Yeah, right.
Mallory pulled a small notebook from her back pocket and opened it to the page of landmarks. She checked off the green lions of Chicago and drew a line through the missing Cicero statue called Tall Paul. Another line was drawn through the lost ballfield. She checked off a second giant called the Gemini Man, a statue in a space suit, and made one more check for Funks Grove. The list of sights for Illinois was almost done. Only one roadside attraction remained unchecked and that was the Queen of the Road.
“Hi, my name is April.” The tourist in red was hovering over the table and waiting out that polite interval where Mallory would offer her own name in exchange, but seconds dragged by and the woman’s e x istence had yet to be acknowledged. More timid now, she said, “April Waylon from Oklahoma. May I join you?”
Mallory looked up with a frosty glare that said no, April should not even think of sitting at this table.
And the woman sat down. “I wondered if you were traveling east or west.” After another long silence, intrepid April pressed on. “If you were traveling east, you might have passed my friends going the other way-on Route 66-a large group of cars all traveling together. You see, I missed the big meeting in Chicago.”
Mallory looked up.
“That’s where the maps were handed out,” said the tourist, “and I’ve been trying to play catch-up with the caravan. Well, by now, of course they’re at the campsite, but I don’t know how to find them. I had numbers to call. They were stored on my cell phone, but the battery died, and then I-”
“Get off this road and take the interstate,” said Mallory, who did not intend to listen to this woman’s e ntire life story. “All the public campgrounds are marked by signs.”
“Oh, not ours. It’s on private land somewhere on this old road. I don’t know what to do. I can’t go back out there. Tonight I got frightened-really, really scared-and I couldn’t e ven tell you why. That sounds silly, doesn’t it?”
A man in coveralls walked up to the table, wiping his hands on a greasy rag, and he spoke to the woman from Oklahoma. “Your car’s been ready for a while now.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” said April Waylon. “I just lost track of time. So the tire’s all right?”
“No, ma’am, it’s not,” said the man who smelled of gasoline. “No holes, but you got a busted air valve. That’s why it went flat. So I changed the tire. But if this ever happens again, you just stay put and wait for a tow truck.”
“I was out in the middle of nowhere, and my cell phone wouldn’t w o rk.”
“Well, that tire was flat as could be when you pulled in here. Now driving it that way-that’s just hell on the wheel and the front-end alignment.”
Mallory’s remote little table for one was turning into a convention center. A portly waitress had deposited a cup of coffee by her tray, and now the woman stayed to read the list of landmarks in her notebook.
When the man in the coveralls had departed, Mallory made another attempt to get rid of April Waylon. She pointed to a departing trucker. “Follow that man to the interstate and get a room for the night. You’ll have better luck finding your friends in the daylight.”
“I’m afraid. I can’t e x plain it. I just-”
“Ask the trucker to keep an eye on your car. You’ll be fine.” But now Mallory noticed that the woman’s o pen handbag had been left at the center table. Either this tourist hailed from some crime-free little town or she lacked common sense.
“But you’re a police officer, aren’t you?” April Waylon was suddenly hopeful. “And you’re traveling west. I can see that now-by your list. It starts in Chicago.” She touched the page. “I remember those green lions. So I could follow you.”
“No, you can’t. ”
“Tall Paul’s out of order,” said the iron-haired waitress, her eyes still on the list of roadside attractions.
And Mallory said, “What?”
“Tall Paul,” said the waitress. “Statue of a man holding a big hot dog,” she added-slowly-in case her customer was only half bright. “Well, he’s in the wrong place on your list. He belongs between Funks Grove and the queen.”
“No,” said Mallory, insisting on this. “Tall Paul was supposed to be up north in Cicero.”
