Centralia

by Mike Dellosso

  Behind them, the Lincoln gained ground. Amy turned and looked out the rear window. “He’s getting closer. We need to do something to lose him.”

  “Got any suggestions?”

  Amy checked the rear window again. “Drive faster?”

  “Hang on.” Peter hit the brake and pulled the wheel to the right. The truck bounced and bumped over the shallow ditch that ran parallel to the road, climbed the short incline to the field, and plowed into the corn, laying down a path of stalks four rows wide.

  Amy leaned forward in the seat and put both hands on the dash. “Oh, my truck.” Cornstalks slapped at the grille like broom handles, broke, and released drying ears of corn, which slid up the hood and bounced over the windshield. “Keep going,” she said. “Make some turns, then head that way.” She pointed to the left. “We can come out on the other side of the field, and he’ll never know where we went.”

  Lawrence pushed himself back in his seat and stomped on the brake. The car’s tires slid on some loose gravel; it fishtailed a bit, then came to a stop. There was no way the Lincoln could navigate the terrain through the field and follow the truck. He got out and removed his sunglasses, scanned the area carefully, and chewed on his lower lip as if it were a piece of beef jerky. The field was slightly elevated, and with the height of the corn, he couldn’t tell which way the truck had headed. He hit the trunk with his hand and cursed again.

  He’d have to call and let the agency know he’d lost them. He hated the thought of it. Failure was not tolerated. If he was lucky, they’d keep him on the assignment, give him another chance to redeem himself and right this wrong. If he was unlucky, which he had yet to be, they would take him off the case, and he knew exactly what that meant.

  If it came to that, he’d go rogue; he’d drop everything and take himself off the grid. They wouldn’t take him. He wouldn’t let that happen.

  Five minutes and thousands of broken and crushed cornstalks later, the truck emerged from the field and the tires found pavement again. For Peter, it had been a ride more bumpy and jolting than any amusement park’s wooden roller coaster. But there was nothing amusing about these twisted turns of events that kept finding him. As the truck hit the road, shedding the remains of the field, Peter’s white-knuckled hands gripped the steering wheel and his heart hammered in time with the pistons of the heaving monster under the hood.

  Amy glanced behind them, then relaxed a little in her seat. Her face was as pale as chalk, her lips colorless. “Peter, you mind telling me what’s going on here?”

  “Do you have your phone on you?” Peter said, ignoring her question.

  “My what?”

  “Your phone. Do you have it?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Get it out.”

  She pulled the phone from the back pocket of her jeans. “You want to call for help now?”

  “Take the battery out.”

  “But—”

  “Amy, do it. Take it out. It’s a trackable device. They can use its signals to pinpoint our location.” It was crazy and some of the strangest timing he’d ever experienced, but the thought had struck him while they rumbled through the cornfield, getting battered by drying cobs.

  Moving quickly, Amy popped the back off the phone and removed the battery. Peter then fished his phone from the front pocket of his pants and handed it to her. “Mine too.”

  She repeated the process with his phone, then stuck them both in the glove box.

  Peter massaged the steering wheel as if he could milk hope from it. He stole a glance at Amy. “I’m sorry, Amy. Really.”

  “You know, for someone who vowed to never talk to me again, you sure have a weird way of keeping your promises.”

  “I never meant for this to happen. I needed help, and you were the only one I could think of.” He turned left at the next stop sign and drove past a large white farmhouse. The house was old, at least a hundred years or so, and appeared in need of updating and repairs. Clothes hung on a wash line outside, and a girl—no more than seven or eight, Lilly’s age—wearing jeans and a purple sweatshirt played with a kitten.

  Amy craned her neck to look at the family. “That’s the Bruces’ home, and that’s Jenny. Theirs is the field we just destroyed.”

  “Do you know them?”

  “Yes. Sort of. His wife works part-time at the Food Lion. We talk. She’s a very kind and soft-spoken woman.”

