A voice, crackling with static, said, “… all I can say is it’s a fuckin’ inconvenience. Over.”
Champion lifted the microphone from its hook, depressed the key on the side, and said, “Breaker 1-9, can you repeat that?”
The same voice came back, “Goddamn roadblock on 80 westbound. They’re stoppin’ everybody. I’m stuck in the line waitin’ to clear. I’m runnin’ behind schedule already, so this is pissin’ me right off. Over.”
“Copy that, thanks.” Champion gave a quick glance over to Chris. Chris felt a light sweat break out on his forehead.
“You got any idea what they’re lookin’ for?” Champion said, into the microphone. “Over.”
“Just heard from up ahead. Searchin’ for some kind o’ fugitive. Said he’s armed and dangerous. Probably some guy escaped from the state pen in Lincoln and hijacked a car to get away. With all the ways he could go from there, though, don’t know why the fuck they’re stoppin’ up the interstate. He could be damn near anywhere. If that’s what’s actually goin’ on. Hell, I dunno. Fuckin’ nuisance, is what it is. Over.”
“It is that. State cops, then? Over.”
“Naw,” came the voice. “Don’t look like it. Feds, I’d guess. I’m still a ways back, but they’re in unmarked cars. Got the whole fuckin’ highway blocked, lettin’ people through one at a time. It’s gonna be a long wait. Over.”
“’bout what mile marker? Over.”
“Around 120. Maybe 122. Passed Ogallala about ten minutes ago, I’d say. Over.”
“Might be time to pull over and take a nap. Over.”
“I dunno. Don’t expect these guys are gonna give up any time soon. Roadblock like this, they mean business. You’re gonna have to deal with it unless you’re packin’ it in for the night. Over.”
“Guess you’re right. Thanks for the info, buddy. Over.”
“No prob. Out.”
Champion rehung the microphone from its hook. “Whaddya think?”
“You know what I think.”
“It’s them again, isn’t it?”
“Of course. I should have taken your advice about the emails. That’s how they know where I am. Has to be. There’s nothing else left for them to track me by, unless they somehow put a chip under my skin while I was asleep.”
Champion’s forehead creased with worry. “I guess it’s pretty likely you’re right about that. I understand why you did it, though. I was all alone in the world, except for one friend, I’d take any kind of risk to get a hold of her. But hell, Chris, this sucks, you know?”
Chris laughed grimly. “Yeah, you could say that.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I don’t know. What can you do? I’m out here in the middle of nowhere in Nebraska. There’s nothing but fields and ranches and a whole lot of nothing between me and some guys who intend to kill me. Unless I’m prepared to strike out across the hills and hope like hell I can get somewhere safe, I don’t think I’ve got a lot of options here.”
In the distance, Chris saw a green sign on the right hand side of the highway. 2 miles. Exit 126, Ogallala, Rt. 61, Rt. 26.
Champion jerked his chin toward the sign. “That’s your last way out. Right there. We take that exit, you got a chance. We keep going, they get you.” He looked over. “You’re not ready to give up, are you?”
Chris looked out of the window at the dry hillsides rolling by, with the smooth, glittering waters of the Platte River still following them, hugging the highway to the north. He thought about Elisa, waiting for him. There could be a way for them to connect, to face this menace together instead of alone, and an almost painful pang of longing grabbed his heart and held on.
“No. I’m not ready to give up. Take the exit. Take the exit, drop me off, and then keep going. I’ll walk into town. After that, I’ll figure something out.”
“Now, that’s not what I meant.” Champion’s voice rose in panic. “I got no problem with taking a detour. I got a GPS. We can go right the hell around that damn roadblock, get back on 80 somewhere west of it, no problem.”
Chris shook his head. “No. It’s too risky. I was wrong about them. I don’t understand computers that well, but I think I know how they did this. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“How?”
