No Sanctuary Read Online Free PDF Page A

anyone?” Rick asked.
    Bert gave the side of his leg a gentle punch.
    After paying for the gas, Rick moved the car to the end of the lot. They went inside the store and used the restrooms. Before leaving, they bought a bag of potato chips and two bottles of cream soda.
    He drove with the bottle of soda clamped between his legs. It was cold through his trousers. The open sack of chips rested on the seat. He took turns with Bert reaching into it. Sometimes, when he was concentrating on the road, his hand collided with hers.
    Soon after the chips and sodas were gone, the road narrowed. It curved along the side of a mountain. Beyond the other lane was a sheer drop to a wooded valley. Rick’s hands tightened on the steering wheel and he slowed down and edged to the right each time he met a descending vehicle. There were pickup trucks, Jeeps and vans, a few R.V.s. The big campers barely had room to squeeze by. Rick began pulling onto the gravel shoulder and stopping each time one of them appeared around a bend.
    After the fourth time he did that, he slid a thin cigar out of the pack in his shirt pocket.
    “Uh-oh,” Bert said. “The man’s getting serious.”
    “They help calm me down.” He held the cigar out to Bert. “Want one?” he asked.
    “Why not?”
    Though she had never complained of his cigars, she had never smoked one, either. “You are in a festive mood,” Rick said. He took one out for himself. His hands shook badly as he unwrapped it.
    Cigar jutting from her pursed lips, Bert leaned toward Rick for a light and wiggled her eyebrows like Groucho.
    Rick lit it for her. “You’re a regular guy,” he said.
    “If I’m a guy, I’m irregular.”
    He grinned and fired up his own cigar. He checked the road. Then he eased off the rough shoulder and picked up speed.
    Smoking the cigar helped his nerves. So did watching Bert with hers. She didn’t smoke it so much as fool with it: she held it out daintily between two fingers; she stretched out her lips and sucked it like a monkey; she talked with the cigar clamped in her side teeth; she tapped off ashes with her pinky; looking at Rick with half-shut eyes, she licked its blunt wet end and slid the shaft deep into her mouth and out and in again.
    “You’re going to make me crash,” he said.
    “You’re doing fine.”
    Long after the cigars were snuffed out in the ashtray, Bert unbuttoned the flap of her breast pocket and took out a folded yellow sheet from a legal pad.
    “Does this mean we’re almost there?”
    “Time to start thinking about it,” she said.
    She spread the paper open across her thighs. There was no map, just handwritten directions. She looked at it briefly, then put it away and patted it. “There’ll be a road on the right with a sign for Jacktooth Mountain.”
    “And we take it?”
    “Nope. We check the odometer and go about twelve miles more. There’ll be a big rock on the left.”
    “A rock? That’s a great landmark.”
    “Some lovebirds painted ‘Bill & Marie, 69’ on it surrounded by a heart.”
    “Romantic. Do you think that’s a year or their favorite pastime?”
    “If it’s a year, it’s been around a long time.”
    “Maybe they make annual pilgrimages to touch it up.”
    “At any rate, after the rock we go about two hundred yards and there’ll be an unmarked road on the right. We take that and follow it to the end. Then we’ll be there.”
    Rick looked at his wristwatch. “Almost three,” he said.
    “Jean said it’s about two hours from the Jacktooth Mountain sign.”
    “Lordy. I hope we spot it soon.”
    They passed it forty-five minutes later. Rick checked the odometer, added twelve to the mileage, and kept an eye on the slowly turning numbers.
    Eighteen miles later, they spotted the rock. Bill and Marie had not been the only artists to leave their mark on it, but they’d been the most ambitious. Their heart, names and number were faded but twice the size of the surrounding graffiti.
    “Two hundred