As a test, I stepped into the gas, but all it did was make him work a bit harder to catch me.
Paulo, if that’s you, I’m going to pinch your head off.
As I watched those headlights loom larger and larger in my rearview mirror, there was no doubt in my mind that this was my mysterious vehicular stalker and he was going to hit me again.
Not if I hit you first.
I had had it with being a victim.
The highway ahead of me was a long straight stretch across acres of flat grassland. There were no bridges to fall off; no hills to plow into. Even more important than all that, it was completely empty except for me and my new best friend—just what I needed. I apologized profusely to my soon-to-be-abused truck and took a good grip of the wheel.
(Later, we’ll talk about why this is actually
not
the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.)
I waited until I could no longer see the headlights over the tailgate of my truck. I braced myself for the coming impact, gritted my teeth against the pain in my leg, and hit the brakes.
I felt the crunch of metal before I heard it. The jarring impact seemed to travel through my steering wheel, up my arms, and into my shoulders, slamming me against my seat belt. The back end of my truck swung around, no matter how I tried to steer out of it, and next thing I knew I was careening into the grassy median. Somewhere in all the bouncing and jouncing, my head met my window with a smack and a spider-web of shattered glass. Stars burst behind my eyes, and I blacked out.
My own voice woke me, which is a really weird sensation even without having just taken a blow to the head.
“Jesse! Jesse, open your damn eyes! You have to wake up!” Someone was pounding on my pillow, which turned out to be the cracked glass of my side window.
I blinked my eyes open, and for a brief moment, I saw a face outside. A blond, with a Mohawk and piercings, staring anxiously through the shattered glass.
Axel?
The moment I thought it, the face was gone.
My truck wasn’t running, and I hoped she had just stalled out when my foot came off the clutch. Fighting against the grogginess in my head, I threw the door open and stumbled out into the grass. Somehow, I’d wound up facing back in the wrong direction, but at least the truck hadn’t crossed into the oncoming lanes.
Across the southbound lanes, I could see the dark Escort crumpled against the guardrail, steam from the engine billowing through the beam from the one remaining headlight. The night reeked of boiling antifreeze where it spewed all over the asphalt, and the driver’s door was hanging open. I managed to limp across the dark highway, only realizing halfway there that I was unarmed. Oh well. Hopefully, he was in worse shape than I was. “Time to find out who you are, buddy.”
No such luck. The mangled car proved to be totally and completely devoid of life. Sometime during my brief bout with unconsciousness, the bastard got out and ran off. He obviously knew how to bleed, though. The spiderwebbed windshield was smeared with red. It wasn’t enough to be fatal, but he’d have a helluva headache for a week or two.
“God-fucking-dammit!” For good measure, I caved in the back fender with a well-placed kick. Unfortunately, that’s when I remembered that my leg wasn’t even close to sound. What followed was the most colorful one-sided exchange of cursing I’d ever heard, and I’m still proud of what small bits I can remember.
I was still ranting and raving by the side of the road when the highway patrol car pulled up. The trooper got out, training his flashlight right in my eyes. “Sir, is this your vehicle?”
I spent the next hour standing on the side of the highway while two more units showed up to check out the wreck. The Escort had been stolen from Utah two months earlier. That much I got from eavesdropping on the radio chatter. The cops noticed the blood trail, too, following it a few yards down the road where it ended abruptly. It seemed that Evel Knievel had another ride.
I got near the car only once and managed to snatch a crumpled bit of paper from the console before I was shooed away. Sitting on my own tailgate, I inspected it by the flickering blue and red lights.
It was a fast-food receipt, dated a month ago. Not a big deal, except that my home address was scribbled on the back of it. I stuffed it into my pocket before the cops got too curious.
How long had they had that address? And why hadn’t they used it? Something between cold-sweat nausea and immeasurable rage brewed in my gut. If this lunatic had gone anywhere near my family . . . I had to get home.
