Triple Threat

saw what happened. Brakes went?”
    “Mine, yeah,” Pellam said.
    “Good thing there was nobody in the oncoming lane.”
    That was sure true. Though there hadn’t been much traffic going in any direction on barren State Route 14. Not here, where it was close to a hundred miles to any kind of town.
    Lis was cute and maternal. Pellam guessed her first reason for coming here was in fact to see if anyone was hurt, rather than cover her ass about leaving the scene.
    “Thanks to you. And Chris,” the sheriff said, looking out the door toward the old car, a Toyota. Had to be twenty years old. The gloss was gone from the paint entirely.
    Pellam played out a scenario that the group had been threatened because they protested land use or something or because they were hippies and Sheriff Werther had stood up for them.
    It would have made a bad scene in a movie and it was surely not true. But that was the way Pellam’s mind worked. He wrung stories from dry rocks.
    The earth-mother left, climbed in the car and they sped away, she and Chris.
    Without a word the sheriff stepped outside to write down VINs and to radio in the details and see who was who and what was what.
    The driver got a coffee, not asking if anybody else wanted any. She paid with steady hands. “Look,” she said softly. “I’m sorry I hit you. I wasn’t thinking… The pickup was a birthday present. Just last week. It’s got eight hundred miles on it.”
    Pellam thought about making a joke that out here that meant two trips to the grocery store and one to Blockbuster.
    But he didn’t, mostly because she didn’t sound particularly sorry she’d slugged him.
    “ ‘S’okay,” he said automatically as his tongue poked a loose tooth. “I didn’t really get the impression you were out for blood.”
    Though he happened to be tasting some at that moment.
    He added, “It was a boom box hit me. That’s what happened.” He nodded toward the sheriff.
    “Thanks. I get carried away sometimes.”
    The pain was starting now. Probably more than boom box pain.
    Then the issue of assault was gone and she looked impatiently at her watch.
    It seemed an appropriate time for intros. Her name turned out to be Hannah Billings. “With an ‘h.’ ”
    A back-end
h.
“I’m John Pellam. This isn’t a line--but I have to say I’ve never met a Hannah before. Pretty name.”
    It conjured up a heroine in a World War II film, a resistance fighter, wearing a tight frock, whatever a frock might be.
    Taylor brushed his butch hair and said, “It’s a palindrome. Her name.”
    “A…?”
    “A word that’s spelled the same backward and forward. ‘Madam, I’m Adam,’ ” he said. “I wrote an entire poem in palindromes once.”
    Poem…
    Hannah said, “And this is Taylor…”
    The poet filled in, “Duke.”
    More relationship mystery.
    “As in
the
Duke. Being out here makes you think of old-time Westerns, doesn’t it?”
    Hannah had no clue what he was talking about.
    How could somebody not know John Wayne?
    “So everybody okay?” Taylor asked. “That was freaky, I mean. Seeing the road doing that turn, what’s it called? A…?”
    “Switchback,” Hannah offered and dumped sugar into her coffee. “Yeah, I’m fine. I’ve had worse.” As if Pellam were an afterthought. “You?”
    “I used to be a stuntman. I’ve had worse.”
    “Stuntman.” She was curious.
    Taylor, too: “Wow. Hollywood?”
    “Yep.”
    “Fascinating.” He dug into his massive backpack for a notebook and wrote something down on the stained, limp pages.
    Hannah muttered to him, “Didn’t quite work out the way you’d hoped, looks like.”
    He shrugged. “Not your fault.” Taylor had a bulky presence but he seemed like a pretty soft-hearted guy.
    There was a formality between the two of them. Pellam just couldn’t figure out their relationship. She had a Colorado license, he’d noted. And Taylor Illinois. Was he a distant relative?
    Taylor looked around, offering a faint laugh. “This place is something. A real diner. It oughta be in black and white. Like an old TV show.”
    Pellam quoted. “ ‘You’re moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas… You’ve just crossed over into… the Twilight Zone.”
    “Controlling the vertical and the horizontal,” Taylor replied. Pellam believed that was a different show. But nodded anyway.
    The woman completely ignored them. She took her coffee outside to make another cell phone call.
    Taylor, the