A Ticket to Hell Read online

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  About the Publisher

  Copyright

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  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  Newsletter

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Except for layers of dust, piled on across nine states, the Porsche was as new as it looked. Through his hands he could feel its headlong strength and untouched power reserve. It darted, low-slung, on the narrow roadway like a frightened beetle. The hum of power and smell of expensive newness gave him a sensual kind of pleasure. He let the sense of pleasure flood through him and drove without thinking of any of the rest of it.

  On both sides of the highway the forlorn wasteland stretched as far as he could see, under the white, metallic glare of desert sun, to distant ash-blue hills.

  The kid beside him had been mumbling steadily but Ric had stopped listening within five minutes after he’d picked him up at the LAST CHANCE FOR GAS signboard. There had been something faintly amusing about the skinny kid standing with his suitcase beside this sign when there was nothing else alive in that whole countryside.

  He wished now he’d left the kid where he saw him back there. The monotone muttering was bad enough; it was meaningless, covering the jazzing that was rattling around in the kid’s head. Ric was even less interested in the hitchhiker’s inner tensions than in his diarrhea of the tonsils.

  He kept his gaze straight ahead. There was no sense in letting the kid read in his eyes that he dug him loud and clear. Nothing moved in that desolation out there except the heat waves on the black road top.

  The kid said it again. “I asked you, how far you going, mister?”

  Ric shrugged. “What difference does it make? Anywhere ought to be better than that signboard back there.”

  “Yeah. That was a jazzing all right. I didn’t even see the road there until the guy stopped and said he was turning off.”

  “Stow it, kid.”

  “Say. What do you mean? What kind of talk is that?”

  “Son, I miss nothing. Don’t you forget it. There wasn’t any turn-off road back there.”

  The kid laughed. His hands were trembling. “Man. That’s pretty good, man. I just flew there, out in the middle of that highway, huh? Like a man from Mars, huh?”

  “If you say so.”

  Ric sensed the kid squirming in the bucket seat. He stepped harder on the gas, feeling the hot wind lick at his face.

  Finally the kid made a slight sobbing sound in his throat, slumped deeper, looked at the dashboard.

  “Yeah, yeah. Nice car. Let’s see you touch a hundred and twenty.”

  Ric didn’t answer. The speedometer needle didn’t even tremble at eighty-five.

  “Oh, man. You’re tough, guy. You don’t say nothing. You do like you want. Man. Funny, you don’t look that tough.”

  A smile pulled at Ric’s mouth. He heard the kid catch his breath. After a moment the kid said, “Mind if I look at that newspaper back there?”

  “No. Help yourself.”

  The hitchhiker twisted in the seat. He was sweated and dusty with road-grime, and there was a smell about him, an odor of fear. He pulled the newspaper off the luxurious leather suitcase.

  “Man. You buy real leather, man. Man, you live like you got it all.”

  “Shut up and read the paper.”

  The kid tensed, straightening slightly, then shook it off. He shook out the paper, stared at the headlines.

  Ric pulled his gaze from the road long enough to glance at the black band of type: DEMAND QUARTER MILLION IN IRON-FIELD CHILD SNATCH.

  “Say, man, you kidding me? This paper’s too old for wrapping fish. Man, this here paper’s five days old.”

  “You didn’t ask me how old it was. You asked me if you could read it.”

  “Man, you ever bite yourself in the morning when you’re shaving?”

  “I’ll tell you this, kid. Don’t hold that paper while you try to get your gun out of your belt. I saw that gun when you got in the car.”

  “That ought to make it easy. I don’t have to tell you what I want.”

  “You still going to make a play?”

  “You saw the gun when I got in. Why didn’t you leave me there?”

  Ric smiled again, and the smile gave his lean face a somber sad expression. “Well, kid, I’ll tell you. There was no side road, nobody in sight. That could have meant you’d pulled off a job on some sucker headed east. In that case, you just wanted a ride to a town.”

  “Man, you lay on it chilled, don’t you? You knew I might of held up somebody—and you didn’t cut out?”

  “That was between you and your parole board, sonny. You fold up that paper, put it in the back, behave yourself, and it’ll lie that way.”

  “Sonny, man. You lecture like a right joe, but you could be readin’ the slides. Them shoes you’re wearing cost sixty bucks anyhow. I’ve owned six suits in my life and combined they didn’t cost what that jacket set you back. Man, they stitched that shirt to size. Me, I ain’t asking much. Seems to me you got a load, I ain’t got nothing—and that ain’t the way I like it.”

  “Sonny, that sad story won’t buy you nothing but six feet of dirt with a hole in it.”

  The boy screamed suddenly. “Stop ridin’ me. Damn it, stop ridin’ me. You know what I want, man. You know I got my hand on my gun right now. You know you can make me real mad.”

  The car did not slow. Ric’s voice had tightened; this was the only apparent change. “You want to get out here, kid? I mean all in one piece?”

  “You talk big. You think I won’t put a bullet in you.”