It took even longer to convince the highway patrol that no, I had not been drinking; no, I did not see where the other driver went; and no, I did not need a hospital. It was the last one that took some fast talking on my part, but finally Officer Allen resigned himself to writing “Refused medical treatment” in his report and let me drive my poor abused baby home. The truck, for her part, still ran like a champ, and as far as I could see the damage to the rear end seemed strictly cosmetic. That’s my girl.
“Don’t worry, baby. I’ll get you fixed up, I pro m-ise.”
Pretty sure I broke a land speed record getting home, all the while watching every car that came up behind me with a healthy dose of suspicion. Who knew what kind of car he would be driving next?
At home, Mira was blissfully asleep and didn’t see me limp in. If she even suspected I was hurt, I’d be on my way back to Dr. Bridget faster than I could blink, and I didn’t want that. I settled on a plan of distract and evade, if the subject came up. I’d explain the damage to the truck later—somehow.
I knocked back two aspirin, swallowing them dry, and stuck a bag of frozen peas on the giant lump on my head. While I waited for the painkillers to kick in, I hobbled into Mira’s little sanctuary to boot up her computer.
I sank gratefully into Mira’s comfortable desk chair. The room glowed a flickering blue from the monitor, casting bizarre shapes over the walls. I watched the shadows dance, a tiny part of me quite certain that something horrifying lurked in the darkness. Even when you get old enough to know there’s no monster under the bed, there’s always that little voice that asks what if you were wrong. I debated long and hard about flipping on a light, even if I risked waking the family up.
There was nothing in my e- mail, so I logged on to Grapevine. (Well, there was nothing from Viljo, but I did have one advertisement for a dating service and two offers to greatly enlarge my penis. How does any self-respecting person actually hit Send on an e-mail like that?)
Too late, I realized I hadn’t turned the volume down. The same woman’s voice screamed, “I see you!” and I nearly knocked everything off the desk in an attempt to hit the MUTE button in time. Snatching the tumbling speakers before they hit the floor, I froze, waiting to hear Mira get out of bed. I counted five long breaths in silence before I finally concluded she’d slept through it.
Carefully replacing the speakers, I put on the headset, muttering, “Viljo, I am going to strangle you.”
Almost immediately, the webcam window sprang up, the geek in question waving a cheery hello. No one should be that cheery this late at night, even counting the time difference.
“Dude, do you ever sleep?”
“I can sleep when I am dead. And if there is coffee and Red Bull wherever I end up, maybe not even then.”
Even the thought of it made my stomach churn. “How your head has not exploded by now, I will never know.”
“Your words wound me. Right here, in my heart.” He smirked; I could see that much over the grainy feed. “But I, most magnanimous and brilliant Viljo, will ignore your insults and produce the information requested of me.”
He’d found something. He only strutted and preened like that when he was proud of himself. “It’s only been a few hours!”
“More than ample time.”
I had to grin as he flexed his thin arms for the camera. He made me look muscular. “Well, spill it, oh guru of the perpetual signal.”
“Checking Miguel’s phone was easy. I should see if the phone company down there needs a Net security consultant.” He did something with his keyboard, and a window popped up on my screen—a call history, apparently. “Guy’s was a little harder, but really, their ‘secure’ site is laughable.” Another window popped up, and I adjusted them so I could see both at once.
“Okay, what am I looking for here?”
“On Miguel’s, three weeks ago, there is a number with a California area code, 714. See it?”
I located the number in question. Miguel had talked to that number five times in the week leading up to his disappearance. The calls were always inbound, though Miguel never called the number back. “Okay.”
“Now look at Guy’s record, for five weeks ago. The same number is there.”
Sure enough, it was repeated quite a few times there, too, but again, only inbound. “Well, whose number is it?”
Fuzzy Viljo frowned in choppy stages. “That is where things get tricky. I have more digging to do, but right now, it is looking like a prepaid cellular phone.”
“Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe . . . it’s another champion’s number. Who’s the guy out of San Fran. Avery?”
“That is not Avery’s number, nor is it any number that Ivan has used. I have a few more places to poke around before I will know for certain.”
“Well, don’t forget to sleep, man. You’re no good to me passed out over the keyboard.”
His snort came through the headset loud and clear. “As if.”
“G’night, man.”
