In Cold Pursuit
“We can give you enough to get you to Belen. That your car up there? Hop in.”Belen, Spanish for Bethlehem. Mary could feel Jenny’s doubt like an actual touch on her arm, but she looked at the scrubbed girl in the Levi shirt, the round-eyed baby, the Irish setter wagging sportively around in the back. She said, “Thank you very much.”
Ten minutes and two dollars later, New York-bred Jenny was still disapproving. “They could have robbed us, and then killed us.”
“The baby didn’t look very dangerous,” said Mary mildly.
“A baby would be the perfect ploy.”
In view of the theft of her gas, it did not seem the moment to remark that Southwesterners, generally speaking, were quick to respond to people in distress. Mary said instead that with their ringless fingers and casual clothes and unimposing car they scarcely had the appearance of prime targets for robbery in any case.
Jenny, half-turning, made a detached inspection of the simple dress that looked made to order, the bracelet that was an unadorned arabesque of silver, the clear hazel-eyed profile. “You do,” she said.
Once back on the road, after the detour for gas and a lock for the tank, Mary began to feel light-hearted and holiday-minded; the ease with which they had gotten through that difficulty seemed an omen. The sun was warmer now, and they would reach the motel in plenty of time for a reviving drink—for her; Jenny was paradoxically prim in that area—and a swim before they did anything else.
But she realized presently that it was going to be a very long trip. Jenny asked duty questions—“What are those trees? Was that a roadrunner? Are those the same mountains or new ones?”—but otherwise seemed content to maintain a silence reinforced by her huge sun-glasses. For the first time she could remember, Mary regretted the lack of a radio.
At Socorro, so-named because it was here that a half-starved Spanish expedition had been provided with food by Indians, it seemed time for a sandwich and something to drink. Jenny undid her seatbelt, angled a long bony arm backward, and produced both. She said with a surprised glance at a label, “This isn’t diet.”
“No.” Mary gave her a curious glance. “I can’t understand why you want it to be.”
This was the closest approach she had made to the situation, and she considered it not only fair but conspicuous by its absence: not to notice someone in Jenny’s wasted condition counting calories was like pretending not to see a flowing red beard, grown overnight.
“I like the taste of it,” said Jenny, but she had actually hesitated.
She was a neat passenger. She turned presently to tuck the empty cans and wadded-up sandwich bags into the cooler for future disposal. She said casually when she turned back again, “That blue car has been behind us for a long time.”
Mary had been intermittently aware of it in the rear-view mirror, but in a day of regulated speed— although most cars on this road nudged sixty and now and then one flashed by at well over seventy—it was possible to travel as far as Las Cruces in a kind of informal convoy. But this was also the loneliest stretch of the journey, with only crows and an occasional circling hawk in the nearby landscape, and the corroboration of the following car made her very slightly nervous. What if Brian Beardsley had simply been keeping an eye on the house for Jenny’s emergence?
Well, what if he had? He’s served a term for aggravated assault, that’s what, thought Mary, and eased the speedometer up to sixty-five. The blue car with its single occupant came along as if on an invisible string, but, again, there were drivers who automatically maintained the speed of the vehicle ahead.
Jenny craned over. “Won’t you get a ticket at this rate? I mean if anybody ever patrols this highway?”
She was certainly very law-abiding for someone who had adopted such a rebellious stance over her own affairs—and, like many visitors, she seemed to find the Southwest interesting but a little comical, an area put together amateurishly by well-intentioned people who had not had the advantage of seeing how things were done in the East. “Certainly it’s patrolled,” said Mary, nettled because it was undeniable that they hadn’t seen a single police car in well over two hundred miles. “You didn’t think those were real crows, did you?”
At the same time, she flicked on her right indicator and began to move off the road. “Rest area,” she said briefly in answer to Jenny’s question. “Stretch our legs.”
The blue car cruised steadily by, was a heat-shimmered blur, was gone. Still, Mary did a little unhurried strolling around in the wind and sun after she had deposited the lunch litter in a trash can, although Jenny retreated almost at once with defensive hands on her hair, before she got back behind the wheel. They had travelled about five miles when they encountered the blue car again, pulled off in the emergency lane with its flashers on and its hood raised. Its driver, obviously investigating the engine, was visible only as a pair of trousered legs.
Such a sight wasn’t at all uncommon on a trip of this length, but Mary wondered that Jenny, who had commented on the car in the first place, made no remark. A fast side glance showed her why: Jenny had dragged her hair over one shoulder and was making her several-times-daily count of her split ends.
They entered a stretch of road where fresh tarring was going on, with flagmen in attendance, and after that a glance at the gas gauge indicated a stop so that they would not have to bother about this particular errand in Juarez. Here, the youth in charge of the hose hung it up when the tank had been filled, proceeded around to the front of the car, bent, straightened, summoned Mary out.
“See that blister?”
Mary bent in turn, but didn’t.
“You got a bad soft spot there, that tire could go any time.