Keeping Watch (37 page)

S: Yeh right. You seein anything good on your trip, or just drivin to gramma's with the folks?

RD: screw that, man, no gramma here. ever seen a voclano? they should put one on the game

S: Mt Doom, throw in that ring, Frodo.

RD: that's what it looks like, steamin and everthing.

S: You serious?

RD: nah, not when we went by. but it does, they say. blew up a few years ago, wiped out a bunch a people.

S: Hey, killer. Yr right, I can just see a nice juicy volcano in the middle of the game, blowin up and everythin.

RD: gotta go, man. lemme know if you hear any more about that Deth Head game.

S: Will do. I'm gonna go crash for a while. Too wired, cant see straight.

RD: see ya

The game after that wasn't as much fun without Silverfish, but Jamie played anyway for another three and a half hours, until Allen's breathing changed, ending in a snort. Snatching the phone and power connections from the laptop, Jamie pushed its lid down, shoved it under a pillow, and stared fixedly at the television screen. He waited, eyes glued on the screen, until Allen's breathing resumed, slow and regular.

However, there didn't seem to be much happening online, so he shut down the game properly, then went back in to the control panel to wipe out his footprints, resetting the dial-up to get rid of his phone card numbers, wiping out all traces of the game itself. He slid the laptop back into the carry-on, drawing the top shut as Allen had left it. He plopped down again in front of the television, and started scrolling through with the remote.

There was even less happening on that.

Allen woke for real a while later, having slept for five hours. He stretched, and turned over to see what Jamie was watching at four in the morning. It appeared to be a hot-dog-eating contest. Allen shook his head at the antics.

“You hungry?”

“Not for hot dogs,” the boy told him, making Allen laugh aloud.

“It's a deal.”

Again, Allen went out for the food, bringing back two hamburgers and an order of French toast from the twenty-four-hour restaurant down the road. He'd bought the breakfast for himself, but he offered it to the boy, who shook his head and reached for one of the burgers.

“Thought you might be getting tired of hamburgers,” Allen said.

“I haven't had hamburgers all summer,” the boy answered around a mouthful.

“Doesn't Rachel make them?”

“Oh yeah, I mean this kind of burger. Hers are more like steaks, with these big fat slices of red tomatoes and buns she makes herself. She even makes the catsup and pickles!”

“They're interesting people, aren't they?”

“I guess. I remember thinking one time, if the world got wiped out, they probably wouldn't even know it for a month.”

“You'd tell Pete, and he'd nod and go milk the cows,” Allen said with a smile.

“They'd have to eat an awful lot of eggs, though, to make up for not selling them in town.”

“Do you want to go back there, Jamie? I mean, if you could choose any place in the world to live, would it be with them?”

Jamie hunched over his half-eaten burger as if this was a trick question concealing a threat of punishment.

“You don't have to decide now,” Allen hastened to say. “Let's see what turns up, in the next few days.”

“When will we see Alice?”

“We're only a few hours from Seattle. I want to stick to the back roads, but even then we'll be there by mid-morning.”

“Okay.” Jamie finished his meal and, at Allen's suggestion, brushed his teeth. Showers could wait until Seattle. They went down to the Honda together, and Allen pulled onto the northbound 15, but in a few miles he got off again, to join the smaller road that ran more or less parallel to the freeway.

A low-slung rental car pulled out of the motel complex behind him. A car that had been hired by its driver at the Seattle-Tacoma airport late the night before, following his arrival on a flight from Las Vegas, a flight that was booked four minutes after Silverfish left RageDaemon sitting alone in the Coeur d'Alene motel.

In the darkness, Allen did not notice the car.

Chapter 32

Some miles up the dark two-lane road, with the sweet scent of hay coming through the half-open window beside him, Allen glanced in the rearview mirror. Since leaving the freeway, two or three pairs of headlights had ridden there for a while before turning off into a side road or a farm drive. Two cars were back there now, but the drivers did not seem to be in a hurry

Allen was, but he could not allow his impatience to influence the weight of his foot on the accelerator, any more than it had the choice of highway over back roads. Rae would be having her coffee and checking her passport . . . But tickets could be changed, and with luck, Alice would soon take over responsibility for this child sitting beside him. However, until he had Jamie off his hands, he would continue at his pace of three miles over the speed limit, on roads where no Highway Patrol lurked, where a dusty five-year-old Honda was an unremarkable thing.

