Sebastian gasped and ran toward his squad car, trying to rescue it before the blazing fire followed the trail of spilled gas and reached his engine.
“Now light one for me,” Donovan said, having managed to turn the Trans Am around far enough to get onto the road, headed in the direction we came. Back toward Route 66. “And hang onto the steering wheel after you do. As soon as I’ve thrown it, light another, okay?”
“Okay.” Breathless, I followed his instructions exactly.
Even with a wounded arm and using his non-dominant hand, Donovan had good aim. He threw the first lit firecracker at Sebastian’s front tires, taking one of them out, and the other at the cop himself. It didn’t burn him to a crisp the way I would have liked, but it did singe the driver’s door enough to get him to swerve to the other side of the road.
By the time we reached the Route 66 intersection, we could no longer see Sebastian behind us and the magnitude of what had just happened was only beginning to be absorbed by my whole being.
My mind had known for several minutes that we were in grave danger, but my body was only just starting to understand. As much as I tried to stop it, I was visibly trembling from the top of my head to my toenails.
“He almost killed us,” I cried.
“Yeah, I know,” Donovan said. “How many fireworks do we have left?”
I peered inside my tote, my hands shaking so hard I could barely keep it open. “Just one.”
“Okay.” He looked steely, determined and…bloody.
I leaned forward just far enough to see how much blood had been coming from his left shoulder. It was dripping everywhere. “Oh, God, Donovan! We have to get you to a hospital right—”
With his other hand, he waved me off. “It’s just a flesh wound, Aurora. Relax.”
“But you’re bleeding—”
“Yeah. That happens when someone shoots a .357 Magnum at you.” He turned onto Route 66 heading westward and sent me a grim half smile. “I’ll be fine. It’s mostly from the broken glass. I’ll be even more fine once Sebastian is out of the picture forever.” He studied me in silence. “Are you okay?”
“No! He almost killed us!” I repeated. “And why are we going west? It’ll be miles before we get to another big city, and we need to take you to an emergency room.”
He shook his head. “No, we need to get the hell away from Amarillo. I’m not going back from where we came.”
“But we still have the key to our room at the Cactus Flower Inn,” I said, which for some irrational reason seemed important to me. There were so damned many loose ends in my life.
Donovan just laughed humorlessly at this. “If you’re really worried about that, we can mail it back to them from Albuquerque.”
“Albuquerque? Jesus, Donovan! We can’t go that far. That’s got to be almost five hours from here. I really, really want you to see a doctor right now. I mean it. And then I want us to head toward home. It was a very bad idea continuing on this far. I’m so sorry.” I choked back a sob and the profound guilt of responsibility. “Please, if you won’t turn back on Route 66, at least go north.”
I grabbed the atlas and flipped frantically until I saw a map of the Texas panhandle. “Th-There’s a good road coming up. See? Route 385. We can take it north up through Oklahoma, Colorado, Nebrask—”
“We could, but we’re not going to,” he said. “I didn’t want to take this trip. You know I didn’t, but—”
“Donovan, I said I’m sorry, and I really am, for all of this. I should’ve listened to you. If we’d just stayed in Chameleon Lake, it would’ve been safer. It would’ve been—”
“A lifetime of never knowing the truth,” he finished for me. “Stop apologizing, Aurora, and hear me out. I didn’t want to go on this trip when you first suggested it. Once we started, I didn’t want to stay on it any longer than a few days. But I’m glad we did. I’m glad you talked me into it—your first instincts were right. And, in spite of everything, I’m glad we learned all that we have so far.”
“I think we’ve learned more than enough now, though. Back there, almost all I could think about was getting away from Sebastian. But a part of me kept worrying about our parents, too. About how they nearly lost their remaining children today. We can’t do that to them. We need to get back home safely before anyone else gets hurt.” I glanced at his still bleeding shoulder. “Or gets hurt even worse.”
“It’s not safe at home right now. Officer James is there.”
“He is but—” I stopped.
But nothing.
I didn’t know what else to say about him. For the life of me, I couldn’t understand how Gideon could tell us to trust him. Unless Andy Reggio was the one lying to us. Or Gideon had been fooled by our hometown cop. Or Officer James himself had meant well but, somehow, had been manipulated by his cousin.
Since we didn’t know which scenario was the right one, though, I was at a loss.
“It has to be safer for us to deal with the devil we know,” I said finally. “Even if Officer James is as crooked and ruthless as Sebastian, there has to be a good, honest cop that we can trust somewhere in Minnesota or Wisconsin. Someone who will help us and protect us and our families.”
Donovan raised one disbelieving eyebrow at hearing these particular words come from my mouth. “That’s what I’d thought until about an hour ago. But now…now everything’s different.”
With the immediate danger gone for the moment, I could see him struggling to process the anguish of Jeremy’s death all over again, knowing with certainty that it had been his worst-case scenario. As senseless, terrifying and painful for his sunny kid brother as Donovan had feared. And that, of all people, Jeremy didn’t deserve such a tragic fate.
But there was also suddenly something different about Donovan. Perhaps that same certainty of knowing what had really happened helped him in some small way. Helped him channel his anger and grief.