  Peter sighed. “Give them my apologies?”

  “Apologies won’t bring their corn back. That’s their livelihood.”

  “We had to.”

  “I know. I’ll pay him back for his loss.”

  “I’ll pay. I drove.”

  “It’s my truck covered with his corn. We’ll split it.”

  They drove in silence for a minute or so, Peter pushing the truck just beyond the road’s posted speed limit.

  Finally Amy said, “Where are we going, anyway?”

  Peter shrugged, checked the mirrors. “I don’t know. I just want to get away and think. I need to think.” There was so much to process, so much to sort out. His mind reeled with questions and possible answers and scenarios that made absolutely no sense and others that made partial sense but only under extraordinary circumstances. But he had yet to come upon an explanation that made perfect sense. It was there; he was certain of it. But he needed time and quiet to sort through all the weeds and find it.

  “Peter, that man had a gun. He was there to kill one of us or both of us. Who was he? How did he know you’d be there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That was two questions.”

  “I don’t know on both accounts.” He forked his fingers through his hair. “I need to think.”

  “You said you needed help. What kind of help? And why me?”

  Peter checked the mirrors again, glanced out the side window, scanned the dash’s instrument panel. She had so many questions. It was time to start giving her some answers. “Karen and Lilly are alive.”

  “Yeah, you said that already. What does that mean?”

  “Exactly what it sounds like: they’re still alive.”

  “But the accident. The funeral.”

  He shook his head, rubbed his temples with one hand. “It must have been staged. Faked. I don’t know. All I know is that the funeral wasn’t real and they’re alive.” More memories of the funeral materialized and peppered his mind with splintered images and fragments of running video. There were so many people there, people he didn’t even know. Friends of Karen, parents of Lilly’s schoolmates. The preacher went on and on. He was a good man, Pastor Morsey, but he didn’t know when to quit talking. Not that Peter wanted to hurry the service up; he didn’t. He just wanted to be left alone to grieve. He wanted some time without well-wishers and condolences and all the tears. Eventually the clouds released their rain and Morsey was forced to wrap things up. When everyone had gone, Peter asked the caretaker if he could have a few minutes at the graves before they put the caskets in the ground. The man, an older gent with a weathered face and tired eyes, nodded and backed away. And that’s when Peter let the tears come. Rain ran off his head and mixed with the tears. He was angry, hurt, lonely. How could God abandon him like this? Take what was most precious to him? How cruel was that?

  But this morning changed all that. How he’d forgotten, he didn’t know. It was as if someone had gained access to his mind as he slept, hacked into his internal hard drive, and erased file after file. His mind, scrambling to repair the damage, had then reverted back to the last configuration that made sense, that it knew to be true: Karen and Lilly were indeed alive. Again he wondered how much he could believe what his mind was telling him. But he wasn’t imagining the gunmen. Or the note in Lilly’s handwriting. None of the pieces seemed to form the right picture.

  Amy held her head with both hands. “Staged the funeral? Okay, so let’s say they are alive somewhere. Who would want to do such a thing? And how do you know? Didn’t you see the bodies after the acciden
t?”

  They’d told Peter the car had been so engulfed in flames that there were no remains to identify. “No. They told me there was nothing left. And I have no idea who’s behind this.”

  Amy’s hand went to her mouth. “I’m sorry. And I’m sorry I didn’t come to the funeral. Didn’t call or write or anything. I thought . . .”

  “I understand, Amy. Really. When I think about it, I can’t really blame you.” Peter reached into his pocket and retrieved the note he’d found in the toilet tank. “Look, I’m not going nuts, okay? I thought I was at first, but I’m not.” He paused to consider all that he had told her so far and put himself in her shoes, on the receiving end of such outlandish and improbable theories. “Okay, maybe I’m a little nuts.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He handed her the piece of paper.

  She unfolded it and stared at it. “Centralia. What’s that?”