“Not anymore.” The waitress wagged one gnarly finger at the young detective. “I was answering fool questions about this road before you learned to drive, missy, and I should know where that damn statue is. A few years back, it was bought up from an outfit in Cicero and hauled down to Arch Street in Atlanta. That’s the next town over. Now you take a left out of the parking lot and head toward the railroad tracks, but don’t c ross ’em. You’ll see a sign for-”
Mallory was not listening. She was rising from the table, dropping a fifty-dollar bill by the tray-many times the cost of her meal-and then, though her food and coffee were untouched, she headed for the door with some urgency to chase down a statue.
Upon entering Atlanta, Illinois, Mallory had no trouble finding Arch Street; the town was that small. The car lights shone on a fiberglass man, who did indeed carry a big hot dog, and he was tall. “ Tall as a building,” said the letter, “ Tall as a tree. Tall Paul.” So the statue had not been lost, only misplaced.
The author of the letter seemed partial to things on a grand scale, but Mallory could not understand the man’s passion for this road. So far, she had formed a one-word impression of Illinois-flat-with the occasional bump. By flashlight, she reread a few of the letters, wondering what she was missing here. She looked up at the statue.
So this was Peyton Hale’s idea of spectacle?
Headlights appeared in her rearview mirror, and a car pulled up behind the convertible, blinding her with a ricochet of high beams. She heard the other vehicle’s door open and close. When the tourist from Dixie Tr uckers Home came rapping on the window, the woman found herself staring into the muzzle of Mallory’s revolver. April Waylon opened her mouth wide to scream, but all that came out was a squeak, and her arms waved about like the wings of a demented bird.
After watching this for a few moments, Mallory got out of the car, saying, ordering, “Calm down. Now!” And the tourist froze, hardly calm, but not quite so annoying anymore. “What are you doing out here? I told you to take the interstate.”
“There’s a car following me. As I got closer to Atlanta, it dropped behind. Its lights went out, but they didn’t t u rn away. You know what I mean?” With one flat hand, April tried to demonstrate how a car might look if it was veering off the road. “Well, it wasn’t like that. The headlights just shut off. And my cell phone still won’t w o rk. I tried the car charger, but that wouldn’t-Oh, my!”
Mallory grabbed the cell phone from the woman’s hand and opened the battery bay. She had expected to see corrosion or a botched connection.
Now she held up the phone so April could plainly see the compartment where the battery should be. It was empty. “That’s why your phone won’t w o rk.”
“But that’s impossible. I used the phone when it was still light outside. I made a dinner reservation.” April Waylon prattled on. “It was a nice little restaurant. You must have passed it. It was just outside of-”
“While you were having dinner, somebody lifted the cell phone from your purse and stole the battery.” Given this woman’s c arelessness with her handbag, that would have been simple enough. However, the average thief would not risk returning the useless phone.
“Maybe it was him! The one who’s following me. He’s still back there. You have to believe me. I’m not hysterical. I’m not making this up.”
Mallory did believe her. A disabled cell phone worked well with the disabled air valve on April Waylon’s flat tire. “Get in my car.”
The woman meekly did as she was told.
The detective walked back to the red sedan. She opened the hood wide and left it that way. Next, she took the purse from the dashboard and locked the car, leaving the headlights on. Returning to her own car and her passenger, she
tossed a red wallet in April’s lap, then hurled the red purse into the middle of the road.
“Oh, my handbag. It’s got all my maps and-” Here, April wisely closed her mouth and faced forward-quietly.
Mallory started up the car and drove off, keeping one eye on the mirror image of the road behind her. “If I don’t c atch your stalker, you should go back to Oklahoma when it gets light.”
“I can’t do that.”
Interesting.
Mallory had assessed April Waylon as a silly woman, easily frightened and quick to panic. Yet, here she was, traveling in the dark, working through her fear. “What’s so important about this trip of yours?”
“I’m looking for my daughter, my baby. She was only six years old when she was taken.”
Mallory watched her rearview mirror. No one was following. She slowed and rolled onto the shoulder of the road, then stopped awhile, minding the passing minutes, waiting until the time was right. “How old is your daughter now?”
“Nearly sixteen.”
They sat in silence for a while, and then Mallory moved on, going slowly.
