77 Sunset Strip (Jerry eBooks) by Roy Huggins

Author:Roy Huggins [Huggins, Roy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jerry eBooks
Published: 2015-05-12T04:00:00+00:00

THIRTEEN

I was on Highway 84 and no one was coming up behind me with screaming sirens. The gas was low, which was just what I wanted. I figured I’d run out in about twelve miles. It actually lasted fifteen. The car choked to a stop, the nose pointed at Los Angeles, and I jumped out and ran back about fifty feet until a car began to show from the southeast where Tucson lay. I turned off to the left and dropped down behind some mesquite. The car whined up and then swept on. I got up and crossed the railroad tracks, crawled under a barbed-wire fence and stumbled out onto the desert floor.

I bent low and started at a dogtrot away from the highway. The mesquite was low and there was nothing to hide me. I stayed bent and kept on running. I could feel the hot ground on my face. I stumbled once and almost fell, holding myself up by my hands while the desert layer cut into them. The heat was low and heavy and there were no shadows, except the cloud shadows playing cragsman along the Santa Catalina Range ahead of me. I went a long way east before I stopped and slowly straightened up and stood breathing, nose and throat dry and raw with desert pollen, trying to see the place I was going back to: Tucson.

It was sunset before I saw it—a lacework of palo-verdes, a school building, and in the distance an elevated water tank looking like a silver blimp in the sky. I figured that would be Tucson. And then I stopped abruptly. Off to the left, the green sky was crossed with great striations of pink, shade on shade. It was a nice sunset, but it wasn’t right. I got out a handkerchief and wiped my face.

I was facing southeast, but there on the left was the sunset. So I wasn’t facing southeast. I put the handkerchief away and sat down on the hard earth. I shook my head.

“It’s this trip, Bailey,” I croaked. “It’s done something to you. Get up, turn around and go back. Don’t hurry. Time doesn’t really matter now. You’ll walk all night, hide the next day; then go in and do what you can. It probably won’t be good.”

I stood up slowly and turned around. And there it was. An orgy of color laid across the desert sky with a wanton violence so turbulent that its reflection in the eastern sky had seemed as bright as any sunset I had ever seen. I grinned and turned back and walked on toward the city. I went through the school grounds, crossed a paved street and came out on a long, wide, dusty road that pointed thirstily at the water tank in the sky. It was called Geronimo Road, and I had walked about half a mile in the drifting twilight when a car pulled up beside me and a voice said, “Ride?” I hesitated for a brief moment, but there was nothing I could do about it.

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