by Dean Koontz
“I miss my dad,” Travis said softly.
“I miss him, too. Very much.”
“I wish he was here to see me ride.”
“He sees you, Trav. You don’t see him anymore, but he sees you every day, and he’s proud, too.”
2
* * *
At Gavin and Jessica Washington’s kitchen table, conversation and food were equal parts of every dinner. For his age, Travis was engaged and engaging, but well mannered, a joy to his mother.
Table talk ranged from the experiences of the day to books, music, horses, hot rods. Gavin had chopped and channeled and fully customized an apple-green ’48 Ford pickup and was starting another such project. No mention was made of most-wanted lists or news stories about a rogue agent.
She’d never told Travis that his father committed suicide. She told him what she knew in her heart, that Nick had been murdered, which was a frightful thing for a child to absorb and accept.
The boy believed that his mother remained in the FBI as part of a team searching for the murderer. This was, of course, a lie, though it had the virtue of being a lie that ought to be the truth, that would be the truth in a world less corrupt than this one.
As usual, Jessica rose from the table when anything more was wanted by anyone, loath to delegate. She didn’t mind being in part defined by her ink-black hair, Cherokee complexion, and striking good looks, but she refused to be defined whatsoever by the fact that she lost both legs below the knees after an IED in Afghanistan did to her, an Army noncombatant, what its makers intended to do to armed soldiers. Her prosthetics ended in bladelike feet that seemed not to hamper her. She gracefully negotiated the kitchen, avoiding the dogs, Queenie and Duke, who chose to settle where they offered the most challenging obstacle course.
Jess had been a bladerunner for nine years, married to Gavin for eight, and his obvious devotion to her was one reason Jane felt comfortable leaving Travis here. The Washingtons had no children of their own, but Gavin interacted with the boy as a good father would, truly interested in him, drawing him out, making him laugh.
In the days ahead, regardless of what happened to Jane, her son would be safe and loved. Her gratitude for such friends was beyond her power to put into words. Nonetheless, an unreasonable resentment spun its web in a cramped corner of her heart, and sorrow perilously close to self-pity overcame her at the thought that, were she to die for her child, she would lose him just as she would have lost him if she’d never fought to save him.
3
* * *
The boy had been in bed an hour and a half when Jane returned to his room after spending time with Jessica and Gavin. In the low lamplight, Travis lay on his side, one loosely fisted hand against his mouth, as if he had fallen asleep while chewing on a knuckle to keep himself awake.
As previously on these rare visits, she settled for the night in an armchair, wrapped in a blanket, watching over him. She slept fitfully, and each time she woke, the sight of him was antidote to the poison of her dreams.
As the tide of sleep, having ebbed, flowed to her once more, she wondered if against all odds she might triumph over David James Michael and his confederacy of elitist sociopaths only to become so ruthless in the process as to lose her humanity and find herself incapable of mothering a child of such perfect innocence.
In the courtroom of dreams, standing before jurors who turned upon her faces as featureless as eggshells, she was convicted of abandoning her son. She fled when a judge sentenced her to a purging of her memory that would erase all awareness of having brought a child into the world. But every door through which she escaped only brought her into the same courtroom, to the same eggshell faces and the same judge and the same cruel judgment.
4
* * *
This was good-bye weather, the overcast sky allowing a gray light of such pathos that nothing on the earth could cast a shadow, as if the house and the stable and the oak trees under which they stood lacked the substance to paint their shapes upon the ground, this morning just another dream conjuration in an existence of eternal sleep.
Jane stood with Jessica to watch the sweet boy mount the Exmoor pony and take the reins. He was briefly awkward clambering astride Hannah but then confident in the saddle, helmeted against falls and saber-toothed tigers. He waved, and Jane waved, and he set off with Gavin, who was riding Samson, across the exercise yard and through an open gate in the ranch-style fence, onto one of the trails that wound through hills of chaparral greener after the seasonal rains than they would be most of the year.
The German shepherds accompanied the riders as far as the gate. But the dogs knew the limits of their license and returned to sit with the women under the shadeless trees, their tails sweeping two arcs of ground, clearing away the crisp oval leaves fallen from the live oaks.
“Where now?” Jess asked, her attention still on the receding figures.
“Better you don’t know.”
“Will we see you in a week or two?”
“Probably not.”
“You need money?”
“No.”
“Because we received the thirty thousand you mailed last week. We put it with the rest.”
“I took it from a guy with extreme desires. He liked totally submissive girls incapable of disobedience. He drew a gun on me and I wasn’t as submissive as he preferred.”
“You don’t need to explain anything to me. I know you aren’t out there robbing banks.”
“I wish it were that easy.”
Man and stallion with boy and pony came to the brow of a hill and poised atop it, like a still from a movie in the tradition of Shane, from an age of hope, when honor and a sense that right would always win suffused the land. Then under hoof, the crown of the hill became a farther slope, on which man and boy descended out of sight, as though they would ride beyond the Mountains of the Moon, all the way to Eldorado.
