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“That’s the most cynical thing I ever heard.”
“And you work in the Senate? I don’t believe you,” Baxter said.
“Okay. It’soneof the most cynical things I’ve heard.”
“Not even in the top hundred.”
Letty had to think about that for a while, finally admitted, “Okay, not in the top hundred. But still cynical.”
Baxter laughed again.
Baxter turned out to be a car freak. They were still in North Florida and they were passed by a car doing perhaps a hundred miles an hour and he said, “Whoa! See that?”
“See what?”
“BMW 8 Series convertible. Rare car, at least around here.”
“Jesus. I thought you’d run over a snake or something,” Letty said. “Or a sharecropper.”
Later: “Got a Range Rover coming up behind us.”
“So what?”
“Nice car. Clumsy, unreliable, expensive to service, but nice-looking.”
“If you like cars like that, why do you drive this piece of shit?”
“This isnota piece of shit,” Baxter said. “This is a highly tuned, expensively upgraded Q-ship. Fast and agile, for a pickup truck. It can go places that would cause a Range Rover’s fenders to fall off. Where not even a cop would follow.”
“If you say so.”
After a moment, Baxter asked, “What do you drive, anyway? Wait: let me guess. A Mini. Countryman.”
“A Highlander hybrid.” When Baxter didn’t respond, she asked, “What? It’s a piece of shit?”
“No, actually, it’s a pretty good machine. Makes sense, especially in California. Mountains and high prices for gas.”
In the evening,pushing into the night, Letty got out the practice pad and a pair of drumsticks, pushed the seat back as far as it would go, put the pad on her knees and began drumming, with side trips to the dashboard and the windowsill. Baxter found a classic rock station and she played along and he didn’t seem to mind.
The trip across country, Letty would later tell someone, was like a survey of American foliage: going from lush, semitropical palms, into piney woods, into desert, and back into lush, semitropical California.
They spent the first road night at a Days Inn in Houston, Texas. Though it was late, they hauled the electronic drum set into the motel and Letty set it up, to make sure it was working. She’d used electronic drums when she was taking lessons. After working with the drums and the console for a few minutes, she said, “Welp. I suck.”
Baxter said, “We should have time for you to practice when we get to LA. I mean, how hard could it be?”
“Hard,” she said. “I sound like I’m in junior high band class.”
The last half of the second day and most of the third was done through desert of various degrees of hardness, with long intervals between stops; Baxter began getting three Quarter Pounders at the infrequent McDonald’s they passed, but turned up his nose at Burger Kings.
They spent the second night in Deming, New Mexico, and the third day threaded their way through the traffic in Tucson and Phoenix and from there across the California line. Letty had driven I-10 from LA to Phoenix and was somewhat familiar with it. Baxter was not.
“Doesn’t look like the Sahara, just looks kinda shitty,” Baxtersaid of the desert miles, as they approached Palm Springs. “Except for the car that passed us a minute ago. A fuckin’ Bentley convertible, can you believe that? Driver looked like he’s about nineteen.”
Along the way, they’d collected receipts from fast-food places, bought a chunk of petrified wood at Quartzsite, and a bag of elk jerky, which Letty emptied out the window when Baxter told her it would give him cataclysmic gas. She threw the bag in the backseat, where it infused the truck with jerky molecules, a little nasal music for the possibly curious.
When they passed the wind turbine field on the west edge of Palm Springs, Letty said, “This is where the West Coast starts. Those windmills. That’s what I always thought, anyway.”
Baxter took the truck to the edge of LA, jogged north to the 210, and then into Pasadena where they found a long-term motel called the La Rouchefort where the spooks had made reservations for them.