  “At eighty-five a bullet in me won’t buy either one of us anything.” Ric sighed. “Son, I’m going to slow down to thirty-five. When I do, I’m going to throw you out of here.”

  The hitchhiker jerked the gun free from his belt. His hand trembled. “Man, you talk. You gonna talk yourself to death.”

  “I told you not to pull that gun. Now, kid, by the time you pick yourself up off this highway, you’re going to be one hell of a lot wiser. But it might be some time before it’ll do you any good.”

  “Stop this car.” The boy’s eyes were distended. He sat forward in the seat, twisting toward Ric, jabbing the gun into his side.

  Without seeming to move, Ric stepped hard on the brake. The car seemed to jackknife. Brakes screeched and the smell of rubber was acrid in the car.

  Thrown forward, the boy struck his head against the front windshield. He made a gasping sound and tried to brace himself. In one movement, Ric lifted his foot from the brake, touched the accelerator, and caught the boy’s wrist in his hand. He twisted, the sound of torn tendons sharp against the boy’s scream.
>
  Ric tossed the gun out his window. It smashed on the highway, bits and parts dancing and scattering in all directions.

  Ric reached beyond the boy, slapped the door handle. The door opened just slightly against the wind pressure. As the car slowed to an exact thirty-five, the door swung out more. The kid glanced at the speedometer, screamed again and clawed at the car seat.

  Ric put his hand against the boy’s chest and shoved, half-lifting him across the door facing. The screaming boy grasped at the door and it swung wide under his weight, carrying him with it. For a moment he hung on to it until his feet touched the road. Then he was jerked free, rolling and bouncing along the pavement.

  Ric hefted the cheap suitcase, pushed it out the door. It struck on its end and leaped straight up, snapping open and spilling its contents as it rolled slower and slower after the Porsche.

  Ric reached over then, caught the door, slammed it. He did not look in the rearview mirror. Lines were pulled around his nostrils and down the sides of his mouth. There were a hundred old agonies roiling in his eyes. His knuckles turned white on the steering wheel. “Damn it,” Ric said. “Oh, God damn it.”

  Chapter Two

  He lifted his foot from the accelerator, glancing at the two oblong signs stabbed in the highway shoulder. The first read, LOS SOLANOS, NEW MEXICO’S FRIENDLIEST CITY, 8 MILES. He felt a faint sinking in his solar plexus. This was the town. This was what it all had led to. The other sign read, speed limit, 45 mph. He slowed, observing the speed regulation exactly.

  He closed his eyes tightly for an instant against the glare and dryness of the sun. The air seemed to poke in the car window like hot lances through his eyeballs. The land was flat and empty and even patches of shadow were a bilious green. Cactus twisted as if withdrawing from the sun; the boulders reflected it; it glittered on the bald ranges.

  He felt a sense of loneliness for a moment, an empty need for something he’d never put into words, and never would. The desolation of the vast country was like a symbolic painting of his own life—the boulders, the dry heat—without another soul as far as he could see. His mouth twisted. When he tried to be kindly, give a kid a lift out of the sun, he ended up with a gun poked in his ribs and another memory of violence that would grab at him in the night.

  He shook his head. He did not allow himself to think about the violence or the few moments of pleasure.

  He stared at the country, memorizing it, because all of it, its very deceiving sense of being changeless and unchanging, was important to him now. What had happened to him in the past, what was ahead—if anything—had no meaning. There was only one meaning to anything—Los Solanos was before him on Highway 58.

  He glanced in the rear-view mirror. There was nothing back there, only the vanishing point of the road in surrealistic nothingness. He tried to tell himself that there was nothing behind him—no ships he’d longed to sail, no women he could have had, not even the woman who was always just ahead in the crowd. But she wasn’t really there when he tried to catch her. And the funny part of it was, the woman hadn’t really looked like Anne at all. One nice thing about being out here—he wouldn’t forever be mistaking the way Anne walked in a crowd.

  The town lunged into view suddenly. Los Solanos had less than a thousand citizens and almost none were out in the noon heat. The town wasn’t much. It really looked as though whoever laid out towns had spilled this one into a crater between desert and mountain by mistake. He did not see why people would live here by choice, unless it was just too hot to move.

  He stopped for the only traffic signal, a faded red in the sun’s glare. Heat flared into the car, almost stifling him. On his left was a Texaco station with a pick-up truck baking on an untended oil-lift. Through a window on his right he saw a few people sitting in a café. It looked small and cool, and looking at it made him thirsty.

  When the traffic signal changed, he moved forward slowly, looking the town over. Thirty or forty cars were parked the entire length of the wide street. A drug store, bank, Indian curio shop, a white two-storied hotel and other assorted shops lined the street. Nothing was happening in any of them. Then suddenly he found himself in a residential section dotted with cottonwood trees.

  Ahead of him he saw the airport. Its metallic buildings and narrow runways were glittering. Beyond it was the jackrabbit and sage country.