April Waylon’s hands folded, fingers tightly interlaced. “You won’t s ay it, but you think I’m ridiculous. All this time-ten years. You think she’s dead. You know she is… And I’m a fool… And you’re right. But I need to find my child and bring her home. All over the world, children come home every day… home from school.” She bowed her head. “It was my fault. The school bus stopped right by the house, but I should’ve been with her… till the bus came. I never saw her again. I used to take it for granted-all those little homecomings. She was only six years old. So you see, don’t you, why I can’t leave her out there?” April turned to the passenger window, watching the nightscape rolling by. “I have to go out and find her.” Her voice became very matter-of-fact. “This is what mothers do.”
Mallory made a sharp turn and then another. And now she had doubled back onto Arch Street. She cut the headlights and the engine to coast silently through the darkness. Up ahead, another car was parked behind the red sedan, and a man with a flashlight was looking in the windows of April’s c ar. The red purse was in his hand. Mallory opened the car door soundlessly and made her way down the street on foot. The man was so preoccupied, he never heard her coming up behind him-until that moment when she wrenched his right arm behind his back and pressed her gun into his neck.
And he yelled, “Knock it off, I’m a cop!”
But Mallory made the pain of the wrenched arm an ongoing thing until the man produced a badge, and even then she was not quite done with him. She looked at the wallet spread on the hood of the red car and read the ID alongside his detective’s shield. This Chicago cop was way beyond his city limit, two hundred miles out of town.
“I know why I was coasting in the dark,” she said. “Now tell me why you cut your lights before you got here.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I never cut my lights. I’m on a car-theft task force. I’ve been tracking a stolen car all night. I lost the LoJack signal on this road.”
It was a bad lie. She knew he was not trailing any car thief to a chop-shop, not out here in the boonies. And he would not be worried about a high-speed pursuit at this time of night-no reason to follow from any dis- tance. She believed he was on a surveillance detail, but it had nothing to do with a stolen car. “Where’s your backup? Where’s your vehicle recovery team?”
The Chicago cop was smiling now, and that was a lie, too, because it came with sweat trickling down his face on a cool night. He thought that she was going to kill him. He believed this with all his heart, but the smile never faltered, and she gave him points for that.
“I’m guessing you’re a cop,” he said, tossing this off as a joke.
Mallory was not amused.
“Hey,” he said, “if this is your car, I’m sorry. It’s not the one I was tracking. I saw the hood up and a purse in the road. I figured somebody was in trouble here.”
She released his arm and holstered her weapon.
He stood up straight and rolled back his shoulders, acting the part of a man who had not just wet his pants. “You are a cop, right?”
She lifted his wallet from the hood of the car. “You know I don’t b u y your story, right?”
“Yeah.” His eyes were on her gun, though it rested in the holster, and he still wore a smile, as if it had somehow gotten stuck to his face and could not be undone.
She glanced at her own car down the road and waved to the passenger, signaling April Waylon to come out and join them. Turning back to the cop from Chicago, she said, “I’ve got a little job for you. If you didn’t lie about cutting your lights, then that woman has a stalker. So you’re going to play babysitter until she hooks up with her friends.” Mallory made a show of reading the ID card in the man’s o pen wallet before handing it to him. “And now that I know where to find you, I can look you up… if anything happens to her. Got a problem with that?”
“Oh, hell no,” he said, “no problem at all.” He was smiling naturally now, just so happy to be alive.
Click.
The noise of the camera was hidden beneath the roar of a car’s engine.
From this distance and deep in shadow, the shot would be dicey with no flash. The only illumination came from the streetlamp and the headlights of the red sedan. And the fast acceleration of the VW convertible had been unexpected. The image developing now was a blur of gold hair and silver metal. In many ways, it was a most telling portrait of the young blonde. By definition, enigmas lacked clarity.
Detective Riker had crossed into Indiana, one state away from Illinois, when he responded to the beep of his cell phone.