The boy sat motionless, facing the windshield, radiating patience and innocence. Allen might not be anyone's father, but he was enough of a parent-by-proxy to sense when a kid was hiding something. There was something the kid didn't want him to ask about. What that might be, Allen hadn't a clue. Well, he thought, no time like the present.

“Jamie, I was wondering: Why were you so sure it was your father who took Sally away from the farm?”

After a minute, Jamie gave a sigh. “I guess I never really believed I could get away from him. He always knows everything. You can't hide anything from him. So when I heard there was a strange man around the place, I just figured it was him, coming to take me back.”

“You don't think that he's dead?”

“No.” No hesitation, none at all.

“Why?”

That was more difficult. “Because . . . I think I'd know. Like, I'd feel it. And besides, if he did die, it wouldn't be because of some dumb plane accident.”

“How would he die?”

“Somebody would kill him. I mean, like shoot him or run him over or something. Not an accident.”

This was getting them nowhere, Allen thought, this glorification of the all-powerful father. “Okay, then tell me something else. Why did it panic you so, when you walked in on Pete Junior cleaning the rabbits?”

That got a reaction: Jamie hunched up as if Allen had jabbed his belly.

“Jamie, I'm just trying to figure out what's going on. I can't help you unless you tell me. You can wait and tell Alice if you'd rather, but you're going to have—”

“No!” Jamie said, his voice quiet but sure. “Not her. I can't tell her that. She'd never understand.”

“I doubt that. But why don't you give it to me, and if I think she needs to know, I'll give her the parts of it I judge that she can handle.” Absurd, of course: What Alice had seen by way of atrocity left him in the dust.

“I don't know. It's . . .”

“Was it the blood?”

As Allen anticipated, the word set off a response. “I don't like blood. I mean, even before . . . My mom, she died . . .”

“I know how she died,” Allen said gently. He didn't intend the child to relive that particular horror—but it was too late.

“There was . . . God, there was so much blood. At first I figured it was a joke, you know? Or an accident, like somebody'd dropped a can of paint or something, it was just all over the room. I remember thinking, Mom's going to be so mad, it's got on Father's favorite chair.” Allen translated this: Father's going to be so mad. “I was just a little kid, you know? I guess that's why I thought it was paint. And then I saw that she was sitting there and it wasn't just
on
her . . .”

“And the rabbits reminded you of that?” Allen interrupted.

“I wish,” the boy exclaimed, to Allen's astonishment. “No. About a month later my father took me hunting. I think it was out of season or he didn't have a deer license, something like that, I don't know, but it was the first time I'd gone and he really wanted to take me out. Anyway, we went out to this place a friend of his owns up in the hills, and went shooting. The friend has a salt lick—deer like salt, you know?—and he puts out corn in the winter to bring the deer around, but it still took all weekend for us to get one. Father saw it first, and told me to shoot it, but I couldn't. You know, like its eyes reminded me of Mom or something. Like I said, I was just a kid. So he shot it instead, and made me go up with him and help him bleed it, and clean it.” His voice wavered and climbed, but he went on. “I was sort of crying, you know, like kids do, and that's when he got mad.”

Allen braced himself.

Jamie drew a breath, and on the exhale he said, “He made me wear the skin.”

“The fresh skin?” Allen said, appalled.

“Yeah. It was gross. He kind of, well, he sort of tied it around me and made me walk back to the cabin in it.”

“Ah, Jamie,” Allen groaned, but the boy wasn't quite finished.

“And that's when he started the hunting game. Like I was the deer, you know?”

Ice tingled through Allen, and he took his eyes from the road, looking with horror at the boy. But Jamie's face was calm, now that he'd told it.