  “That’s why I needed your computer.”

  “But why couldn’t you use your own computer?”

  Peter checked the mirrors. No black Lincoln followed. He slowed the truck and turned right onto Long Acre Lane. The road was lined with mature sycamores, their branches sprawling overhead, forming a canopy thirty, forty feet above the ground. Beyond the trees were acres of field that had lain fallow. Grass, shin-high and brown, swayed slowly, pushed about by the air’s gentle currents. He didn’t want to tell Amy about the gunmen. He’d trusted her at one time, trusted her with his career until she’d betrayed him and nearly cost him his job and reputation. But when he needed someone he trusted, hers had still been the first name—really the only one—he could think of. Regardless of what had happened between them, he knew where he stood with her. “Can I trust you?”

  If the question startled Amy or took her by surprise, she didn’t show it. “After what just happened? I think I should be asking you that.”

  He said it again. “Can I trust you, Amy?”

  She studied the note for a long moment, then turned her head toward the window and watched the trees whiz by. “Yes. Yes, Peter, you can trust me.”

  “Do you think I’m nuts?”

  Her hesitation didn’t bother him. Anyone sane would deduce that he was playing on the edge of lucidity, walking that very fine line that separated sanity from utter madness. After checking the note again, she said, “No. I think you’re confused, I think you still haven’t made sense of any of this yet, I think you’re a total jerk for pulling me into this, but I don’t think you’re crazy.” She paused, glanced at him, and smiled. “Well, maybe a little nuts.”

  He couldn’t argue with any of that. “Fine. I think I was being tracked or bugged or monitored or something.”

  “Big Brother?”

  “Worse.”

  “What do you mean, worse? And why?”

  He paused, swallowed. A light sweat had broken out on his brow and upper lip. If he wanted her help, he’d have to tell her. She was the only one who would listen to him and take him seriously without writing him off as a mourning husband and father who’d misplaced his last piece of sanity somewhere in the land of paranoid psychosis. “Big Brother with guns and an intent to kill.”

  “Is that who that was back there? Big Brother?”

  “I really don’t know. I think he was sent to clean up Big Brother’s mess. Three men broke into my home shortly after I found that note. They had guns. Silencers. They weren’t there to play nice.”

  “They were professionals?”

  “Apparently.”

  “And they knew the moment you found this note?”

  Unbidden, tears came again, pressing behind his eyes and oozing out the corners. He dashed them away. “It looks that way, yes. I was being monitored.”

  “What happened? How did you get away?”

  He glanced at her but didn’t answer.

  “We need to call the police,” she said.

  Peter shook his head. “No way. I have to stick with people I can trust. People I know.”

  “And you can’t trust the cops?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Why ever not?”

  Outside the truck, the line of sycamores ended and the fields gave way to a more populated stretch. Small homes, mostly ranches and mobiles, lined the road now. Each sat on a nice-size lot with a paved driveway and trees for shade. In them lived families who shared memories and played games together, maybe watched movies at night, ate popcorn. Families that hadn’t been destroyed by lies and hunted like criminals. A mile or so down the road, they’d enter the town of Five Forks. Peter massaged the wheel again. “Because one of the intruders—one of the men who would have shot me in cold blood—was a cop.”

  Amy didn’t say anything to that. She stared out the side window for a long time before asking again, “How did you get away?” She seemed surprised that a lab researcher, a man who spent most of his academic life in a white coat, a man who would rank at least in the upper tenth percentile when it came to nerdiness, could escape the clutches of three trained killers.

  Peter glanced at his hands. He had once again clenched his hands until his knuckles lost their color. “That’s enough for now, okay?”

