by Dean Koontz
Sandra hastened her daughters toward a parking area reserved for larger vehicles that were not commercial trucks, the grandmother hurrying behind them and glancing back as if Jane might be at her heels and transformed now into a hound with sulfurous breath. The first motor home in the line was theirs, and they boarded on the starboard side.
The flat-black Jeep Cherokee drove out of the parking lot and toward the truck-stop exit, but then pulled to the side of those lanes and stopped.
If Jane hadn’t been America’s most wanted, if she’d possessed some genuine authority, if there hadn’t been at least four in that old Cherokee, and if the likelihood wasn’t a hundred percent that one or all of the four would have weapons, she would have trusted her intuition and would have put her career at risk. She would have run the fifty or sixty yards to the damn Jeep and would have gotten the driver out of it and put him on the ground and held him on suspicion of intent. But that was a game of ifs-and-would-haves, none of it germane to what was here and now.
The motor home came toward Jane, grandmother riding shotgun, Sandra visible up there behind the wheel, chin lifted in a pose of moral triumph, as if she were piloting a tent-revival bus on a cross-country crusade for Jesus and had just prevailed in a moment of demonic temptation. She drove past, turned south, away from the restaurant, and headed toward the truck-stop exit.
Jane ran to her Ford Escape, opened the driver’s door, and looked south in time to see the motor home follow the exit road that led to the eastbound lanes of Interstate 40. As the big RV reached the bottom of that long stretch of blacktop and took the ramp to the interstate, the Jeep Cherokee followed at a discreet distance.
“ ‘But what snarky thing does it really mean?’ ” Jane hissed, getting behind the wheel of her car and pulling shut the door. “Shit, shit, triple shit.”
She keyed the ignition. The car wouldn’t start.
7
* * *
They could have known what Jane was driving only if the one who remained in the Jeep had seen her arrive.
She remembered now that when she’d parked here and gotten out of the car, she had reached under her sport coat to quickly adjust the concealed-carry holster. No one could have seen the pistol, but someone familiar with such a rig—like the person in the Jeep—might have realized what she was doing.
While the three men had been considering her as a candidate for abduction, they smelled cop—or just competence and street smarts—no less keenly than she caught the scent of their criminal intent. Truck stops, museums, all the works of humankind were but fields and forests of another wilderness, where beasts on two feet stalked their own kind, each crime a symbolic act of cannibalism that spoke to a deeply entombed—but not dead—savage aspect of the human character corrupted in some time before mere history and ever since passed from generation to generation. The two women and two girls unknowingly cast behind them the spoor of prey, and the men in the Cherokee laid down the spoor of blood-seeking beasts, and though Jane knew them both by their trace, only the predators knew her.
She got out of the Escape, popped the hood. They had not taken time to sabotage the vehicle beyond her ability to put it right.
Through the restaurant window, they would have seen her slip out of the booth. If they suspected she might pause to give a word of warning to the mother of the girls, they still wouldn’t have been sure if she would step outside in two minutes or half a minute. They had needed to avoid being caught; if she had seen them disabling the Ford, her suspicions would have been confirmed.
They didn’t have a sharp knife between them. Or if they had one, they didn’t think to use it to cut the fan belts.
The ignition cables had been disconnected from the spark plugs. Four of the plugs had been removed as well and cast aside. One lay against the cap of the oil pan. Another was trapped between the power-steering belt and a flywheel. She took too long to find the third cradled in a niche between the starter motor and the oil pan. The fourth eluded her until she dropped to her knees and looked under the car; it had fallen past the engine block to the pavement.
After she installed the spark plugs and was connecting the ignition-wire boots to the plug terminals, a tall man in a cowboy hat appeared beside her. “Can I give a hand, little lady?”
He was probably a trucker, with white hair and a white mustache and a face leathered by sun and time, fifty-something, old enough to know what chivalry meant and to think that it still mattered. He wished only to help. Considering that the world needed more like him, Jane didn’t dismiss him either with a word or with a gesture.
“Thanks, but I think I’ve got it. Some damn foolish kids pulled the plugs. I guess they figured I wouldn’t know what to do, I’d have to just stand around waiting for Triple A.”
The trucker nodded solemnly. “I’d wager you did less to them than look askance. Everyone takes offense at the littlest nothin’ these days. Looks like you grown up with engines.”
“I didn’t, in fact, but I’ve learned some.”
She finished the job and stepped back, and the trucker closed the hood. “Why don’t I wait while you start her, just in case.”
“Appreciate it.”
The engine turned over on Jane’s first try.
When she lowered the glass to thank him, the trucker leaned close, one big hand on the windowsill. “Thirty years, I’ve driven dangerous loads for hazard pay, didn’t so much as rip a fingernail.”
She needed to go, get done what had to be finished, but there was a kindness about him and a melancholy that arrested her.
“My boy, a Marine, they give him an easy assignment protectin’ some State Department thing overseas. Not so easy, after all. He’s dead at twenty-four. Been six years of lies about how, what, why—the smart people coverin’ their butts.”
He opened the hand on the windowsill, producing a card between thumb and forefinger. “That’s our home address, me and my wife. The phone number, too. No one would ever find you there.”