5
* * *
North on Interstate 15 to Barstow, into the true desert of sand and eons-old rock and Joshua trees like spiny totems of some ancient humanoid race long extinct, and then east on Interstate 40, coastal clouds feathering away to blue sky, air so clear that the Saturday sun blazed white instead of yellow…
Iron Furnace, Kentucky, was a long drive away, but facial-recognition software matched to airport-terminal and train-station cameras made quicker travel dangerous. Having cut her own hair short, she now wore long auburn hair, contact lenses tinting her blue eyes green, and makeup she didn’t need. Facial-recognition scanning, however, would see through those superficial changes and ID her by the unique measurements, shapes, and relationships of her features. In the air or on the rails, she was vulnerable to capture on arrival, having been identified in the minutes after departure if not even before.
Jessica had packed her off with a thermos of black coffee as well as power bars sweetened with fruit and honey, so that she could meet the empty miles on a caffeine-and-sugar high. A radar detector and laser foiler ensured a legal velocity through the speed traps.
Determined to reach Flagstaff, Arizona, in nine hours, she navigated the California Mojave, past Pisgah Crater, through the Bullion Mountains, through a hundred fifty miles of wasteland to the Colorado River. She came into Arizona, past far buttes and nearer slickrock, through a landscape of sage and agave, guided by a map and experience, stopping for fuel and a bathroom break in Kingman.
She traveled by the grace of music. To keep her spirits up: Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and the little-known Teddy Wilson, the best pianist of the big-band period. The farther her son receded in her wake, the less effect dance music had on her mood. The arid empty land, bespeaking ten thousand years of rock-splitting weather, born of cataclysmic forces both volcanic and tectonic, called for Bob Dylan, early to mid-career.
At 4:05 in the afternoon, having gained an hour transiting from Pacific Time to Mountain Time, she arrived in Flagstaff on schedule.
Nine hours counted as a hard haul, but any cross-c
ountry drive was better begun with a first-day marathon, when the driver had not yet been numbed by the vastness of the undertaking. She planned to make it to Albuquerque, another 325 miles, before stopping for the night—or, failing that, at least 187 miles to Gallup.
They said that man proposes, God disposes; but what happened next to delay her was not the work of God.
Although she had drunk the coffee in the thermos as well as more that she bought in Kingman, she’d eaten only one of the power bars. She wasn’t much for sugar, but she was a lioness for protein.
She left the interstate for a truck stop bigger than some towns and topped off the gas tank and parked and went into the restaurant for an early dinner.
People whose work was the highway did not eat all to the same schedule, but 4:15 was early for dinner even among those who timed their day by miles rather than by minutes. Because there were maybe thirty customers in a space able to accommodate at least six times that many, Jane didn’t take a stool at the counter but settled in a booth by a window with a clear view of the parking lot beyond which eighteen-wheelers passed on their way to islands of pumps.
The waitress brought a menu and a cheerful attitude. She took an order for milk, with which Jane intended to wash down a maximum-strength acid reducer, and turned away with the assurance that she would be “back in a jiff.”
Aware of being watched by three guys at a table near the center of the room, Jane scanned the menu, looking over the top of it from time to time to assess what it was that interested them.
They were drinking beer, Coronas with lime slices, sharing nachos and french fries topped with cheese. In their late twenties. Cowboy boots and engineer boots. Stonewashed black denim on one, blue jeans for the other two. One with a shaved head and an earring. One with shaved sides and hair on top, a postage-stamp beard between lower lip and chin. The third looked fresh-scrubbed and sported a hairstyle more common on ’50s television than in the world of now, as if at times he found it advantageous to pass for a church boy.
What they said to one another didn’t travel. But they were quick to laugh, and the laughter had a caustic edge, a snicker of contempt, which was especially the case when they were focused on Jane. She could relax. They made no connection between her and the most-wanted stories on TV. Their interest was sexual, and nothing would come of that but the disappointment with which they must be profoundly familiar.
They were most likely just three dudes starting early on their Saturday night, hoping for action of some kind, which would end up being video games.
When the waitress brought the milk, Jane ordered two dinners: an eight-ounce steak and roast chicken on the same plate, hold the potatoes, double the veggies.
“You don’t look like the kind of girl could put away all that,” the waitress said.
“Just watch me.”
After she took an acid reducer with a long swallow of milk and set the glass on the table, she discreetly regarded the three men. The one with the shaved head was on a cellphone, staring at her intently. When he realized she might be looking at him, he at once shifted his attention to the beer in front of him. He spoke into the phone for half a minute more and terminated the call and drank from the bottle.
Maybe the call he’d made had been about her. Probably not. She didn’t look enough like herself to be identified so easily. Paranoia could be a tool for survival. It could also be an engine of unreason and lethal panic. He was just a guy on a phone.
The waitress brought her dinner. “Bet you was raised on a farm like me.”
“Many have said so.”
These days, she wielded knife and fork with machine efficiency, eating like someone condemned, determined not to run out of time before she ran out of food.
As she ate, she watched the three men surreptitiously. She was not their sole interest. They were scoping out a couple at another table, or rather the well-built brunette who was half of the couple.
