Читать книгу City Out of Time - William Robison III - Страница 6

Baker, California

April 8, 1996

Pike’s Restaurant was every bit of the dump that Lanz remembered. In the 1950’s, Pike’s had been part of a small local empire that included a Mobil Oil gas station, an El Rancho motor hotel complete with swimming pool, and the eponymous Pike’s Restaurant. Not much was left. The gasoline station had been reduced to a couple of pumps. The motel had closed nearly ten years before. Even the restaurant was a shell of what it had been ten years earlier when teenaged Lanz and Seth had come here for pie and a few hours away from any sort of adult supervision. Not to gloss over Lanz’s golden memories of his youth… he knew the place had been seedy even then, but there had been a charm to seedy when he was that age. Now, Lanz almost felt embarrassed walking through the front door.

If Colonel Buck felt any sort of discomfort in his surroundings though, he wasn’t letting on. He sat back in a duct taped vinyl booth that probably hadn’t been cleaned in a couple of weeks. With a glass of ice cold milk and a generous slice of cherry pie in front of him, he looked, for all that any one could tell, like a man on vacation. The Colonel waved Lanz over and Lanz took a seat on the other side of the booth from the Colonel.

“Can I order you some pie?” Colonel Buck asked.

“It should really be my treat, sir,” Lanz replied.

The Colonel laughed and pulled a wad of dollars out of his pocket that was as big as a fist. It looked like hundreds of dollars.

“See this?” he asked, waving the money in front of Lanz, “It’s play money. Where I live everything is taken care of – uniforms, housing, even meals. So money really has no meaning to me. I always have enough to get what I need.”

Lanz looked at the money like it was a magic wand. “Must be nice.”

“I also rarely have a chance to spend money,” the Colonel noted. “Pie, especially, can be a treat. Would you like a slice?”

“Sure,” I said.

The Colonel waved the waiter over and handed him a wad of bills without counting them, “My friend will have the same.”

“Yes, sir,” the waiter replied enthusiastically, and as he walked off, he started counting the money in his hands.

“Thank you,” Lanz said.

“It’s my pleasure, son,” The Colonel replied. “Now… shall we get down to business?”

“Business? Oh, right… the Will…”

The Colonel hesitated, “Is everything alright?”

“Yes… fine… why do you ask?”

“It’s just that you seem… well… you sounded kind of reluctant on the phone earlier. Is there something… was there something between you and your brother that I should know about?”

“My brother? No. Nothing. Actually, Colonel, I’ve just been having a really bad day.”

“Ah… I see… how bad?”

“The kind of bad that makes you question your place in the universe.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Quite frankly, I was thinking of getting away from my life for a while – maybe exploring a bit, finding a new place to live, a new life to have, a new me.”

“In my experience, no matter how far you run, you can’t outdistance your past.”

“Only I don’t really have much of a past, do I? My brother is dead. My parents are both gone. And the only family I have left, my uncle, would never come looking for me.”

“So this is about your brother, then?”

Lanz took a moment to think about this before answering.

“Seth and I never really saw eye to eye. He was never serious – always wandering off into some new scheme or adventure. He was restless and wild. Without parents, he was a real handful. I was only a few years older myself, but the job or raising him was mine. Our Uncle Pete gave us a place to stay and food to eat and clothes to wear, but he wasn’t a parent. To him, we were distant relatives crashing on his couch. Seth was always running off and I was always bringing him back home. I think he resented me for that.’

‘But Seth was my only family, Colonel – my only connection to the past. We didn’t exactly see eye to eye, but he was still part of my life. It didn’t matter that we didn’t get along. Just seeing Seth would remind me of all that we’d been through together – all that we’d survived. But… ultimately… he finally found something he couldn’t outrun and I wasn’t there to bring him back home. Now, I’m on my own.”

“It was your brother’s time,” Colonel Buck noted. “Perhaps it was your time too.”

“What?”

“I once had a brother – only we weren’t related by blood. We joined the service at the same time, shared many of the same adventures, and lived, loved, and fought together. But then, tragically, I lost him. I was really torn up about it, Franco. I even thought about quitting. I couldn’t imagine doing this job without him. In a way, I was lost right along with my brother. But then, I realized that just because he was gone didn’t mean I had to quit. It just meant that it was time to move on to a new phase of my life. Maybe it’s time for you to move on as well, Lanz.”

Before Lanz could say another word, the waiter arrived with another slice of cherry pie and a glass of ice cold milk. As Lanz contemplated the pie and the milk, Colonel Buck slipped a plain manila envelope on the table in front of Lanz.

“This is what your brother wanted me to give you,” Colonel Buck noted. “He said that you’d know what to do.”

Lanz looked at the envelope and nodded. Somehow, Lanz had expected something as ordinary as an envelope from Seth.

“And now I’ve said my piece and done my business,” Colonel Buck said. “Please enjoy your pie and your milk… and with luck, perhaps our paths will cross again.”

The Colonel slipped out of the booth and stood up, straightening his uniform as he went, and balancing on his cane. Lanz watched him stand with a bit of surprise on his face.