“It’s got to be that they pinpointed your computer. They’re monitoring my emails, and they identified your computer from them somehow. They know where they originated. Somehow, they connected your truck with that computer. I don’t know how they’d do that, but there has to be a way. Maybe you’ve used it for something official, something that allowed them to log your computer’s identification in their databases. All it would take is once. And you’re a trucker. You have to stop at weigh stations, you go through toll booths, everything like that. They know exactly where you are.” He paused. “That has to be how Elisa has escaped so far. Even if they know that she’s using her laptop to send emails, they haven’t figured out where it is, yet. But once they have both pieces of information, you’re pinned forever, like a butterfly to a mounting board.” He laughed again. “I always thought the information age was cool, you know? And I thought the conspiracy theorists were paranoid idiots. What earthly reason could they have for monitoring our whereabouts? But I was wrong. When they have a reason, it’s easy. All of the mechanisms, the infrastructure, are already there. We can be pinpointed in minutes, unless we swear off electronic communication entirely.”
“Damn it, this is so crappy.” Champion sounded genuinely distressed.
“Yes. It is. But I don’t need to drag you down with me. When you get to the roadblock, if they ask you—which they will—don’t deny that you gave me a ride. They’ll know that much already, and if you lie, you’ll be in worse trouble. You’re much better off playing innocent, that you gave me a ride out of Lincoln, that I was hitchhiking. That’s the first time I used your computer, so they wouldn’t know that wasn’t true. I haven’t touched the computer for over an hour, so tell them that I told you to drop me off in Sutherland. That was the last town we passed, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Tell ’em that I told you I was meeting up with friends in Sutherland. If they fall for it, maybe they’ll think Elisa is there. Or maybe they’ll try and see if I have relatives there. Either way, it might get them off my ass for a while.” He sighed. “And I guess I can’t email Elisa any more.”
The sign for the exit appeared on the right, the off ramp curving up from the highway onto a hill that supported the Highway 61 overpass. Champion put his turn signal on, and the truck moved smoothly off the interstate and onto the ramp.
He braked to a halt at the top of the hill, where there was a stop sign and a right-turn arrow pointing the way to Ogallala. “You sure about this, Chris?”
Chris nodded. “I’m sure. I can risk my own life. But I’m not risking anyone else’s, not if I can help it. I’ve already cost two people their lives. If you got caught with me, you really think they’d let you go?”
“No. I guess not.”
Chris opened the door, and with a little urging he got Baxter to jump down onto the gravel on the road’s shoulder.
Champion tossed him a full water bottle, which Chris caught in mid-air. “You take care, buddy. Guess we’ll probably never see each other again. But man, I hope like hell you get away. I really do.”
“So do I. And thanks. Thanks for everything you did for me.”
“I wish I could do more.”
He shut the door. Champion raised one hand in a solemn wave. Then with a groan, the big engine propelled the truck past the turnoff for Highway 61, and down the on ramp back toward I-80.
Chris watched the eighteen-wheeler roll back onto the interstate, and stood, with the sun in his face and the wind pushing on him in hot gusts, like the breath of some distant dragon, until Champion’s rig was lost to view. Then he turned right, toward the bridge across the Platte and the town of Ogallala, Nebraska.
He had n
ever felt so completely alone in his life.
Chapter 12
Chris walked across the broad bridge over the South Platte River, Baxter trotting contentedly by his heels.
Poor guy. He had no idea what had happened. Fortunately. For a dog, this kind of thing might be a big adventure. As long as he had food and a place to sleep and gets a pat on the head occasionally, he’s none the wiser. What would happen to Baxter if They finally got to him? Would someone take him in?
He had to snap out of this. Unprofitable thoughts. At a time like this, he needed to pay attention to what was in front of him, not wandering off into hazy, defeatist trains of thought.