Speechless, she took the card. His name was Foster Oswald.
“I come out the lavatory behind you, heard those ladies. Said to myself, this here is some girl. Then I saw your wedding band.”
She looked at her ring hand on the steering wheel.
“It’s a unique design, so since this mornin’ it’s in all the TV babble. But now, you want me to ride along, help with those ladies?”
“Thanks, but no. I’ve got it.”
“Damn if you don’t, girl.”
Foster Oswald stepped back, and she drove fast out of the parking lot, faster still down the exit lane, and cranked the Ford up to ninety when she reached Interstate 40.
8
* * *
Jane had lost twelve minutes with the spark plugs at the truck stop. The motor home had probably gotten twelve miles in that time. She covered that much ground in eight minutes—during which Sandra might have put another eight miles between them.
The bastards in the flat-black Cherokee wouldn’t have rushed into a setup. They would have driven fast ahead of the motor home until they found the right place to jack the women. Maybe they even knew from the start where they would do it, which meant it would happen sooner than otherwise.
Flagstaff and its Ponderosa pines had been put so far behind her so fast that it might have been a clairvoyant vision of a place rather than a place she had actually been. Jane pushed the car even harder, until the speedometer showed 100, and then 110, and the radar detector gave her no reason to relent. She whipped from lane to lane when slower traffic appeared before her so abruptly that it seemed to be reversing at her from the east. A careless motorist changing lanes without signaling, a blown tire, a highway patrol siren signaling a chase that she couldn’t win—anything could go wrong. Mile after mile, however, nothing happened except that a couple truckers air-horned her to express their disapproval.
Medium-light traffic. But the highway was far from lonely. The day waned quickly, though twilight remained at least half
an hour away. Hijacking a motor home on an interstate in daylight would be a bold act, the work of guys who had chemicals other than just alcohol in their blood. They couldn’t block multiple lanes or risk staging a bump with a vehicle much larger than theirs and maybe lose control.
She could see only one way they might do it. Fake a breakdown, flag the motor home, hope Sandra would be civic-minded enough to pull off the road behind them. They knew her nature. They had not only been watching her but also listening to her in the restaurant.
But would two women with two children in their charge dare stop when those pretending to need help were three fit young men? The only sane answer was no. Even if Sandra had a heart bigger than her brain, she would not put her daughters in jeopardy, especially not now that she had been warned that those same three men had been watching her in the restaurant.
And then Jane knew how it would surely happen. Neither Sandra nor her mother would see the three men until it was too late. The fourth person in the Cherokee, the one who hadn’t come into the restaurant, must be a woman.
The Jeep would be off the pavement where the shoulder opened into a wider lay-by. The woman, the shill, would be standing beside it, apparently alone and vulnerable, desperately waving for help only when the motor home rolled into view. She might be faking an injury, too. Beyond the shoulder of the road, the land would drop away. The men would be hiding on that slope behind rock formations, among whatever clumps of brush there might be. The woman, their accomplice, would come around to the starboard side of the motor home when it stopped behind the Jeep, rather than to the port side, past which traffic streamed at high speed. The RV would screen her from the view of passing motorists. If the grandmother was still up front in the cockpit, when she put down the window, the apparently injured girl would have a gun.
From there it could go several ways, depending on whether the door was locked or not, depending on whether the shill shot the grandmother dead at that point or only threatened her. But of the various ways it might play out, whether deadly force was used in the first instant or not, the men would surge up the slope and be inside the vehicle in half a minute. Less. Kill the grandmother if she wasn’t already dead. Drag Sandra out of the driver’s seat, pistol-whip her into submission, take control of the two girls. They would drive the motor home to some prearranged hiding place—a barn, any abandoned structure—and use the girls and the mother until they tired of them, strip everything of value from the vehicle, leave the murdered family behind to rot until someone stumbled on the bodies.
The speedometer at 115, tires thrumming. The fierce velocity turned the dead air ahead into a buffeting wind through which the Ford cleaved, its body shimmying on its frame with a sound like an out-of-tune violin issuing a two-note oscillation under a long-enduring bow stroke.
Cresting a hill, she saw a straightaway sweeping toward the east, where the far horizon darkled, and not a mile ahead, the motor home stood roadside. She more than halved her speed, squinting at land rutilant with the light of the low sun, as if some nuclear catastrophe had rendered it radioactive and unfit to sustain life. Straining forth from every rock and signpost, elongated shadows like the spirits of those things yearned toward the coming night.
Having entered the straightaway in the center lane, she could see past the motor home to the shoulder of the highway ahead of it, where stood a dark, familiar vehicle. A man and woman were walking away from the motor home, toward the Jeep, their backs to Jane. The man might have been one of the three in the restaurant. The woman was surely the shill. From a distance, she appeared slender, perhaps five-feet-two, a girlish figure who would inspire sympathy if you came upon her stranded at the roadside.
If those two were returning to the Jeep with such nonchalance, then the hijack must be complete, two men now aboard with the women and girls. The shill and her companion would drive ahead to prepare whatever makeshift garage for the arrival of the big RV.