  They rode in silence for the next thirty minutes, across oceans of open farmland striped with rows of corn and blanketed with fields of golden wheat, and through the towns of Five Forks and Crossroads. Peter kept glancing in his mirrors but never saw the black Lincoln or any other vehicle following them. Though satisfied that he’d temporarily shaken his murderous shadow, he didn’t believe for one moment that he’d lost his pursuers but had merely stalled them. They seemed to have resources beyond his ability to truly hide. He only needed to lie low long enough to collect his thoughts, formulate a plan, and figure out what to do with Amy. He certainly didn’t want to endanger her any more than he already had but knew that she was part of it now—she was involved—and whoever was after him wouldn’t stop until they had both of them.

  When they arrived in Bentleysville, Peter said, “We need gas, and I need to get some answers.”

  Amy said, “I need answers too.”

  “You’ll get them. As much as I know.” She deserved to know what he knew, which wasn’t much. During the drive following their cornfield escape, his mind had sprouted a whole new crop of questions. All without answers. He’d spare Amy the finer nuances of his tortuous soliloquizing and share only the facts he’d learned or deduced.

  After filling the truck at a small local station on the fringe of town, he found a coffee shop on one of the secondary streets and parked behind it in the employee parking area.

  “Why not go to the library?” Amy asked.

  “Cameras,” Peter said. “Libraries have security cameras, even in small towns.”

  “Yeah, these little towns are real hotbeds for book thieves. You wouldn’t imagine what the street value is for the latest Dan Brown novel.”

  “We need to stay off the grid, out of view. No cameras, no credit cards, no phone calls.”

  Amy sighed, ran her hand through her hair. “You think they can tap into some country library’s closed-circuit system?”

  “I’m not sure what they’re capable of right now. They tracked me to your house. How did they do that? My car? My phone? It could be anything. It’s like they know my next move before I do. They’re resourceful, and until I figure out how they operate, we need to be as invisible as possible.”

  “And who exactly are they?”

  Peter pulled the key from the ignition and opened the truck’s door. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

  It took Lawrence Habit a full twenty minutes to make his way around the cornfield and find the road that Patrick and the woman had taken. It was obvious civil engineers had tractors, not assassins, in mind when designing the grid for rural roads. Oversize, tread-heavy tires could go where luxury sedans could not. Lawrence primarily made his living maneuvering through city streets with stop signs and traffic lights and the occasional pedestria
n to deal with. This land of corn and wheat and shoulderless roads was as foreign to him as a grass-covered savanna was to a mountain goat. He glanced at his watch. He was now thirty minutes behind them. He’d have to be liberal on the gas pedal.

  Shortly after Lawrence had lost Patrick and reported his miscalculation, his employer had phoned back and given him the route and direction Patrick and the woman were headed. The call came from a different number this time, and it was a different voice on the other end, masculine but with an effeminate quality to it—so mechanical and lifeless Lawrence at first thought it was a recording. To make sure it wasn’t an automated caller, he asked the voice what its favorite rock group of the 1970s was. An odd question, but personal enough that a computer-generated identity using artificial intelligence would not be programmed to answer it. The voice hesitated, then mumbled that it didn’t listen to seventies rock. Eighties was its music of choice. Red Hot Chili Peppers.

  Satisfied that he was indeed speaking to a real person, Lawrence told the voice to phone him again when Patrick reached his destination, wherever that might be. The voice agreed but said yet another individual from yet another phone number would call Lawrence the next time.

  Lawrence was not surprised.

  Ten minutes later he received another call. A man this time, no mistaking it, with a hint of a New England accent. Bostonian. Patrick’s location was given with specific orders to take him alive. This made Lawrence’s job a lot trickier. Still, it was better than the alternative. He did not want to kill Patrick; after all, he owed the guy his life.

  Lawrence thanked the caller for the information and was about to disconnect the call when the man said, “One more thing you should take note of.”

  Lawrence pressed the phone harder against his ear. “I’m taking notes.”

  “If you fail this time, you will be discontinued.”

  That was it. Spoken coldly as if he’d read it from a script and didn’t realize what he’d said, the weight of his words, the finality of his simple sentence, until after the words had crossed his lips.