Minutes later, he was out on the street. He took his last look at his brother's shithole of a building, then turned his face to the north and started walking.
Aaron had a flat coming home from work and no spare. When he tried to call for road service, he realized his cell phone was dead. He spent all day working on other people's cars, but he couldn't fix his own. By the time he walked to a pay phone and back to his car, it was almost dark. He was still pissed as he pulled into his parking space at the apartment. To make matters worse, the elevator was out of service again. By the time he got to his fourth-floor apartment, he was cursing. He jammed the key in the lock and started to turn it when the door swung inward.
Unlocked? His apartment was unlocked?
His first inclination was that he'd been robbed; then he remembered Wes. His demented stepbrother could be lying in a pool of blood. But when he moved farther into the room, he could tell that the clutter on the floor and tables was all his. A quick look into the bedrooms and the kitchen also failed to give up an intruder, although he was looking at the mess with new eyes. But the search did reveal one fact that made his heart skip a beat.
Wes was gone.
That didn't make sense. How could a man like Wes just get up and walk away when he hadn't even been able to feed himself? The best Aaron had been able to tell, Wes had never moved from where he'd put him each morning until he came home each night. Now he was gone. Aaron went back into Wes's bedroom, only this time he wasn't looking for a thief. He was looking for clues.
It didn't take long for him to realize that Wes's duffel bag was missing, as were the clothes he'd come home with. He stood in the middle of the room, growing angrier by the minute.
"The bastard! The sorry bastard! All this time he was playing me. He had to be."
He stomped out of the bedroom and into the kitchen. He got a beer from the fridge and was popping the top when he saw the coffee can on the table. At that point, he exploded. He threw the beer across the room, ignoring the fact that as it landed, it splattered beer all over the wall and floor.
"My money! He stole my money!" he screamed, and kicked over a chair.
He was on his way to the phone to call the police when he got a big reality check.
If he reported Wesley Holden as missing, and a thief, then how could he claim Wes's money?
"Fuck," he muttered, then plopped down on the sofa.
But the longer he sat there, the better his mood became. He had no reason to be angry. In fact, Wes had just done him a great big stinking favor. He was rid of the problem but not the dough.
He got himself another beer and then toasted the thin air.
"Thank you, brother dear. Thank you for your brief visit and your deep pockets. They were both a pleasure."
Then he downed the beer and picked up the phone. It was time to celebrate, and he knew just the little redhead to help him do it.
Wes's first night on the road was as close to a nightmare as anything could have been. Every large, unsettling noise threatened to trip him out of reality. Even after it got dark, he was afraid to stop walking. It wasn't until the sky had begun to change from black to gray that he finally stopped at an abandoned gas station on the outskirts of a small
He stood for a few minutes, checking out the distant lights of Miami, then the area around the old building. Except for the traffic of passing cars and a bird perched on the sagging roof of the empty station, there was no movement in the area. Satisfied that he was alone, he crawled through a back window that was missing its glass and then paused for a quick reconnoiter. Instinctively, his hand went to the switchblade as he did a quick walk-through of the building. He found the remnants of a small campfire, which told him he wasn't the first person to find shelter here. Either someone was using it for storage or they'd just given up and left, because there were machine and engine parts scattered about the front of the building in varying stages of disrepair.
After checking to make sure he was alone, Wes kicked aside a stack of wooden pallets, dropped his duffel bag into a corner to use for a pillow, and lay down on the floor with his back to the wall and the knife in his hand. The last thing he remembered seeing was a small mouse coming out from under a stack of boxes and running from the room.
The downdraft from the rotors on the Black Hawk whipped sand into Wes Holden's face as he and a young G.I. covered the pair of soldiers who were dragging a wounded comrade toward the waiting chopper.
"Colonel Holden! Colonel Holden! You've both got to come now! "
The call came from the Black Hawk. Wes did a three-sixty, scanning the area with a practiced eye as he measured the distance between the sniper shelter and the open bay of the waiting chopper.
"Now! Colonel! We've got to go now!"
He heard the urgency in the gunner's voice and realized they knew something he did not. He turned abruptly to the G.I. and yelled.
"Go, soldier! Go now!"
"But, Colonel..."
"Now!" Wes shouted, and they both started running.
It was just what the sniper had been waiting for.
More than a hundred yards from the chopper, the sniper opened up. The first bullet ripped through Wes's right shoulder. The numbness that came next caused him to drop his rifle. He didn't even know it was gone until he saw the expressions on the faces of his men, screaming at him from inside the chopper.
He saw the young G.I. ahead of him stop and turn back, intent on getting his commanding officer. The next bullet hit the man straight between the eyes. The wind from the downdraft caught the spray of blood and brains that came out the back of his head and blew it away, along with the scream on Wes's lips. Then a second bullet ripped through Wes's body, this time in the back of his left leg. Within seconds he was falling.
He heard the first of the antiaircraft guns firing as his elbows hit the sand. He tried to roll out of the line of fire, but the bullets in his shoulder and leg left him flopping like a fish out of water.
He turned toward the chopper and began frantically waving them off.
"Go! Go!" he shouted. "Goddamn it! Go!"