“You mean, he'd pretend to be stalking you?”

“Yeah. And sometimes I'd hear his rifle behind me, you know the noise when you slide a bullet in?”

“But he didn't . . . ?”

“You mean, did he actually shoot at me? Oh, no. Well, once or twice, but only as a joke.”

“Fuck, Jamie.”

The boy laughed, at the unexpected adult obscenity as much as Allen's reaction. “Kinda creepy, isn't it?”

“You could say that.”

“So I guess,” Jamie mused, going back to Allen's original question with remarkable equanimity, “Pete Junior's rabbits kind of took me by surprise. It was like, the farm was this whole different world, then to walk in on all that blood. It just was sort of a shock. Stupid of me, I know. I wouldn't do it now.”

Shock
's the word, thought Allen, stunned to momentary silence by the response to his first question. There was a lot more he needed to ask; would all his questions lead them to searing images such as the boy wrapped in a bloody deerskin? He tried to choose his next one. What about,
Tell me about the death of your first-grade friend, smiling blond Able Shepherd
? Or,
How did that scruffy-looking white dog you used to have actually die?
And,
How did you feel about your mother, before her death? Did you know how to use a shotgun, when you were seven?
And,
You say your father was an ignoramus when it came to computers, yet it was his muscle-bound assistant who printed the page from an obscure Web site?
And, a big one, the answer to which Allen already shied away from:
What went on in that small, windowless room next to your father's bedroom?

While Allen's thoughts roiled and Jamie congratulated himself on getting away without revealing the most shameful part of Father's hunting game, a quarter of a mile back a blinker signaled and the squarish headlights of the Volvo that had been following them slowed to turn. Allen nursed the Honda around a tight S-bend in the road, then picked up speed again as his lights showed a straight way ahead. The smell of manure came strongly through the windows, causing Jamie to stir and comment, “It stinks just like the farm.”

“Cows everywhere—” Allen was starting to say, when high beams filled the back window and a lot happened all at once.

The car riding behind the Volvo had reacted to the open road like a loosed arrow. It shot toward them, a low, fast shape that took the bend at high speed and was now barreling up on the Honda as if it was parked. Allen's foot jammed onto the accelerator, with no discernible change in the rate the following car was gaining on them.

“Get your head down between your knees,” he ordered the boy. He heard the seat belt catch at the sudden movement, and then unreel as the thin chest curled more slowly down behind the dash.
I should've put him in the back,
passed through Allen's mind, and then there was no time for thinking.

The low-slung lights came so close to the Honda's back bumper, they vanished, then emerged in the side mirror as the car moved out over the center line. Allen, too, veered over the yellow line, and then the window in front of him made a slapping noise and cracked into a thousand fine lines that spread with the force of the wind. Two more shots came, Allen cursing and struggling to maintain control of the car, aware that one of the shots had hit him somewhere in the meat of his left arm—but it hadn't killed him and he would worry about the damage when the battle was over. He let the Honda sway over the center line while its engine climbed to full push, then in a movement that rational thought had nothing to do with, the hand-brake jerked up, the wheel slammed around, the other car swerved around them and into a white picket fence while in a furious squeal of reversing energies the Honda's smoking tires bit down and catapulted them down the road in the direction they'd come.

Back around the S-bend, Allen spotted the road the Volvo had sedately entered on the left. On the right side its continuation, though paved, was nearly invisible between fences. Allen yanked the wheel and sent the car on two wheels into it, slapped off his headlights (thanking the gods that not all cars were fixed with full-time running lights). He kept his foot down and the wheel rock-steady, blinded by darkness and by the wind funneling through the holes in his windshield, praying that the road stayed straight beyond the last glimpse his headlights had given him.

“Better sit up,” he told Jamie. If they went head-on into a parked tractor, the kid had more of a chance if he wasn't already pressed up against the dash.

