“No,” he said.
And squeezed back.
Paytrice gasped immediately, whimpered, and dropped hard to his knees., sunglasses askew, eyes wide and not understanding. Swallowing hard. Sweating hard.
“Sir,” he said, voice unnaturally high. In pain. In fear. “Please.”
“You tell him.”
Paytrice nodded quickly, struggling not to bend over. To bow.
A shout, maybe not the first one. John saw the brother sidling as fast as he could between the parked cars, brandishing a fist.
“You tell him,” John told Alonse. “Tell Trask to leave me alone.”
A single tear on Paytrice’s cheek as he nodded, just once.
John released him and ran down the lane, waving at Lisse to get moving. She did, at a crawl, until he swerved around the trunk, yanked open the passenger door, and threw himself inside.
“Go!” he cried.
“Where?” she said as she maneuvered through the gap and turned right.
“Anywhere,” he said. “Anywhere.”
* * * *
2
Alonse Paytrice knelt in the parking lot and sobbed, hands useless on his thighs.
His brother towered over him, not knowing what to do, what to say. “How he do that?” he asked finally, fingers brushing his brother’s shoulder.
“I don’t know.” Alonse didn’t wipe his eyes, didn’t wipe his nose. “I don’t know.” When he finally looked up, when he could finally see, he said, “That man ain’t right, Seb, that man ain’t right.”
“Stronger than he look.”
“No.” He accepted Sebastian’s help to his feet, but shook the hands off once they started back to the limo. “That ain’t it, Seb. Something else. Something else.”
* * * *
3
John switched places with Lisse the first chance they had to pull over. Twenty minutes later they were on the interstate, headed for Baton Rouge. His original plan was to simply ride up the Mississippi on I-51 all the way to Illinois, cut east, and run straight for home. Now he wasn’t so sure.
Neither was Lisse.
“He’ll find me,” she said for the fifth, maybe sixth time. She barely looked at him. “A man like that, he’ll know how to find me. Those men ...” She shuddered. For the fifth, maybe sixth time.
He didn’t speak.
He couldn’t speak.
Levee Pete and Alonse Paytrice.
What the hell was going on?
He was about as unathletic as they come. Walking was the most exercise he got, and that, not every often. When he was a kid his height had protected him from bullies; when he became an adult, his height was still somewhat intimidating—that, he thought with a grin—and that damn presidential resemblance. But against a giant like Paytrice?
The sensation, the floating, had ended as soon as he’d grabbed those monster hands, nothing left but anger.
No, he corrected; not anger... purpose.
Whatever that meant.
The leading edge of the Gulf storm continued to catch up with them, muting the sunlight now, softening the shadows.
“Do you have relatives?” he asked at last. “I mean, someplace I can drop you? Friends, maybe?”
“No,” she said. “They’ll find me.”
“Then maybe you should ...uh ...”
“Stick with you?” She laughed, not quite strained. “I don’t think you’re very safe, you know. You got that lightning thing, bad news stuff, it comes to you out of clear blue, you know what I mean?”
“I didn’t used to,” he answered sourly.
“Nothing better to do, though,” she said, looking out her window.
“Thanks.” But he smiled.
A mile, and he saw nothing. Nothing registered but the cars ahead of him, the semis jetting past him, the way the afternoon grew slowly darker.
“John?”
“Yes?”
“How’d you do that? That man?”
“I don’t know, Lisse. I swear to you, I don’t know.”
She grunted. “Tell you the truth, I ain’t surprised.” She sighed. “He didn’t scream, like that kid, but it was close enough, the look on his face.”
He knew.
“I don’t get it. What does he want? The reverend.”
He shook his head, raised an I-don’t-know hand, and told her about the conversation he’d had with the minister after she’d left. Her eyes widened in disbelief.
“The Antichrist? You’re kidding.”
“That’s what he said.” He wanted to laugh; he couldn’t.
“You have a kid, right?’’
“Yes, right.”
“What’s his name, Damien?”
He did laugh then. “No. Joey. His name is Joey.”
“Watch that rig, John, he’s drifting.”
The eighteen-wheeler had slowed for an exit, signal light blinking, sliding over into their lane. John slowed to let him in.
“Joey,” she said quietly. “Sorry, but that’s no name for the Antichrist. He do sacrifices and stuff? You know, slice up the neighbor’s puppies and kittens?”
He laughed again. “Not hardly. He ... he loves animals. Especially horses.”