“Hey! I am not done!”
I halted in the middle of shutting the window down. “What else do you have?”
Viljo’s image held up one finger, indicating for me to wait, and in another moment, more windows popped up on my monitor. “Miguel and Guy have both tried to sign onto the system in the last week. Unsuccessfully.”
“Are you sure?”
“Do you think I would make a mistake like that?” He frowned at me. Great, now I’d offended the little geek. “Both attempts were made within hours. They did not gain access because they failed the security checks. Things Miguel and Guy would not have forgotten. Someone is trying to get in.”
“You’ve had hack attempts before. Amateur stuff, you said.”
“Not like this. It gets weirder. I cannot get an IP address on it.”
We were rapidly descending into that realm of mumbo jumbo where I was definitely out of my element. “And that is . . . not normal?”
“No. All Internet presence has an IP address. You can mask it, or confuse it, but you still have one. This is just . . . vapor. A ghost in the machine.”
“So it’s someone better than you.”
He snorted. “There
is
no one better than me. I am telling you, something is fucked up here.”
“Well . . . batten down the hatches or whatever it is you do. I’ll let Ivan know.” And, as an afterthought, I asked, “Have you heard from the others?”
“Everyone has checked in except Sveta and the Knights Stuck-up-idus.”
Sveta was in Eastern Europe somewhere. At least, I thought she was. She was the only female champion I was aware of, and that is where my knowledge ended. “I’ll let Ivan know that, too. Get some sleep, Viljo.”
“You, too.”
Two tries to call Ivan resulted in a “Customer has gone beyond the service area” message, and I almost threw my cell across the room in frustration. Dammit. Of all times for the phone service to go down. Why couldn’t Miguel’s family live in a real city, instead of some hole in the mountains?
I did my usual house walk, checking for open locks and windows and rogue Ford Escorts, then crawled into bed beside Mira with a (manly) whimper and did my best to sleep. In my dreams, the Yeti was there, gnawing at my right leg like a starving terrier. It wasn’t the most pleasant of nights.
15
“J
ess.”
“Jesse.”
“Jesse!” Although my head was buried under my pillow, Mira’s voice wouldn’t let me sleep in peace. Then, to make it worse, she started shaking my shoulder.
“Wha mrrmfh? G’way.” I swatted blindly at her, connecting with nothing.
“Wake up. Ivan’s on the phone.”
That at least penetrated the foggy haze in my head. I fumbled my hand free of the tangled sheets to take the cell phone and tried not to groan as every muscle in my body protested. It was official. I was way too old to be water-skiing across linoleum floors. “H’lo?”
“Dawson! I am to be waking you. Much to be apologizing.” A deep voice thundered in my ear, sounding totally unapologetic despite words to the contrary.
Oh hey . . . It was Ivan. Dimly, I knew Mira had told me that already. “Ivan. Um yeah, hi . . . Hang on, I gotta jump-start my brain.” Coffee—I could smell coffee. Like a zombie, I shuffled out into the hallway in only my plaid pajama pants, searching for the source of that divine smell. I don’t drink it often, but when I need it, I
need
it.
It didn’t take me long to realize that my right leg was still rather annoyed with me for last night’s escapades. It reinforced this message with a sharp pain every time I stepped down—not a good start to the day.
“I am not to be knowing what this ‘jump-starting’ means.” He didn’t wait to find out, either. “What news are you to be having from Grapevine?”
“Everyone has checked in but Sveta and the Order.”
“This is not to be surprising. Svetlana is to being difficult in the best of times. You will to be having Viljo contact her again, until she is to being responding.” Ivan sighed, and I could picture him running a hand through his snow-white hair. “And the priests . . . Well, they are to being warned, and this is the most we can do for them. At least, they are not alone.” There were never fewer than five of the Knights Stuck-up-idus, and I was inclined to agree with Ivan. Right now there was strength in numbers.
“I’ll pass the message on to Viljo.” Limp, step . . . limp, step . . . It was going to be a very long day at this rate. “I had him do some digging, too. He looked through Guy and Miguel’s phone records and found one number in common.”