As though casting a spell of misdirection on the pair afoot, Jane murmured, “Don’t look back, don’t look back, don’t look back,” as she slowed and pulled into the right-hand lane, one tire on the shoulder, getting out of their line of sight behind the hijacked vehicle. Other traffic noise might have masked the sound of the Ford, but taking no chance, she killed the engine and coasted the last hundred yards. Gravel crunched under two tires, until she stopped six feet from the motor home.
Drapery lay in soft wide folds across the back window of the RV. But other windows might not be covered.
When she got out of the Escape, she didn’t fully close the driver’s door.
The motor home’s engine was idling, condensed exhaust vapor dripping from twin tailpipes.
Passing vehicles lashed her with their tails of wind as she went to the starboard side of the RV. If those drivers were curious about this roadside tableau, they restrained their curiosity with thoughts of the high price often paid these days by good Samaritans.
One door on the port side, but two doors here, one near the back, the other at the front. She resisted the temptation of the rear door, drew her pistol, and moved forward, staying close to the RV and below the glass line.
She came to the door beside which the grandmother had been sitting when they left the truck stop. Eased up to the window. No one in the cockpit, two empty seats.
If the hijackers were in the living area or the kitchenette, which would both be open to the cockpit, they would hear the door. The sudden increase in traffic noise would alone alert them.
For one faint-hearted moment, she told herself that this was not her war, that these evil men were not the organized sociopaths that posed the great danger to her future and to Travis, that they were mere amateurs at wreaking horror, not havoc mongers of epic intentions like D. J. Michael and his kind. But in truth this wasn’t one war and hers another. They were the same war, universal across all space and time, each a battle essential to sustaining the hope of an ultimate triumph, and to walk away from one skirmish was to surrender everything, everywhere, and there would be nothing then but to lay down arms and die.
Past the front of the RV, she saw the Jeep Cherokee enter traffic, racing east toward whatever exit would take them to the place where they would celebrate and their captives would suffer.
Screened from traffic, Jane took the sound suppressor from the sleeve in her shoulder rig and screwed it on the .45.
She tried the vehicle door. It was unlocked. She opened it.
9
* * *
Inside the door, three low steps to the copilot’s seat, the top step a triangle that served also for entrance to the living area behind the cockpit. No one there, neither the women nor the girls, nor their captors. Beyond the living area, the open kitchen and dining nook, both likewise uninhabited.
She eased the door shut and went into the living area without hesitation, having been taught that commitment required progress as quick as conditions permitted, faster than courage alone allowed. You needed to tap into something greater than courage. Depending on your philosophy, you might call that something the conviction of the well trained or, if you were honest with yourself, you knew it was blind faith in whatever power had ordered the universe.
The slipstreams of passing eighteen-wheelers rocked the motor home on its tires. She could hear her heart knocking, too, and a rushing sound in her ears that was the circulation of her blood through carotids and jugulars. If there were voices, she didn’t hear them.
Easing into the narrow passageway beyond the kitchen. Open door to the left, shadowy bathroom beyond. At the end, a closed door to the farther bedroom.
Light spilled into the passage from a room on the right. She couldn’t sidle up to the jamb and peek through an open door. She had to assume instead that she’d been heard and was awaited. So she went boldly into the light that fanned the hall, into the open doorway, but low. Head and gun low because these amateurs aimed high for the head, trained to do so by bad movies.
A cramped bedroom. The one
with the shaved head stood in there, his back to Jane. The grandmother slumped in a corner, bleeding from the mouth but alive and terrified.
Sandra was lying faceup on the bed, hair wild, left eye swelling shut, those ever-popular cable ties zipped tight at wrists and ankles. Skinhead tore open her blouse, cloth splitting, buttons flying loose and pinging off a lamp base, clicking off a wall panel. This was neither the time nor place for rape. He was teasing himself with a preview and further terrorizing both women.
Maybe he happened to glance at the grandmother and intuited the meaning of her surprised expression. Maybe he heard something. It didn’t matter which. He turned toward the door and saw Jane. He didn’t have a gun in hand, and the sight of her stunned him so completely that he didn’t instantly reach for a weapon. That didn’t matter, either. She shot him point-blank center-chest, shattering the sternum, so that the hollow-point round carried bone splinters with it through his heart, which seized up around that coronet of white thorns, and he went down dead before he received the payment of pain that he had earned, fell backward onto the bed beside the shackled woman. In death as supple as an eel, he slid slowly off the mattress and to the floor, mouth open in a silent shout, eyes as wide as they were now forever blind.
The other man wouldn’t have heard the suppressor-muffled shot under these circumstances. Sandra had cried out in revulsion as the corpse fell on the bed, though her cry might have been interpreted as nothing more than a response to just one more outrage committed by Skinhead.
As Jane gestured at the two women to stay quiet and keep still, something big passed in the night, maybe a Peterbilt towing two trailers, evidently in the nearest lane, making time, rocking the motor home harder than before. From the corner of her eye, she saw movement, pivoted toward it, bringing up the Colt, but it was just the door arcing away from her, influenced by the listing vehicle.