was just about all they’d seen since leaving Fallon (and all headed the other way, west), but a car. Really burning up the road, too.
She thought about it, then shook her head. “No. It was good to see Gary and Marielle, and Lake Tahoe—”
“Beautiful, wasn’t it?”
“Incredible. Even this ...” Mary looked out the window. “It’s not without beauty, I’m not saying that. And I suppose I’ll remember it the rest of my life. But it’s ...”
“. . . creepy,” he finished for her. “If you’re from New York, at least.”
“Damned right,” she said. “Urban Zone of Perception. And even if we’d taken 1-80, it’s all desert.”
“Yep. Tumbling tumbleweeds.” He looked into the mirror again, the lenses of the glasses he wore for driving glinting in the sun. The oncomer was a police-car, doing at least ninety. He squeezed over toward the shoulder until the righthand wheels began to rumble on the hardpan and spume up dust.
“Pete? What are you doing?”
Another look into the mirror. Big chrome grille, coming up fast and reflecting such a savage oblong of sun that he had to squint ... but he thought the car was white, which meant it wasn’t the State Police.
“Making myself small,” Peter said. “Wee sleekit cowrin beastie. There’s a cop behind us and he’s in a hurry. Maybe he’s got a line on—”
The police-car blasted by, making the Acura which belonged to Peter’s sister rock in its backwash. It was indeed white, and dusty from the doorhandles down. There was a decal on the side, but the car was gone before Pete caught more than a glimpse of it. DES-something. Destry, maybe. That was a good name for a Nevada town out here in the big lonely.
“—on the guy who nailed the cat to the speed-limit sign,” Peter finished.
“Why’s he going so fast with his flashers off?”
“Who’s there to run them for out here?”
“Well,” she said, giving him that odd-funny look again, “there’s us.”
He opened his mouth to reply, then closed it again. She was right. The cop must have been seeing them for at least as long as they’d been seeing him, maybe longer, so why hadn’t he flipped on his lights and flashers, just to be safe? Of course Peter had known enough to get over on his own, give the cop as much of the road as he possibly could, but still—
The police car’s taillights suddenly came on. Peter hit his own brake without even thinking of it, although he had already slowed to sixty and the cruiser was far enough ahead so there was no chance of a collision. Then the cruiser swerved over into the westbound lane.
“What’s he doing?” Mary asked.
“I don’t know, exactly.”
But of course he knew: he was slowing down. From his cut-em-off-at-the-pass eighty-five or ninety he had dropped to fifty. Frowning, not wanting to catch up and not knowing why, Peter slowed even more himself. The speedometer of Deirdre’s car dropped down toward forty.
“Peter?” Mary sounded alarmed. “Peter, I don’t like this.”
“It’s all right,” he said, but was it? He stared at the cop-car, now tooling slowly up the westbound lane to his left, and wondered. He tried to get a look at the person behind the wheel and couldn’t. The cruiser’s rear window was caked with desert dust.
Its taillights, also caked with dust, flickered briefly as the car slowed even more. Now it was doing barely thirty. A tumbleweed bounced into the road, and the cruiser’s radial tires crushed it under. It came out the back looking to Peter Jackson like a nestle of broken fingers. All at once he was frightened, very close to terror, in fact, and he hadn’t the slightest idea why.
Because Nevada’s full of intense people, Marielle said so and Gary agreed, and this is how intense people act. In a word, weird.
Of course that was bullshit, this really wasn’t weird, not very weird, anyhow, although—
The cop-car taillights flickered some more. Peter pressed his own brake in response, not even thinking about what he was doing for a second, then looking at the speedometer and seeing he was down to twenty-five.
“What does he want, Pete?”
By now, that was pretty obvious.
“To be behind us again.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why didn’t he just pull over on the shoulder and let us go past, if that’s what he wants?”
“I don’t know that, either.”
“What are you going to—”
“Go by, of course.” And then, for no reason at all, he added: “After all, we didn’t nail the goddam cat to the speed-limit sign.”