“You’re leaving? Now? Don’t you want to see what Seth put in the envelope?”

“I’m not really the curious type, Lanz,” Colonel Buck noted. “I’m sure whatever he left you will have some meaning for you. But as for me, I’m only the messenger – and my job here is done. Goodbye, good luck, and God speed, Lanz Franco.”

The Colonel turned so fast that Lanz was still trying to get his hand up for a salute when the Colonel hobbled through the front door of the restaurant and was gone.

Lanz turned back to the envelope on the table. It was plain and blank. He reached out and flipped it gently over. Something inside the envelope made a rattling noise as it hit the table top, but other than that, there was no indication whatsoever as to the contents of the envelope – no writing, no stamps, nothing.

Lanz took a bite of the pie, but it didn’t distract him from the envelope. Finally, he could stand the suspense no longer. He gently put down the pie fork, moved the pie and the milk to the side, and slid the envelope directly in front of him.

Lanz pried up the metal flanges that clasped the envelope shut and lifted the flap before shaking the contents on to the table. One piece of paper and a round object that turned out to be a compass slipped out.

Lanz slid the compass into his hands. It was a military issued compass. There were no nicks or markings and nothing to indicate that it was anything other than a compass. Lanz put the compass on the table and then picked up the single piece of paper and held it up to see what it said.

Lanz,

35529391 -116124235

Seth

Lanz felt a deep kick to his stomach. This was it? Some sort of mathematical joke? After all that Seth and Lanz had been through, all Seth had given him was a compass and some numbers… compass… numbers? Lanz rolled his eyes. The numbers were map coordinates.

Seth had loved the outdoors. Uncle Pete had taken them camping when they’d first moved to Las Vegas and taught them how to read a map, how to make a tent, how to navigate by compass. Seth had joined the Scouts and even become an Eagle Scout. Lanz had hated camping, at first, but had eventually embraced it for the time it allowed him to spend with his brother.

“What the hell?” Lanz muttered under his breath.

“Everything all right?” asked the waiter from behind the counter.

Lanz looked up and then slowly nodded, “I’m fine.”

All the same, he gathered the paper and the compass and then stood up and left the rest of his pie and milk on the table. He walked quickly out of the restaurant and went to his car.

He drove down Baker Blvd to the parking lot of the Bun Boy restaurant and pulled into the parking lot near the giant thermometer. By the light of a street lamp, he looked at the piece of paper again.

There was nothing more to the paper than coordinates - directions to some mysterious wilderness location. No hidden message. Had Seth left something for Lanz out in the middle of nowhere? Some buried treasure? Or was this some sort of practical joke from beyond the grave?

Lanz put the paper back in the envelope and added the compass as well. He was going to drive back to Las Vegas and sort this all out after a good nights rest and…

On the passenger’s seat was a folded up map that Lanz hadn’t seen before. Lanz could clearly tell that it was a government survey map like those used by the military. By the coordinates listed at the top of the map, Lanz knew that the map had to be of the same area where Seth’s paper indicated. Someone had put the map on Lanz’s passenger seat back at the restaurant and Lanz didn’t need to take two guesses to figure out who it had been.

Lanz looked at the paper again and then at the nearby I-15 highway that would take him back to Las Vegas. One direction led to a wild goose chase, the other took him back to his old life in Vegas.

“Damn it, Seth… you know this isn’t my thing,” Lanz muttered with frustration.

Lanz watched the trucks roll by on the highway for a minute more before he opened the map. The map showed the Death Valley area not ten miles from Baker. If Lanz started driving, he could be there in less than an hour. It was nearly ten o’clock at night.

In the back of his mind, Lanz could clearly hear his brother’s voice say, “Then there’s no time like the present!”

Lanz smiled to himself, threw the envelope and the map in the seat next to him, and started up the car. Somehow, no matter how screwed up his life was at that moment, it felt good to be going along on some sort of mad adventure one last time… for Seth’s sake.

He drove for nearly half an hour before he saw a place to pull off the road. It was the start of a hiking trail that led off into the desert.

Lanz kept the engine running while he found where he was currently on the map and made a note of the coordinates. From this point on the map, if he headed ENE for about ten miles he’d be pretty darn close to wherever Seth was sending him.

Lanz folded up the map and stuck it and the piece of paper with the destination coordinates into his pocket. He reached into his glove box and dug out an old flashlight. There was an old canteen in the trunk and he managed to find a nearly full bottle of water that he dumped into the canteen. He wrapped the canteen over one shoulder, took an old sweatshirt out of the pile of junk in the backseat. He locked the car doors and turned towards the desert.

The heat of the desert was still there, even at 11pm, but it was already starting to cool down. There were a few clouds, but Lanz didn’t see anything he had to worry about. Ten miles – a mile an hour – he thought he could reach his destination early the next morning. He’d conserve his water until the trip back.

Lanz took one last look at his car – most of his life packed into the trunk and the back seat. He switched on the flashlight and without another backwards glance walked off into the desert.