“Cowboy, huh?”
“Twenty-four hours a day. Hat, shirt, gunbelt, the works.” He smiled. “We have this cable channel, it shows westerns all day, and old cowboy shows. It took a crowbar to get him outside when Roy Rogers or Gene Autry were on.” The smile wavered. “I wonder if she still lets him watch them.”
“If he’s the Antichrist, he can probably watch any damn thing he wants.”
He looked over, saw the grin and felt the melancholy drain. “He can’t think that, can he? Trask, I mean. That I’m looking for the Antichrist, and my son is it?” He shook his head quickly, and looked back to the highway when Lisse pointed. “Nah.”
“Then that quest thing he said, what is it?”
“He’s crazy, Lisse, that’s all.”
“Like a fox,” she answered, squirmed in her seat and looked into the back. “That box, those the papers you were so hot to print out?”
He nodded, braking as a van cut in front of him to take the next exit. Barely breathing until the van actually left the highway.
“Maybe it’s in there,” she said thoughtfully. “The answer.”
“I know it is.”
“You know what it is?”
“Not positive. It’s something, though.”
“What got you all excited before?’’
“Yeah.”
“You gonna tell me?’’
He hadn’t planned on it, but as soon as she said it, he answered, “Yes. Maybe if I tell you, you can tell me if I’m nuts or not.”
“Oh, you’re nuts, all right. No question. Question is, why?”
Because I’m scared, he thought; because I’m scared out of my mind, and I don’t know why.
Then she said, “John, we going right up the river?”
“That’s the plan. We’ll probably hit traffic by Baton Rouge and Memphis, but we should—” He looked over and saw her staring out the back window. He shifted his gaze to the rearview mirror, saw nothing out of the ordinary until the car behind him shifted into the next lane.
The gray limousine was back there, one lane over and a dozen lengths back.
“Oh...shit.”
Lisse faced front, the fingers of her left hand plucking at her shirt. “Hanging back there.”
He sped up, but not much, shifted lanes once before moving back into the right-hand lane behind an old station wagon packed with kids, a pair of mattresses strapped to the roof.
“Still there,” she said.
He knew; he saw.
“Following.”
She nodded. “He probably knows you’re heading back home. I don’t get it. Why not try to pull us over, or get there before you do?”
“I don’t know.” He lost its image for a few moments, found it again, smooth and gliding in the next lane over.
“I don’t know.”‘
She snapped her fingers softly. “Or he’s waiting for us to pull over. Gas, or something.” She nodded to the dashboard. “You don’t got but half a tank. You’ll have to stop.”
Another mile, while the traffic thickened.
“I need a hero,” he said with a forced laugh. “Some guy who knows what the hell he’s doing.”
“You got a gun somewhere?” she said, only half joking.
He didn’t have to answer, but he moved a little faster.
“Tell me something,” he said. “You any good at navigating without a map?”
“Do I have a good sense of direction? Yeah, I guess so. Never got lost as far as I can remember. Why?’’
“I have another plan.”
He drove for another forty-five minutes, keeping to the speed limit while most of the rest of the traffic barreled by. Trying to beat the storm, he figured, nodding when she turned on the radio just in time to hear a newsman tell his listeners about the rain in New Orleans, the gusts of high wind.
The limousine hung back, evidently content to play shadow for a while. He had stopped checking on it twenty miles ago; it was there and, for now, there wasn’t much he could do about it.
When the first drop hit the windshield, smeared the dust, he wondered if he really was nuts, thinking what he was thinking. He wasn’t a hero—-movie, real life, or otherwise— and the smartest thing would be just to pull over and let the man have his say. A rational thought for a rational man, but Paytrice had changed that. His dander was up, as George Trout would say, and when that happened, mules no longer had the corner on stubborn.
The wind picked up, swirling dust across the highway.
The temperature began to drop.
When the rain finally struck it was fast and hard, the wipers on full speed barely keeping up with the torrent. Cars pulled to the shoulder to wait it out. Tracks didn’t bother. The station wagon veered sharply toward an exit, the kids at the back window ghosts in the rain.
“Won’t last,” Lisse said, her voice startling him. “Too hard, it won’t last.”
“In that case,” he said, and at the last possible moment cut toward the exit, swept down the ramp without slowing down. Lisse yelped in surprise and grabbed for the dashboard when he ran a red light at the bottom, praying there were no cops nearby. He braked only when he reached the next corner, swung right into a small shopping district, most stores dark, many boarded up, cars at the curbs old and bleak.
