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Into the West
Elizabeth McNeil
He sighed, and his head fell back on the chaise. Faces looked down from
the billboards. I should be up there, he thought. A ringing wafted
through the heat. Across the pool deck, hands let go of iced drinks and
snatched for cell phones. Mike grabbed his holster just as it stopped.
That had to have been her. He looked at the phone, willing it to ring
again.
Until a few years ago, the world had reached up to him on his
billboards. He was almost seven stories tall, and the scurryings of life
at his feet were far away. But then tobacco billboards were banned.
Overnight, he'd shrunk to the scale of the scurryings. Audition after
audition, rejection after rejection because he looked too much like the
Marlboro Man. Days dripped into weeks, weeks spilled into months. And
then the first phone call came.
He recognized her voice at once. Sally. Every boy in school had been in
love with her. He'd left a message at her agency months ago, after
seeing her on an ad in Times Square. She was in some kind of trouble-he
could tell from her voice-but she said she couldn't talk about it. He
wanted to meet. She couldn't. Couldn't give him her number. But she
called again. And again. And again. She could never talk longer than a
few minutes, but she called now every day, and his days had started to
curl into spirals around her calls. Nothing else mattered.
She always called from a cell phone. He found an engineer in a basement
on the lower east side who built a compass-like attachment for his
phone, thatpointed toward where the calls were coming from. For the past
two weeks, he'd been driving west, the direction the compass registered
when she called.
There it was. His hand was on the phone the moment it rang. He could
feel her voice saying his name as he checked the compass-still west. He
was running toward the car before he registered the fear in her voice.
He had to find her.
The car door slammed and he was pulling onto the freeway as she suddenly
hung up. West. The world moved across the windshield like a movie. He
wove wildly back and forth between the lanes of shining, Pacific-bound
cars. The smooth asphalt dipped them all past the dark skyscrapers of
downtown, slid them through a tunnel, and then spilled out onto the
coast. He skidded into the first parking lot and ran out onto the sand.
Here. She would be here. He was running up and then down the beach, but
all he could see was a lone jogger in the shimmering distance. His phone
was ringing. Here, I'm here-I need to talk to you. Quickly-I only have a
moment-He looked down at his compass. West-the ocean. He scanned the
horizon. Nothing but the waves.
Sally? Sally? Where are you? The line was dead.
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