“I won’t be able to rest until that bastard Sebastian is locked up for life or, preferably, dead,” he told me. “We’ll be able to deal with Officer James better once his cousin is put away. Until then, we’re staying out on the road.”
Just before the point where Route 385 North branched off from Route 66 West, Donovan pulled onto the side of the highway long enough to let me look at his shoulder. He was right. The cuts were mostly caused by flying glass, but a few of them were deep and I suspected a bullet had come awfully close. We cleaned out the wound with a little drinking water, and I hunted down a couple of bandages I’d packed in case I got a foot blister. Never would’ve imagined I’d be using them for something like this.
“Hold still,” I said, trying to keep his shoulder steady by reaching for the warm, taut flesh at the base of his neck. His muscles flexed under my touch, and I tried to shake away the desire to stroke him there.
“Just put the bandages on, Aurora, and let’s go.”
I burned a little under his gaze, he was so close. His emotions still so raw and visible on his face. “Fine. But the first store we see, I’m buying some antiseptic and gauze for your shoulder,” I told him. “Plan to stop soon.”
He nodded as he pulled away from me. He stuffed his bloody t-shirt into a corner of the trunk, put on a fresh one and, again, told me not to worry.
“I’ll be fine, and so will you,” he insisted. “No matter what happens, I’ll protect you. I promise.”
Despite my pleading, however, he refused to turn right onto Route 385 and drive north.
We argued about it some more—honestly, probably close to three hours on and off—as we pushed further westward. At one point, Donovan tried to distract me by switching between radio stations in search of songs that were especially annoying or overplayed.
“Hey, could we get any luckier?” he crowed, tuning in to the Captain and Tennille singing “Muskrat Love.”
When I groaned, he said, “What? You don’t like it?” He flipped through a few more stations, passing by some decent ELO, Billy Joel, Jackson Bro
wne and the Carpenters in favor of David Cassidy’s “I Think I Love You.”
“Donovan…”
“Oh, c’mon. I know you like this one. I saw that cheesy Cassidy poster you used to have up in your room. It’s not still there, is it?”
When we got back home—if we got back home—I really needed to rethink my room.
When I didn’t immediately answer, he laughed. It was strained, but he seemed positively determined to keep our conversation light.
“Once all of this is over, I’m going to take you to hear some real music. No Bee Gees disco shit or stupid teenybopper stuff by those Cassidy brothers. I think Shaun is even worse than David.” He scowled. “You need to go to a rock concert. The Rolling Stones. The Steve Miller Band. Bob Seger. Bad Company.”
“After eight straight days of traveling with you, I know all about bad company,” I retorted, doing my best to play along with him.
He rewarded my effort with a small grin. “Guess I set myself up for that one.”
When the musical teasing stopped and silence descended on our car again, though, my fears seeped back in. Seeing the green “48 miles to Albuquerque” sign up ahead didn’t help.
Donovan, who’d been much quieter for the past half hour, looked cautiously at his rearview mirror and then his driver’s side mirror before passing a small flatbed truck.
I figured, by this time, it was too late to convince him to head home, but in a last-ditch attempt to suggest we get off the beaten path, I said, “I’ve never been to Colorado. Have you?”
He shook his head.
“I hear it’s beautiful with the mountains, trees and lots of...nature and stuff. Maybe we could go for a couple of days. Just to take a break from everything. Think about what we should do next.”
“Aurora,” he said, his voice patient but unyielding, “you, more than anyone, know we need to get to the bottom of this. Going west on 66 is our best chance of finding out what happened. So is reading the rest of your brother’s journal, given everything we know now. We need to look for more clues in the cities Gideon went to and, maybe, we’ll catch a lucky break and either find him or piece together the rest of this puzzle.”
He checked his mirrors again, his expression tense, then he sped up and passed two other vehicles.
“It’s easier to disappear in a bigger city than it would be in the great outdoors. We want to blend in with the crowd until we have a few more answers. Besides—” He glanced uneasily in his rearview mirror one more time. “We’re being followed.”
8:20 p.m.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Pasadena, California ~ Saturday, August 16, 2014
I thought I was going to go insane just waiting at home, but that was all that was left to do. I had, quite literally, done everything else I could imagine, short of going on live national TV and asking America if anybody out there had seen my son.
Don’t think that idea hadn’t occurred to me either.
Between my prayers and my curses, however, I reminded myself that situations like Gideon’s and Jeremy’s rarely transpired. That their disappearance had been an extraordinary circumstance, ignited by a bizarre chain of events. There was nothing normal, typical or commonplace about the peril they’d found themselves in that summer.
But then I remembered what had happened to Donovan and me in Amarillo. Our unexpected brush with death. A near miss that had left me breathless, terrified and stunned that we’d both survived. And if that hadn’t been enough to convince me that danger could find anyone, anywhere, there was what happened next in New Mexico...
“What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.”
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Albuquerque, New Mexico ~ Sunday, June 25, 1978
Fear put a stranglehold on my chest. “Are you sure?” I whispered. “How do you know?”
Donovan didn’t say anything for almost a full minute. Then, “It’s those same bikers from back in Texas. They’ve been on our tail for the last hour.”