  He almost passed the motel before he saw it. A neon sign glowed palely in the sunlight illuminating its name—La Pueblo. Swank, he thought, almost as swank as the Porsche.

  He pulled the car into the pebbled drive, parked beside a factory-fresh Cadillac and sat for a moment. He looked the place over, pleased with it.

  To his right was the air-conditioned office. A man and woman sat inside. They stared at him but did not move. Outside the plate-glass window was a planting box of cacti and a stand of yucca beyond the entrance.

  The small motel cottages were separate units, lined along a grass-plotted patio shaded with palms and a single cottonwood. Bright sun umbrellas were opened beside a swimming pool as blue as washwater. A lot of color, he thought, in this drab place. He admired all of it before he got out of the Porsche. When he unwound himself and stood beside the car, his face was expressionless. There was no sense in letting these people see how much better all this was than he was accustomed to.

  He reached over into the rear of the Porche, lifted out the expensive leather suitcase that had impressed the hitchhiker. Hell, Ric thought, it impresses me. He rolled up the car windows, locked it. He gave it one last glance, admiring it even under its coating of dust that made it look as sweated and tired as he felt. Don’t worry, baby, he silently told the Porsche. You look at home in these swank surroundings, even if I don’t.

  Ric walked slowly across the pebbled drive, the only sound the crunching of pebbles under his shoes. He was a tall slender man in his early thirties with a bitter hungriness in his face. He did not look like a gentle man; he was faintly ugly, and there was a toughness about him that the tailored jacket could not conceal or soften. He knew all this. He paused before he pushed open the office door, thinking about it. Anybody could see what he was. He was equally sure almost anyone could see he wasn’t what he wanted to be, just as he had none of the things he’d started out wanting.

  He stepped out of the sunlight into the cool office, blinking. The air conditioning grasped at him and shook itself downward through his skin.

  “Got a vacancy?” he said. His voice was low and even faintly apologetic. There were vacancies. Only one other car was parked outside. But in his time he’d been turned away from crummier joints than this.

  “Sure.”

  The man in the wicker chair was round, and his body was tilted so it fit the cool upholstery of the wicker chair. He did not move. His gaze went over Ric, to his suitcase and shoes.

  “Come far today?”

  Ric stood there with the suitcase. “Yes. Could I have a cottage, please?”

  “Sure.” The man let his pink head roll slightly on the chair back. “Peggy. Let him sign. Give him number eight.”

  “Which one is that?” Ric said. He glanced through the tinted window along the green patio.

  “Last one down there on the right,” the man said. “It’ll be quiet down there. Real quiet. You look tired. Look like you could really use the rest.”

  “Thanks.”

  Ric pulled his gaze back to the room, batted it against the woman’s for a moment. When he saw what was in her eyes—the naked look in them—he looked away sharply though he knew she was amused because he did.

  She was in her late thirties, well-built, slightly overweight with most of it in her breasts and hips. She wore neither bra nor girdle—she didn’t even control the look in her eyes.

  “Sign this,” she said.

  She pushed a white card across the glass top of the case, leaned against it, her arms pressing her breasts.

  “That’s a slick car you’re driving,” the man said.

  “Thanks.”
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br />   “Always wanted one of them little bugs. Really travel, won’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  “Saw you locking it before you came in.”

  Ric’s head jerked up. “Yes?”

  He glanced over his shoulder, gray eyes cold.

  The man shrugged. “Nothing to me, but closed up in that sun—be like a blast furnace when you open it.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Am I right, Peggy?”

  “It’s his car.”

  “I’m just trying to tell him.”

  “Thanks,” Ric said.

  “Don’t have to lock anything around here,” the man said. “Friendly people. Friendliest people I ever met. Peggy and me, we came from southern Illinois. Never met people friendly like they are out here. Never lock a door.”

  Ric looked up at the woman, pulled his gaze from her dress front. “That license number,” he said. “I don’t remember it. Never could remember license numbers.”

  The man said, “It’s all right. We’ll fill all that in for you.”

  Ric took a deep breath, signed his name. For a moment he stood looking at it. Ric Durazo. He turned the card slowly, watched the woman read it. Nothing happened. He exhaled. They had been right about this much anyhow. It was a long way from New York, longer even than he’d hoped.

  “Want me to show you down to your cottage, Mr. Durazo?” Peggy said. It was naked in her voice now. He wondered how husbands could be so blind and deaf, and then decided maybe they got that way on purpose. Ten, twelve, fifteen years—it was a long time. Most women tired and bored him in three weeks, all except one, and that whole affair had been nothing but a joke on Ric Durazo right from the start.

  He glanced at Peggy, saw the nakedness she wanted him to see. He shook his head, then took the key from her.

  “No,” he said. “I can find it.”

  Chapter Three

  He stepped out of the office, feeling their gazes on his back and knowing what was in their faces without turning to look at them.

  He looked both ways along the street. To the east was the shaded avenue of homes, west was the airport and the barren country. He stared at the airport for a moment, at the hills writhing faintly in the haze. Then he took another quick look around the motel grounds.