End of California

A SOURCE YOU CAN TRUST Under the circumstances, he told himself, speeding made sense. He'd driven down through the San Joaquin Valley at eighty and eighty-five, crossed the Mojave with the Volvo's air conditioner blasting and the needle on the dash nudging ninety. Through Kingman, Flagstaff and Winslow, Gallup and Albuquerque, Amarillo, the vast nothingness of western Oklahoma, clean across Arkansas and over the Greenville bridge, and he'd seen more state police officers, deputy sheriffs and plain old small-town cops than he could have calculated, even if calculation came naturally to him, which recent events had proven it did not. None of them stopped him. It was as if they understood that while anybody who lived in California had good reason for wanting to distance himself from its borders, his reasons were better than most. They hadn't been in Mississippi for more than three or four minutes before a gray patrol car pulled out of the lot at a bait shop and attached itself to their rear bumper. He glanced at Angela: stoic and silent, the picture of stillness, her eyes hidden behind sunglasses. Had she taken them off a single time since they left Fresno? If so, he didn't recall it. He'd noticed her wearing them in the motel room last night. In the backseat, Toni said, "I think you'd better pull over." "I think you're right, hon," he said, and stopped on the shoulder next to a cotton field where a young black guy was spraying herbi- cide from a Hi-Boy. Leaving the engine running and the air on, he climbed out and shut the door. Wet heat enveloped him in its familiar embrace. The state trooper, a woman, was somewhere between thirty-five and forty. Trim and tan, with sandy brown hair and delicate hands that looked too small to wield the weapon riding her right hip. She tipped her own sunglasses up, and he saw a smooth lump below her left eye, the skin perceptibly discolored. Her voice was husky but not abrupt or unpleasant. "You're a long way from home." "Yes ma'am. I guess you could say that." "Could I see your license?" He pulled his wallet out, withdrew the license and handed it to her. "Fresno. That's cotton country too, isn't it?" "Yes ma'am." She glanced inside the station wagon, nodded at Angela and Toni, then looked through the back glass into the cargo compartment, which in addition to luggage contained two computers, a couple printers, a bunch of medical books and the records from his former practice. "Moving?" she said. "Actually, we are." "Mind if I ask where?" "Loring." "Really?" "Yes ma'am. The fact is, I grew up there." She examined the license again. "Barrington," she said. "There are some folks by that name in Greenville." "They're not kin to me, but I played football against one of them in high school." "That'd probably be Carl, I'm guessing." "Yes ma'am." "He's tending bar now at the Holiday Inn. I used to stop in there from time to time with my husband. Carl likes to pour big ones." "He was a pretty big guy, if I recall right. Not a bad ballplayer, either." Something had disturbed her. Frowning, she looked through the window againfirst at Angela, then at Toni, then at theYarbrough, Steve is the author of 'End of California ' with ISBN 9781400044382 and ISBN 1400044383.