I tried to come up with a reasonable rationalization. “Well, 66 is a main road. It’s either this route or I-40, if you want to go west, right? They were tourists snapping pictures of the Cadillac Ranch back in Amarillo when we first saw them. It’s not unusual that they’d be continuing on toward Albuquerque.”
“It is if they talked to Sebastian after he shot at us and now he’s got them looking for us, too. It is if they’re more than willing to pass other drivers, but they refuse to pass us.” He checked his mirrors again and frowned. “If I slow down, they slow down. If I pass one car, they pass one car. If I pass two cars, they do the same. It’s not a coincidence.”
“What are we going to do?”
“Well, first, we’re going to get into Albuquerque. Then, we’re going to lose them.”
He was focused, serious and determined to do exactly what he said he’d do. Until we’d driven into Amarillo, I’d only gotten a few glimpses of Donovan as the coolheaded military man that he’d become during his years away from Chameleon Lake. After watching him get us away from Sebastian, though, I suspected Donovan had been downplaying this side of himself, containing it to whatever mental compartment he stashed his army memories and training.
But I’d seen these traits come out a few times in the past twenty-four hours, and he seemed increasingly ready to jump into taking stronger and more evasive action with each new incident. I’d had no choice but to be very self-reliant these past two years and hadn’t realized how much I would appreciate his expertise and his partnership. How much I would admire the former and, almost immediately, come to count on the latter.
Over the next thirty miles or so, I saw that Donovan was correct about the motorcyclists. Sometimes he’d slow down. Other times he’d speed up. No matter what he or any of the other motorists on the road did, though, the two bikers maintained the same distance between themselves and us. It was eerie.
True to his word, as soon as we hit the Albuquerque city limits, Donovan was on a mission to lose them. He took a right down a big street named Juan Tabo Boulevard and, when they followed, he made a quick left onto Buena Ventura Road. The bikers didn’t miss a beat. Wherever we turned, there they were, too.
Donovan shot me a resolute look. “Keep your seatbelt on” was all he said as he cut a labyrinthine streak through the heart of the sprawling downtown.
The Sandia Mountains cradled the arid city in its majestic purple haze, but it was hard to think about the desert beauty for long with a pair of dangerous strangers just a few car lengths behind us.
After slipping through a series of deeply yellow stoplights—with the bikers always managing to follow—we finally caught a break.
Donovan crossed the railroad tracks at Lomas Boulevard, red lights blinking and bells ringing in warning, just seconds before the gates came down. We were on one side of the tracks, the bikers back on the other—with a freight train between us. And we were free…at least for the time being.
“Wow.” I breathed out some of the shallow air I’d been barely holding in my lungs. “That was some really great driving. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome, Aurora.” A thin smile played at his lips as he glanced first at me and, then, down the street. He drove a convoluted route though several more city blocks in silence before saying, “Remember in St. Louis how you wanted to stay at one of those no-tell motel motor lodges with a garage?”
I nodded.
“You’re gonna get your wish tonight.”
***
The motor lodge Donovan chose for us was called Sandstone Suites. The sixteen-unit complex was near the intersection of both I-40, which was east-west, and I-25, which was north-south. We could, according to him, drive in any cardinal direction at a moment’s notice.
“But, if I have my way,” Donovan said, as he closed the unit’s garage door behind the Trans Am, “we won’t be driving anywhere for a few days.”
I knew he was serious about going incog
nito for awhile in, perhaps, the same way our brothers had done when they were laying low in St. Louis. It wasn’t just what Donovan said that gave away his intentions, though, it was what he did.
Making me hide out at a corner grocery store while he checked into the motel.
Claiming for the first time on the trip to be a single guy traveling alone.
Telling me he’d listed his name on the registry as “Joseph Walters” (which was really his grandfather’s name).
Paying by cash, of course, not by check or credit.
And quickly stocking up on medicinal supplies as well as nonperishable, ready-to-eat food items at the store before hightailing it back to Unit #12.
Oh, and then there was the 32-ounze bottle of golden whiskey that he just bought and plunked on the table next to the TV.
“In an hour, I’m not gonna be able to drive anyway,” he informed me, as he poured himself a generous serving of the alcohol in one of the motel’s Dixie water cups. “You can have some, too, if you want. I won’t tell your parents.” He put only about an inch of liquor into a second paper cup and handed it to me.
“Thanks,” I said. “I think.”
“Here’s to Jeremy and Gideon.” He raised his cup in a toast and waited for me to do the same before he downed every last drop of the amber liquid in his.
I took a tiny, dutiful sip, but it was still enough to leave me coughing. “St-trong,” I managed.
He chuckled and poured himself another triple shot. “That’s the idea.”
I eventually finished mine, but I didn’t ask for a refill.
It was early afternoon when Donovan had his first few whiskeys—with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich as a chaser—but these were far from his last drinks. He was walking that razor-thin line between wanting to numb the pain and, also, knowing he had to be alert enough to handle whatever situation might arise next. But danger was unpredictable. There could be a lot of hours to kill between boredom and terror.
Road and Beyond: The Expanded Book-Club Edition of The Road to You Page 27