He felt the boy move upright. A pair of low headlights swept around the bend in back of them; when the lights were past, Allen flicked his own beams on for a fraction of a second, just enough to imprint the road ahead onto his retinas. All clear. He let the car slow, cursing his middle-aged eyes, but he'd made out a fence on his left with a vague shape looming behind it. When the fence broke off, he dove in after it, taking the dirt track slowly so as not to raise any dust. The looming shape was an old barn, plenty big enough to hide a Honda.

He pulled in, turned off the engine, reached up to switch the inside lights to the off position, and jumped out of the car.

“What—” Jamie started to ask.

“Quiet.”

Half a mile away, headlights raced back up the main road before turning in to the road that the Volvo had entered. He'd bought them a few minutes.

He patted around the back floor until he found the sweatshirt that Jamie had been using as a pillow. The left sleeve of his shirt was soaked with blood, although he wouldn't know just how bad the damage was until he had a chance to peel away his clothes—the bone and muscle were intact enough to have gripped the wheel, but he'd had to crank it around one-handed. The most immediate danger was leaving a bloody trail, so he bound the sweatshirt around his shirt, pinning its sleeves under his upper arm. Still working by feel, he retrieved the leather carry-on holding his jacket and laptop, slinging it over his good shoulder and transferring the flashlight to his pocket. The rest he would have to abandon: The car would take time to trace, and although he didn't have time to wipe down everything for fingerprints, he assumed that whoever was after them wasn't on the side of law enforcement's records computers.

“Come on,” he told Jamie. “Don't shut your door all the way.”

“Can I bring my backpack?” came the whisper.

It wasn't heavy, and it was all the boy had. “Okay.”

The boy moved with caution across the uneven ground, and Allen rested his hand on the thin shoulder, straining to see. He knew the full moon was up there—if only they'd been in the desert instead of the cloudy Pacific Northwest, they might be able to keep from walking into a ditch, or a string of barbed wire.

His eyes picked out shapes to suggest that the derelict barn had collected a wide assortment of vehicles, but he didn't hold out much hope that any of them would start on first try. Instead, the overgrown once-graveled track continued on, in the same direction as the paved side road but concealed from it by fences and high weeds. They stumbled at first, then found their night feet and were walking with quiet efficiency when the headlights went past on the road, fifty yards away, moving slowly. Allen's hand tightened on the boy's shoulder; they stood still until it was out of hearing. A few minutes later it cruised by again; it wouldn't be long before the car started nosing its way into driveways. He urged Jamie on; in half an hour, it would be growing light, and Charlie would—he caught himself: He was light-headed; there was no Charlie here to fade into the jungle. Fifty-four years old, and he was still walking his first nighttime patrol with the smell of blood in his nostrils.

The house that belonged to the old barn was half a mile down the lane, and apart from the porch light, it was dark enough to suggest that the inhabitants did not attend to predawn milking chores. A dog barked inside, and Allen froze, but it sounded to him like a bark of boredom, not of alarm. That no one hushed it meant either that the inhabitants were heavy sleepers, or that they were away. He urged Jamie up the grass next to the driveway, making for the buildings in back of the house.

There was a garage, but a brief shine from the flashlight revealed a lot of garden furniture, three wheelbarrows in various states of disrepair, and a workshop for refinishing wooden chairs. On the flat graveled ground behind the one-time garage was where Allen found his riches: a two-year-old Ford, next to a Dodge pickup so old it was probably made of cast iron, with drips and tire tracks marking where a third car habitually stood. Allen skipped the securely locked sedan in favor of the pickup. He popped open the door; the overhead light stayed dark, but the interior smelled of cigars, an encouraging sign. He began to search for a key: Just as no farmer would lock up an old truck, neither would he leave its key inside the house, where he'd have to strip off his muddy boots whenever he had to shift a bale of hay or a load of wood. He used his right hand to feel under the seat, cursing under his breath: The left arm was no longer numb. The first metal object his startled fingertips encountered was no key, but an old revolver. He pulled it onto the floor of the truck, and continued his search. No luck there, or in the pocket of the overhead visor. He climbed in and flipped open the glove compartment; when the pale light went on, there it was.