Quicksilver(62)

As if Panthea was embarrassed by the apparent uselessness of her vision and felt the need to make it seem a little more relevant, she said, “He was sort of a weird old man. He was wearing a white shirt with a string tie, khaki shorts, white kneesocks, and saddle shoes. Oh, and a Tyrolean hat.”

In the unlikely event that this detail would eventually prove to be a matter of life or death, I said, “What’s a Tyrolean hat?”

“It was slightly more boat shaped than round. A soft-brimmed green-felt number with a small red and green feather tucked in the band.”

“Do you think he’s evil?” I wondered. “He doesn’t sound very menacing.”

“I don’t know. I didn’t get much of a feel about him. Maybe something more will come. We must not wait for the equivalent of a Wikipedia entry on this old man. Our gifts assist us, but they don’t control us. We distinguish ourselves by the efforts we make, by taking the initiative whatever the risks.”

“We aren’t puppets,” I said, recalling her brief dissertation on that subject at the end of dinner in her Quonset hut.

“Indeed, we are not,” Panthea said. “Nor would we want to be even if that assured our triumph. It’s by our choices and actions that we succeed or fail. Without the freedom of choices, we would have no dignity.”

“You’ve given all this a lot of thought,” I said.

“When you live alone in the true desert, miles from Peptoe and even farther from Sulphur Flats, when you also work at home, making your living as an artist, you have a lot of time on your hands. You either think deeply about everything or you go mad. I have not gone mad, so far as I am aware. I credit my adoptive parents for that. There is a certain Ching attitude that nurtures sanity.”

During the next mile, the sky went dry. Bridget switched off the windshield wipers.

As tattered clouds alternately unraveled from the face of the moon and raveled over it again, the pall of darkness fluctuated.

A signpost loomed on the left. Six feet high, the tallest object in sight, it was the first sign of any kind that we had seen on this lonely road. Bridget braked to a stop alongside it and put her window down, the better to read the black hand-painted notice on the white placard.

The first line declared in large letters, WALLACE EUGENE BEEBS AUTONOMOUS ZONE.

In smaller letters, the second and third lines informed the reader as to the meaning of “autonomous zone”: THE LAWS OF THE UNITED STATES DO NOT APPLY HERE.

The fourth through sixth lines were more ambiguous than what came before them: LOVERS OF FREEDOM SEEKING THEIR UNIQUE BLISS ARE WELCOME TO INQUIRE AS TO AVAILABILITY.

The sign stood beside a rutted dirt lane that crossed a field and appeared to slope into the desert equivalent of a glen. If a residence lay at the end of that track, we could not see it from the highway.

Considering that we hadn’t passed one structure or encountered a single other vehicle on this two-lane artery between the Twilight Zone and Transylvania, I wondered how long it had been since a lover of freedom had knocked on Wallace Eugene Beebs’s door, seeking bliss.

“This looks like the place,” Bridget said.

“What place?” I asked.

“The place where we might be able to trade this Explorer for another set of wheels.”

“You think there’s a used-car lot down there?”

“All we need from Beebs is one vehicle on which he’s willing to make a deal. What do you think, Panthea?”

“I don’t get any vibes, bad or good. But I don’t much like the idea of autonomous zones.”

“If it were anywhere else,” Bridget said, “you could pretty much conclude there must be at least a few violent crazies down there. But intuition tells me . . . out here in the middle of nowhere, Mr. Beebs is just another Sonoran Desert eccentric, as harmless as Hakeem Kaspar. What do you think, Quinn?”

I didn’t like the idea of autonomous zones, either. However, when I thought about needing another vehicle that the ISA didn’t know about, I felt psychic magnetism pulling me toward that glen.

I said, “What’s the worst that could happen—that maybe this Beebs dude turns out to be a cannibal, and a trapdoor on his front stoop drops us into a cellar, and in the cellar there’s a stew pot and the sucked-clean bones of fifty freedom lovers who inquired about the availability of their unique bliss? I’m up for that.”

Bridget pinched my cheek. “You’re so totally my kind of guy.”

“Well, in fact it could be something worse than a cannibal,” Panthea said. “Not that I’ve foreseen anything bad. I’m just sayin’.”

Sparky said, “So how much money might you need, sweetheart?”

Bridget thought for a moment. “Let’s try to get it done for less than fifty thousand.”

The duffel bag that contained the remaining hundred and ninety thousand dollars of drug-gang money was on the floor under Sparky’s feet. At the motel in Tucson, when Bridget and I had been off to coffee and cakes with Butch and Cressida Hammer, Sparky had finished counting the loot and had packaged it in five-thousand-dollar rolls held together with rubber bands.

As he began to withdraw ten of those rolls from the bag, he said, “Okay, let’s go.”

“I’m not driving down there,” Bridget said. “I don’t think that would be wise. We need to do a little reconnaissance on foot, be sure just how autonomous this autonomous zone is, how many citizens of Beebs’s America there might be.”