The rearview mirror was empty of everything but the rain.
‘‘East and north,” he said when Lisse looked at him for an explanation. “Just head us east and north.”
* * * *
“John, we’re lost.”
“That’s the point, isn’t it? Where are we?”
“I said we’re lost. If I knew where we were, then we wouldn’t be lost.” She giggled. “Mississippi, I think.”
“Good.”
The gray limousine was gone.
* * * *
“We’ll stop in a couple of hours, get a room, get some sleep.”
“Two rooms,” she said primly.
“If you say so, it’s George’s money.”
“And food. I’m starving. I ain’t hardly eaten all day, them drive-thru burgers don’t count.”
He looked at her, barely seen in the dark, the sun long gone. “Funny about your English.”
“Hey.”
“That accent, I could listen to it all day. But your English comes and goes, have you noticed?”
“My English is good enough for me, Yank. Nobody ever complained about it before.”
“I’m not complaining. Just something I noticed.”
“So it slips when I get nervous. You wanna make something of it?”
“You’re nervous?”
“Shit, no, I’m scared half to death.”
* * * *
The room was small, musty, at the back of a motel near the Tombigbee River. Thin walls, stains in the bathroom sink, water dripping constantly from the pines that overwhelmed it. The window air conditioner didn’t work, and the television bolted to the chipped chest of drawers had only two stations—one from Memphis, one from Birmingham. Once in a while.
He had tried to call Casey but there was no answer at the rectory, none at the church. Information gave him a number for the doctor, Mel Farber, but no one answered there, either.
Fingers crossed, but no hope at all, he tried calling home.
His answering machine didn’t pick up; Sharon must have turned it off.
When he failed to get hold of George, he wanted to tear the phone from the wall.
* * * *
They lay in their own beds, not really sleeping.
Crickets and tree frogs.
“John?”
“Hmmmm?”
“What if he’s there when we get there?”
“My turf.” He chuckled. “My turf, my friends, my town.”
“They’ll protect you?”
“Us. Yeah. I hope so.”
“I sure wish that made me feel better than I do.”
Crickets and tree frogs, a passing car that sat them up until the headlights moved on.
“Those papers, John. What’s in those papers got you all up like that?”
“You heard some of the tapes, right?”
“Sure. A couple.”
“You notice anything in common?”
“You mean, aside from they killed a whole mess of people?”
“Think about it.”
“I’m too hot to think, I’m too tired to breathe. Don’t play me games, John, this ain’t the time.”
“They didn’t care, Lisse. Except for a couple, like that guy in Rahway, they didn’t care about anyone they killed. Not even family members. They did it because they felt like it. Because they were in the mood do to it. When they weren’t in the mood, they didn’t do it. A score of them, Lisse. More than that. And I know, I know, that if I talked to more, it would only be the same.”
A night bird, calling.
“That means...you saying that means there are people out there, a ton of them maybe, doing the same thing?”
“Exactly what I mean.”
“They kill because they want to.”
“No. They just kill. There’s ... I don’t know ... there’s nothing inside anymore, I think.”
“No, that can’t be.”
“I hope you’re right, Lisse. I really hope you’re right.”
Another car, speeding, trailing voices whooping.
“Your friend, the minister?”
“Priest.”
“Whatever. He said you were marked. This what he meant? That you should find this out?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what he meant.”
“Scary thought.”
“Tell me about it.”
“End of the world.”
“A year ago, I would have laughed. I still doubt it, but you’ll notice I’m not laughing.”
A mattress creaked.
“John?”
“Yeah?”
“No offense, you know, but.. . who are you?”
The crickets stopped.
* * * *
8
T
he bus is on a wide, hard-packed shoulder, interior lights off, flares stabbed into the ground ahead and behind. There are no streetlamps. There are no nearby buildings. There may be moonlight, but it isn’t strong enough. There may be night noises, but all Patty can hear are soft snores and soft whispers and once in a while, an angry slap to someone’s thigh, followed by a curse of supreme exasperation.
She sits by the window, but there’s not much to see, only the darkness. Joey is curled on the seat beside her, his head in her lap, hands tucked under his chin, eyes closed. Her left hand strokes his hair absently while she tries to make sense of this run of bad luck.
In the Mood - [Millennium Quartet 02] Page 21