The surveillance cop from Chicago said, “She made me, Riker. I swear I don’t know how she did it. This never happened before, not to me.”
Riker kept a tactful silence. This would not have happened if the Chicago cop had kept a mile between his vehicle and the Volkswagen, but then he listened to the tale of the lady tourist and the stalker, and now he understood how Mallory had caught her tracker. The other man was not done talking, but Riker had ceased to listen. His mind was elsewhere. No believer in coincidence, he tried to force the connection of a New York suicide to a crime scene in Chicago and a stalker in downstate Illinois. It hurt his head.
The other man’s long story ended with the tagline, “Sorry.”
“Well, she’s good at spotting shadows,” said Riker. The girl could even see shadows that were not there. “It’s a gift.” And this was true. Mallory had turned a heightened sense of paranoia into an art form. “But thanks for hanging in there all night. I owe you bigtime.”
“That’s good, Riker. ’Cause when I get back, I can’t t e ll my boss that I screwed up. So I’m gonna tell him that you called off the surveillance. That’s okay by you?”
“For sure. I’ll back you up.”
“Thanks. Did I tell you she stuck a gun in my neck?”
“Oh, shit.”
“I’m guessing she’s no car thief-maybe a cop? Maybe the registered owner of that car-Detective Mallory?” When there was no response from Riker, the Chicago man said, “She doesn’t s t rike me as the type to drive a Vo lkswagen.”
Mallory was searching for an on-ramp to Interstate 55, a well-traveled highway with signs for twenty-four-hour fuel stops. The landscape of this old access road was the dark gray of early morning long before sunrise.
An on-ramp was no longer needed. She saw the lights of a gas station up ahead, and that was strange. Another driver might have felt lucky to find one open at this preternatural hour; Mallory was only suspicious. It was a small station with only one pump, and she wondered how it survived on local traffic. There was no garage for auto repairs, and the nearby interstate highway would eat up the commuter trade for gasoline. There was no reason to open for business before the full light of day, and yet a sleepy boy in coveralls was dozing beside the gas pump when she pulled into the lot.
An old
man stepped out of the small wooden building. Rubbing sleep from his eyes, he hitched up his pants as he walked toward her. Mallory waved him off and put the pump’s nozzle into her gas tank. The old man shrugged to tell her fine by him-less work, and what did he care if she wanted to pump her own gas? He held up one gnarly finger as he named his terms of “Cash and carry. I don’t t ake no damn credit cards.” When she failed to answer him, even by a nod, he stepped up to the car. “You know you’re damn lucky I got any gas at all. Those damn tourists took most all of it yesterday.”
The young boy was circling the convertible, eyes full of love for it, but giving Mallory a wide berth, sensing trouble if he came closer-if he should actually touch her car. Finally, he came to rest a short distance away, asking, “Are you hunting somebody on this road?”
Mallory was rarely taken by surprise, and now it must show on her face.
Encouraged by her reaction, the boy took one step closer, politely asking, “You got a picture to show us?” Failing to get an answer, he took her for a foreigner, and his hands described a square in the air, as if this might communicate a photograph.
“What?”
“A picture!” said the old man, frustrated now that the boy beside him had exhausted his vocabulary in the spoken word and sign language. He jerked one thumb back toward the field on the far side of his gas station. “All those people who camped here last night was carrying damn pictures.”
She hung the nozzle on the pump and crossed the lot to round the small building and look out over the field beyond the gas station. They must have been very neat campers. There was no debris left behind, only charred circles from campfires and the tire marks of many different vehicles. When she returned to the gas pump, the old man was still muttering.
“Like I’d remember every customer who stopped for gas in the past twenty years.” One hand rested a moment on the boy’s s houlder. “And my grandson here, damned if those fools didn’t ask him to have a look, too. Posters and pictures and itty bitty locket photos-just every damn thing.”
“But the ones I saw looked like they was just kids.” The boy shyly edged closer to Mallory. “So… if you’ve got a picture-”
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