Pushing it away, he looked around. Ogallala was a small town, with the flat topography allowing a grid of streets running parallel and perpendicular to the river front. First Street seemed like a major road—there were many passing cars and curious looks as he walked down the wide sidewalk past a realtor’s office, the Keith County Senior Center, and a small grocery store. Further along seemed to be mainly occupied by auto dealerships, so he turned right up a side street, and soon found himself wandering through block after block of neatly kept houses, past large shade trees that provided the highest concentration of the color green he’d seen since entering the state of Nebraska.
He passed an elderly gentleman out mowing his lawn with a push mower, and responded to the one-handed wave in kind. A slight frown crossed the old man’s face as his eyes followed Chris down the sidewalk. Was it because Chris was a stranger? Or because he looked shabby? Or because his dog wasn’t on a leash?
Or was it because the elderly man was one of Them?
But that was ridiculous. He turned, unable to stop himself from checking. The old man gave the scruffy stranger and his dog no further attention, and had returned to mowing his lawn in perfectly lined-up parallel stripes.
He had to rely on his intuition to tell friend from enemy, and from the people who had no connection to him at all. And this guy was one of the latter.
He continued walking for about a quarter-mile, and the tidy suburbs were beginning to straggle off into larger lots with less well-kept houses. He saw old cars, some with gaping spots of rust, and unkempt tangles of children’s toys, farm equipment, and oddments like spools of chicken wire and empty steel barrels lying on their sides. The whole place had an air of lonely desolation.
One of the last buildings before the pavement turned to a dirt road was a small, square white building with a steeple and a sign in front. The Ogallala Full Bible Church of God. Without knowing exactly why, he turned up the walkway, past rows of marigolds flowering orange and crimson in the blazing sunshine, and then up to the door.
Chris had never been religious. He’d only been in a church a few times in his life, for friends’ weddings and for the funerals of his father’s parents—both of his paternal grandparents were the children of Italian immigrants, and devoutly Catholic. His mother’s side of the family had mostly been freewheeling agnostics. His father, once freed from the lockstep attendance at Mass he’d been forced into as a child, had jumped straight into atheism without a backward glance.
As a result, religion was something that had hardly been on his radar at all. He’d run a couple of times into the devoutly religious as a result of his teaching of evolution, and had reacted to their objections mostly in puzzlement. Other than that, he hadn’t given much thought to it.
So it was a mystery to him why he went up that walkway in a town he’d never been in before, to a church he’d never heard of before, and opened the door.
The inside of the building was cool and dim and silent, and had that distinctive smell of old books that he’d always associated with libraries. Baxter followed him, claws clicking on the hardwood floor. The door swung shut behind them with a clunk. Row after row of dark wooden pews were lined up facing a raised altar on which sat a table, two chairs, and a lectern. A rather battered-looking spinet stood in the corner. Other than a large, unadorned cross, there was not much in the way of decoration on the walls. It was about as far from the ornate cathedral where his Grandpa and Grandma Franzia’s funeral masses had been said as he could imagine.
He sat down in one of the pews. He’d come here on impulse. What should do he do next?
A door opened at the back corner of the church, behind the lectern, and artificial light shone out from what seemed to be a small office. A tall, heavyset man, balding and walking with a steel cane, came out, and met Chris’s eyes with an unsmiling, but not unfriendly, gaze.
“Can I help you?”
“I’m… I’m not sure.” Chris looked down at Baxter, who had sat down next to him, panting. “I’m sorry, but my dog was with me and I didn’t want to leave him outside.”
“Oh, I’ve never heard Our Lord had problems with dogs, so I don’t either.” He smiled, revealing a pair of front teeth with a large gap. “Got two of them myself. For hunting, mostly, but that doesn’t mean I don’t spoil them in the meantime. He looks like a good boy. What’s his name?”
“Baxter.”
“Well, that’s a good name for a dog.” He leaned over and scratched Baxter’s ears. “Any case, though, what can I do for you today?”
Intuition. Luck. Maybe he wouldn’t have come in here if it weren’t safe. “Can I ask you a question?”
The man shrugged. “Certainly.”
