Devoted(9)
He would have his Attwood signal horn and Tac Light. He never forgot those things.
At the first suggestion of a threat, he would use the horn and bolt into the house. Megan had no concern that Woody might fail to recognize a threat. He feared strangers and anything with which his routine had not familiarized him.
Pinehaven wasn’t a hotbed of crime. Even the national drug epidemic had thus far not seriously sickened this quiet backwater. Their property was just beyond the limits of the town in which she had been born and raised, and she had come to feel safe here.
Leaving Woody alone on the back porch wasn’t ideal. But he was eleven, and he cherished what independence his condition allowed him. She couldn’t be at his side around the clock, and it wouldn’t be good for either of them if she kept him close with a tether of fear as inhibiting as a leash.
She returned to bed, where she would most likely need half an hour to go back to sleep.
A small gun safe was attached to the bed rail. On retiring each night, she opened it for access to the weapon. On rising for the day, she’d lock it again. The pistol was a 9 mm Heckler & Koch USP with a ten-round magazine.
She had bought the gun a week after Jason died. She had taken shooting lessons from a former police officer who ran a self-defense school. Three years later, she continued to practice regularly.
Lying awake in the dark, she wondered if she really felt as safe as she claimed to be.
10
As far as Lee Shacket is concerned, southwest Utah sucks, sixty miles of austere moonlit “scenery” on State Route 56 from Cedar City to the state line, as far from a Starbucks or a good sushi restaurant as anywhere on the planet. But he still believes it’s necessary to travel by tertiary routes that are less policed than the interstates.
Compared to southeast Nevada, however, Utah is a lush paradise. Toured via a series of two-lane back roads, Lincoln and Nye Counties prove to be a hellish wasteland over which a fierce sun now rises like an omen of an impending thermonuclear holocaust. From the sleepy whistle-stop called Caliente to the nowhere burg of Rachel, he races through eighty-seven miles of Nevada nothing. The next town lies beyond another fifty-four miles of desolate land and lonely blacktop, a stretch of hara-kiri pavement on which rattlesnakes, bored and despairing, slither and lie waiting for the wheels of fate that will release them from the tedium of desert life.
Miles in the distance, to either side of the highway, fester settlements with names like Hiko and Ash Springs, served by state and county roads, and others like Tempiute and Adaven that can be reached only on unpaved tracks. At 6:50 a.m., he stops to fill the fuel tank at a combination service station and convenience store that, with a house behind it, stands alone at a crossroads a few miles short of Warm Springs. The gasoline at the two pumps is an overpriced brand he’s never heard of, and the building housing the store is fissured pale-yellow stucco with a blue ceramic-tile roof.
With his old life in ruins behind him and his new life with Megan still far away in California, Shacket has been in a foul mood since leaving Cedar City. Mile by mile, the arid Mojave leaches out of him what little human kindness has not been drained away by the endless injustices he has suffered.
The gas pumps aren’t as old as the fossil fuel they provide, but they aren’t of a generation that reads credit cards. He goes into the store to provide the cashier with his Nathan Palmer Visa, to activate the pump.
The man is evidently the owner, and Shacket despises him on sight. He is old and fat. He wears khaki pants with suspenders, a white T-shirt, and a narrow-brimmed straw hat, which seems like a costume, as if he is playing at being a desert bumpkin.
After Shacket fills the tank, when he returns to the store to sign the Visa form and get his card, the old guy says, “Beautiful mornin’, isn’t it?”
“Hot as a furnace,” Shacket says.
“Well, you’re not from here. To us, it’s a mellow mornin’.”
“How do you know I’m not from here?”
“Seen your plates when you pulled in. They’re not Nevada. Looks like maybe Montana.”
As Shacket signs the form, he says nothing. He concentrates on the signature, because for a moment he forgets the name that’s on the credit card. He almost signs Lee Shacket. Something is wrong with his mind.
“Only eighty-two degrees,” the cashier says. “That’s cool for these parts, this time of year.”
Shacket gets the Nathan Palmer right. He meets the old guy’s rheumy eyes. “What parts are you talking about? Your private parts?”
“Excuse me?”
“Excuse you from what?”
The cashier frowns and slides the Visa card across the counter. “Well, you have a nice day.”
Shacket doesn’t understand the anger and contempt he feels for this stranger. It scares him a little. And is irresistible.
“Excuse you from what?” Shacket asks again. This geezer pisses him off with his phony howdy-neighbor style. “Did you fart? Excuse you from what?”
The cashier breaks eye contact. “I didn’t mean no offense.”
“Did you offend me?”
“Sir, I truly don’t believe I did.”
A buzzing arises in Shacket’s head, as if a hive of wasps has taken residence in his cerebellum. “That’s what you believe, is it?”