At yet another table sat two women and two girls. The older of the women appeared to be about fifty, the younger one thirty, both attractive and enough alike to be mother and daughter. The sisters looked nine and eleven, a lively but well-behaved pair.
Perhaps the laughter of the men seemed softer and more guarded, nervous and with a darker snicker, when their attention was on the family of four. They leaned over the table to share their comments in voices lowered even further than when they seemed to be talking about Jane.
Other than such small and perhaps meaningless suggestions of bad intentions, she could not say what inspired a trilling from her lowest vertebra to highest. This brief tinnitus in the spinal fluid was the way that, in certain situations, her intuition spoke to her: You’re the law, pay attention to this, the very signature of evil in the world.
6
* * *
Jane adjusted the pace of her eating to the rhythm of whatever scene was playing out with the three men, who had by now focused exclusively on the grandmother, mother, and two young girls.
The targets, if that’s what they were, appeared unaware that they were the objects of scrutiny. In a time when the multitudes of the earth seemed to be dividing rapidly into just two categories, prey and predators, it was remarkable how unattuned the gazelles could be to the gathering leopards all around them.
The family of four ordered dessert, and when it was served, the three watchful men stopped talking. They quickly finished the latest round of beers, dropped a meager tip on the table, and went to the cashier’s station to pay, as if they had simultaneously recalled some important business for which they were late.
Jane turned to the window.
The three soon appeared in the parking lot and went to an old flat-black Jeep Cherokee. No brightwork at all. Tinted windows. They huddled next to the Jeep, talking, and someone inside put down a window to join the discussion. Jane could not see who had opened the window, and then it rolled up. The three men got aboard and closed the doors, at least four of them now in consultation behind the tinted glass.
Maybe someone started the Cherokee’s engine, but the vehicle didn’t move.
Jane asked for her check. When it came, she gave the waitress cash, including a thirty percent tip, and said, “I’ll just sit here a few minutes digesting, if you don’t mind.”
“Honey, you lay down right there and take a nap if you’re of a mind to.”
By the time the two women and the girls received their check, the Jeep still waited outside.
Jane went to a small reception area between the cashier’s station and the front entrance.
The older woman appeared first, offering the cashier a credit card. Her daughter and granddaughters joined her as she finished the transaction and put away the plastic.
As they moved toward the front entrance, Jane stepped between them and the door. “Excuse me. But did you notice those three men drinking beer?”
The older woman blinked at her. “I’m sorry—what?”
“They’re driving an SUV. They’re waiting outside. I think it would be good if I walked with you to your car.”
The grandmother looked at her daughter. “Did you see them, Sandra?”
Sandra frowned. “I saw them, but so what? They only had a couple beers.”
“They were watching you,” Jane said.
“I didn’t see them watching us. What does that mean, anyway—watching? They were full of oats, goofing each other, that’s all.”
“They were watching you,” Jane insisted. “And there’s something not right about them.”
“Not right—how?”
“They’re nasty business. They’re bad boys on the prowl.”
“Are they really?”
“I know their type.”
Too late, Jane recognized Sandra’s indignation, the glitter of moral disdain in her eyes. “Their type? You mean Mexicans?”
“That’s not what this is about.”
“Isn’t it?” Sandra asked, as if she knew the answer and did not need to hear it.
<
br /> “One of them might have been Mexican,” Jane said. “The second one, I don’t know what. The third one was as white-bread as Richie Cunningham. It’s an equal-opportunity crew.”
“Holly, Lauren.” Sandra brought her two children closer to her, as though the threat stood here before them rather than outside. To Jane, she said, “What’s this Richie business supposed to mean?”
“Happy Days,” the grandmother explained, pleased with her knowledge of trivia. “Ron Howard played Richie Cunningham.”
“But what snarky thing does it really mean?” Sandra wondered.
Jane dared not claim she was an FBI agent, thereby giving them reason to remember what they might have seen on the news. Besides, any assertion that she possessed authority would result in a demand to see her badge.
“Look, it costs you nothing to let me walk with you. You’ve got these girls to think about.”
Sandra raised her voice, for the first time attracting the cashier’s attention. “And if those men were trouble, what could you do, anyway—call them names?”
“I’m licensed to carry.” Against her better judgment, Jane pulled back her sport coat to reveal the holstered pistol.
“This is bad,” the grandmother said, “this is very bad. You can’t just shoot Mexicans for drinking beer.”
“You get away from us with that,” Sandra said, as if the pistol were a critical mass of plutonium. “Girls, we’re going.”
The cashier appeared about to step out from behind the counter, and Jane relented.
Sandra guided Holly and Lauren toward the door, as her mother counseled Jane. “Young lady, maybe you need help. There are fine therapists who could help. Hate isn’t the answer to anything.”
The cashier asked, “Is something wrong?”
“A small misunderstanding,” Jane assured her, and she followed the women and children outside, into the cool crisp air and chrome sunlight and eastward-reaching shadows of this late afternoon in Flagstaff.