“Do you know who I am?”
One shaggy eyebrow rose a little. “Far as I know, I’ve never seen you before in my life. Is there a reason I should?”
Chris looked into his eyes. “No. But can I just say that if you’re planning on killing me, I wish you’d cut to the chase and get it over with.”
The man stared at him in complete incomprehension, and finally sat down, first leaning on his cane and finally dropping ponderously into the pew across the aisle from where Chris sat.
“Son, you’re making no sense at all. Either there’s a story behind this, or you’re plain crazy, and at the moment the jury’s still out on which it is. Why would you walk in and ask a man if he wants to kill you?”
He sighed. “I don’t know who I can trust. What I’ve been through—I don’t know if you’ll understand.”
“Well, I don’t know either, till you tell me about it. But I do know that now you’re in the consecrated house of God. And I am a minister of the Gospel. You have nothing to fear here. But you want help, you need to level with me. What’s all this about?”
“I need someplace safe to be. I’ve been running for days. There are people who are trying to kill me.”
The man’s broad forehead creased, and both eyebrows shot upwards. “That’s the second time you mentioned someone killing you. Why’s someone trying to kill you?”
Mentally and physically exhausted, Chris leaned forward, and put his forehead into his hand. “I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.”
There was silence in the dim, musty sanctuary for some time. Finally, he raised his eyes. In his imagination, he wondered, in the moment before he looked up, what he would see. The heavyset man now holding a gun, its barrel a black, empty eye aimed at his head. The man flanked by grim-looking individuals in black suits. Or that the man would have mysteriously vanished, leaving him alone in this dingy little church.
But all he saw was the man still sitting there, in exactly the same position as before, his large, calloused hands laced across the handle of his cane. Their eyes met. “I’m Reverend Joseph Harper. Most folks call me Reverend Joe. Whatever evil’s been following you, it cannot enter herein.” His eyes never wavered from Chris’s. “You have nothing to fear here.”
Chris sat with Reverend Joe alone in the church. No one else was nearby, at least no one Chris saw.
What possible reason could They have to spare him now? Given that they’d been trying for almost three weeks to get rid of him? So either the man knew and was on his side, like the boy in the tollbooth, or he was telling the truth, and didn’t know anything.
Besides, if he was one of
Them, he’s probably already be dead.
“My name is Chris Lake. I’m from Syracuse, New York. In the past month, I’ve survived at least three murder attempts. I’m telling you the honest truth that I have no idea who it is that is trying to kill me, nor why. Right now I seem to have shaken them off, but I don’t know for how long that’ll be. I don’t want to put you at any risk, but a place to hide out for a few days would be wonderful. I can pay, at least something, even if it’s to crash on your sofa, or sleep in the church, or wherever.”
Reverend Joe stared at him in silence for another few moments. Chris had never believed in souls, but the preacher seemed to be trying to see into his. “The Lord Jesus commands us to care for the downtrodden. It’s a commandment that a good many of his followers like to forget. In Matthew, chapter twenty-five, Our Lord says, ‘Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, “Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry, and ye gave me meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me in; naked, and ye clothed me; I was sick, and ye visited me; I was in prison, and ye came unto me.”’ How can I do other than what the Lord commands?”
Chris looked at him, a sudden sensation of detachment washing over him. A dizzying succession of bizarre feelings slipped past. This elderly man, in his flannel work shirt and khaki pants, was a link in a chain extending back in time, back through Cotton Mather and Martin Luther, and earlier, Thomas Aquinas and the Venerable Bede and St. Augustine and other, less-remembered names from long-ago college history classes. Despite his long life of disbelief, Chris felt that Reverend Joe really was drawing down some kind of celestial power to shield Chris from harm. He sensed that this moment, right here and now, was some kind of pivot point on which his very life might depend. A deep shudder ran through his body. Baxter whined, and looked up at his master, uncomprehending worry in his brown eyes, and he leaned heavily against Chris’s leg.
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