Free The Last Thing He Wanted by Joan Didion Page B

teeth, as if Elena were invisible.
    Who is.
    I think you know who.
    Give me a name.
    “Epperson,” she said. She seized the name from the ether of the past ten days. “Max Epperson.”
    The man with the ponytail looked at her, then shuffled the cards and got up. “I could be overdue a night or two in Josie,” the man said.

2
    W hen I am away from this I tend to elongate the time sequence, which was in fact quite short. It was early on the morning of June 26 1984 when Elena McMahon left Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport on the L-100, and late the same morning when the L-100 landed somewhere in Costa Rica. It was close to midnight of the same day (first there had been a bridge washed out, then a two-hour stop parked outside what seemed to be a military installation) when Elena McMahon got to San José. You’re doing nothing, the man with the ponytail had said when she asked what they were doing at the military installation. What I’m doing doesn’t concern you.
    He had gotten out of the truck.
    Anyone asks, he had said, tell them you’re waiting for Mr. Jones.
    From the time he reappeared two hours later until they reached San José he had not spoken. He had instead sung to himself, repeated fragments of what appeared to be the same song, so inaudibly that she knew he was singing only by the periodic spasms of pounding on the steering wheel as he exhaled thewords “great balls of fire.” In San José he had driven directly to a hotel on what appeared to be a downtown side street. Free ride ends here, he had said. Seen from the unlit street the hotel had an impressive glass porte cochere and polished brass letters reading HOTEL COLONIAL but once she was inside the small lobby the promise faded. There was no air-conditioning. An industrial fluorescent light flickered overhead, casting a sickly light on the stained velour upholstery of the single chair. As she waited for the desk clerk to finish a telephone call she had begun to find it inauspicious that the man with the ponytail had brought her to this hotel without ever asking where she wanted to go (in fact she would have had no idea where to go, she had never before been in San José), just pulled directly under the porte cochere and stopped, letting the engine idle as he waited for her to get out.
    Why here, she had asked.
    Why not here. He had flicked his headlights off and on several times. I thought you wanted to run into people you know.
    There was a pay telephone on the wall by the elevator.
    She would call Barry Sedlow.
    The first thing to do was get in touch with Barry Sedlow.
    As she opened her bag and tried to locate the card on which he had written the 800 number for his beeper she became aware of the desk clerk watching her.
    She would tell the desk clerk she needed a drugstore, a doctor, a clínica.
    She would get out of this place.
    She had seen a bus station on the way to the hotel,the bus station would be open, she could make the call from the bus station.
    She did not bother to remember the directions the desk clerk gave her to the clínica but as it happened she passed it on her way to the bus station. That at least was good. This could be going her way. In case anyone was watching she had been walking toward the clínica.
    The bus station was almost deserted.
    The dispatcher was sleeping noisily in a metal cage above the concourse.
    The public telephones in the waiting room had rotary dials and could not be used to leave a message on a beeper, which was the only number she had for Barry Sedlow. Emergencia, she said over and over when she managed to wake the dispatcher. She held out a ten-dollar bill and the KROME GUN CLUB card on which Barry Sedlow had written the 800 number. La clínica. Mi padre. The dispatcher examined the bill and the card, then dialed the number on his pushbutton phone and left as a callback number one of the public phones in the waiting room.
    She sat on a molded plastic bench and drank a local cola, sweet and