rocks. He dug down a few inches with his hands to make a depression, and rolled Tim into it. He covered the body with rocks and then walked the three miles back to the road.

When Hobart reached the car, he opened the trunk, took out the gas can, and poured the three gallons into the gas tank. He started the engine, turned on the air conditioning, and opened the windows to blow the hot air out of the car while he accelerated toward the gas station in Amargosa Valley. With a full tank, he could be back in Las Vegas in a couple of hours.