The Black Hawk was about ten feet off the ground and rising when a fireball exploded, flaring into afire-storm of boiling flames and flying shrapnel. Wes screamed out in rage. When the flames turned into a rising column of black smoke where the Black Hawk had been, he knew he was looking at a funeral pyre.
The devil had belched.
Days later, Wes woke up with a rat crouched on his chest, staring at him with tiny black eyes that glittered from the deprivation of its own life of hell. He slapped at it with his good hand, then missed as it darted from his chest into a small hole in the wall. The movement caused enough pain to make him want to weep, but his mouth was so dry he didn't dare waste the fluids. His shoulder was bandaged and in a sling, and there was another bloody, filthy bandage wrapped around his thigh.
He didn't know where he was, but the enemy had him—and he could hear them coming down the hall.
Wes woke up with a gasp, swatting at an invisible rat and looking for a place to hide from the soldiers of Saddam Hussein. Then he saw the pallets and the boxes and the greasy engine parts, and he said a quiet prayer of thanksgiving. He might be lost and homeless and hungry, but he was free.
He got up with a groan, brushed the dust off his clothes, picked up his duffel bag and crawled out of the building the same way he'd come in, only to realize it was sometime past noon and the sun was already on its way toward the western horizon. At that point, his belly growled. He shouldered his bag, slipped the switchblade into his pocket and headed toward the light. He needed food. Beyond that, he couldn't plan.
Two weeks later, a trucker pulled into a truck stop on a highway in the mountains of
But then Wes had spoken softly, thanking the man for stopping, and the trucker had changed his mind. Now they'd come to the end of their road.
"Godspeed, soldier," the trucker said, and shook Wes's hand.
“Same to you," Wes said. "And thanks for the ride."
"Anytime," the trucker said, then added, "Stay safe."
Wes nodded, then went into the bathroom of the station as the trucker began fueling up. He washed up as best he could, then got himself a soft drink and a bag of chips, and began walking down the highway. The urge to keep moving was strong. He'd seen plenty of country in the past two weeks, and taken shelter from heat and storms beneath overpasses and inside culverts and bathed in ponds and ditches. With each passing day, he was growing stronger. Only now and then did he have a flashback, and when he did, he seemed able to come out of them in less and less time.
For the most part, he still shunned people, accepting rides only when he was too tired to walk. Once he'd come upon a man who'd lost a wheel off of a trailer he was pulling, and in doing so, had lost his load of sod. Wes had helped him put on the spare, then reload the heavy rolls of grass and dirt. The man had been so grateful for the help that he'd given Wes all the money he had in his pocket, which was just shy of sixty-five dollars. Wes still had most of it, but it wouldn't last forever.
What he needed was a place of his own—a place to live where he would not be bothered. He still wasn't sure of his ability to maintain composure in the face of adverse circumstances, so until he learned to trust himself again, he figured the best thing would be to stay as far away from people as he could. But to make that happen, he needed to find a place that felt right. So he continued in a rambling direction while telling himself that he would know the place when he saw it.
The mountains of
A dark sports car came flying past. Just as it drew even with Wes, the driver laid on the horn, pointing and laughing rudely as he went by.
For Wes, it was the end of his patience. Without thinking of the consequences, he moved from the highway into the trees. The shade alone was such a welcome relief that he just kept walking upward. He walked for what felt like hours, until his throat was dry, his belly was growling, and he was thinking about trying to find a road to a town. It was at that point that he heard someone singing. The sound was faint, but he could tell it was a woman.
He stopped, tilting his head until he had focused on the direction, then followed the lilting draw of her voice.
She was singing a hymn, humming parts of it, then skipping to words with no apparent rhyme nor reason.
He stopped.
The breeze in the trees was weak, but enough to rustle the leaves on the highest branches. The density of the forest felt sheltering. If he stayed here he would be safe, but the song drew him closer.
Ally didn't like to do laundry. It was the one chore she bore with little grace. Today she'd gotten a late start and was just now hanging out the last load. She could have used the dryer in the laundry shed and been done long ago, but then she would have had to listen to her father chastise her for wasting electricity, so it was easier to do some things his way.
She was humming to herself and hanging up one of Porter's shirts when she heard Buddy's deep, throaty grumble. It wasn't much, but it was all he could manage that passed for a bark. She turned around to see what he'd seen, then felt the breath leaving her lungs.
A tall man with broad shoulders and long legs was just walking out of the trees. Beneath the wide-brimmed Stetson he wore low on his forehead, she could see long black hair and a beard equally dark and long. He had a slight drag to his stride that didn't seem to slow his approach or hinder his ability to carry the duffel bag he had slung on one shoulder.
Her first instinct was defensive. The man was a stranger, and he'd come from the mountainside instead of the road. But when he seemed to sense her nervousness and stopped a good twenty yards away, she decided to stay put.
Then he took off his hat and bent down to pat Buddy, which she considered another good sign. Buddy's opinion of visitors was an unfailing test of their character. As he straightened, she got her first good look at his face. Even from this distance, she could see the expression in his eyes. It was the saddest, loneliest look she'd ever seen, and the thought crossed her mind to put her arms around him and never let him go.