Keeping Watch (38 page)

He grabbed the key and closed the flap against the spill of light, then slid out again and whispered to his companion, “Get in.”

When the boy was inside, Allen climbed up behind him and eased the heavy door shut, tugging it only until it clicked. He put the key into the ignition, then paused, trying to think against the pain that was now grinding seriously into his left shoulder. The hat—he'd found a baseball cap wedged into the visor. He pulled it on, then reached back into the glove compartment for the glasses he'd glimpsed there—not sunglasses, maybe the farmer's reading specs, but the shape of them would change his face. Next to the glasses lay a half-empty pack of six-inch panatelas. He stuck one between his teeth and slid the box of kitchen matches from their niche inside the cellophane wrapper.

“You better curl up on the floor,” he told Jamie.

As the boy sank down, Allen lit the cigar, blew out the match, then turned the key. The truck started, and he found reverse on the second try. Allen backed around, and with no hesitation he switched on the headlights, put it in first gear, and rattled down the driveway, singing clench-toothed into the cigar at the pain shooting up his arm. Without slowing, as if this was a trip he made every morning of his life and he knew there would be no traffic on his road, he swung the wheel to the right, past the big rural mailbox marked
THE REIENBACH'S
, heading back the way they had come, straight toward the low lights of a slow-moving sports car.

For a moment, he was afraid that the car was going to stop in the middle of the narrow lane and force him either to mow it down or to reverse madly down the narrow road, bullets flying; however, the old truck was so patently not the Honda the gunman was seeking, Allen was allowed to rumble over the weed-covered shoulder and go on his way, puffing his cigar and squinting under his hat through the smoke and the distorting lenses of an astigmatic: old Farmer Joe Reienbach on his way to town. Again with the merest pause, he rolled the truck out onto the main road, turning south, and slowly brought the truck up to speed. No lights followed. As soon as the crossroads was out of sight, he accelerated, tossed the cigar out the window and glasses onto the dash, and watched for some kind of paved surface leading off to the left.

He was lost in no time, which was just fine with him. The road he'd chosen was too well maintained to be a dead-end, and he was bound to come across something going north soon enough. He'd have to do something about the arm before too long, but although it felt as if a pit bull was ripping into it, the bleeding seemed to be slowing; for the moment, they were safe. Time to find out what was going on.

“You can sit up now,” he told Jamie.

The boy climbed up from the roomy well, saying with the first excitement he'd ever shown, “Man, that was really amazing, that spin-around turn. How'd you do that?”

“Practice,” Allen said, although in truth, he'd been wondering the same thing himself. “How about telling me who that guy was?”

Silence.

“It was someone I saw at your house back in May, big guy with real short blond hair.” O'Connell's right-hand man; Allen had recognized him despite the distorting lenses.

Jamie turned to gape at him in the thin dawn light. “Howard? You got away from
Howard
?”

The sheer disbelief in the boy's voice made Allen glance at him and immediately wish there was more light. The kid looked flabbergasted and terrified, and was staring at Allen as if he'd never seen him before.

“Who's Howard?” Allen did know that “Howard” was George Howard, weight lifter and odd-job man, but he made for one of the few gaps in Gina's dossier; Allen knew little more about him than he had in May.

“My father's . . . associate, he calls him. Howard works for my father.”

“Doing what?” Hauling garbage; fetching boys for torture.

“Everything. You sure it was him?”

“Either that or his twin brother.”

“Was he alone?”

Allen had been puzzling about that, himself. “Is Howard left-handed?”

“He's ambi— You know, when a person can write with both hands?”

“Ambidextrous.”

“Yeah, that. He does some things with his right hand, but he writes with his left.”

So it hadn't been mere luck that had enabled the driver to shoot at him out of the side window. Allen hadn't seen any passenger, and the sports car did not appear to have a sunroof. Which meant this man Howard had been driving and shooting at the same time. A formidable assailant.

“But was he alone?” the boy persisted. “You didn't see my father with him?”

“Jamie, your father went down in a plane crash.”

Silence answered him.

“Why does Howard want to kill me?” Allen asked.

“If he'd wanted to kill you, you'd be dead.” The boy said it flatly.

“Not yet, although he did manage to wing me.”

“Howard
shot
at us?”

It occurred to Allen that Jamie, curled up below the Honda's dash and later kept literally in the dark, could not have followed much of what happened; all he knew was Allen's dramatic high-speed movie turn, and later that Allen had rummaged around in the back of the car before they'd abandoned it behind the barn. “He sure did.”

“And he
missed
?”

This, by Jamie's reaction, was more extraordinary than that the man had been shooting in the first place, on a par with the sun rising in the west.

“Not entirely, no,” Allen said with heavy sarcasm.

Jamie leaned forward, taking in Allen's injury for the first time. Allen told him, “It went through the upper part of my arm, and it may have chipped the bone, but it doesn't seem to have hit any major arteries. It's bloody and it's painful, but the hand still works and I'm not going to pass out while I'm driving.” He hoped.

But Jamie seemed less concerned with the state of Allen's arm than with how it had come about. “That means he couldn't have missed killing you by much.”

The words could have been the dregs of belated terror, but they did not sound that way, not at all. The boy sounded pleased, as if some anomaly of the universe had been explained.

“Does this happen a lot, Jamie?” Allen asked, struggling to keep his voice mild. “I mean, if your friend Howard is in the habit of riding up and down shooting at people for kicks, maybe you could have mentioned it to me?”

Silence.

Allen couldn't decide if the boy realized that he had been an intended victim as well—Howard may not have been actively gunning for the boy, but if they'd crashed at that speed, the boy could have been killed. “Jamie, talk to me.” And after no response: “Jamie, how do you think he found us?”

At last, he had hit a weak spot. Jamie winced, and then let loose with a torrent of words. “I'm sorry, God, Allen, I'm so sorry, I didn't think you'd mind. I saw your laptop at the motel and there wasn't anything on the TV that I wanted to watch and I just thought I'd check in with the game. I didn't tell anyone where we were, I swear I didn't” (
except Silverfish,
Jamie's mind whispered), “but I used my phone card so it wouldn't go on the motel bill and maybe he tracked that. I don't know how he could find me through the card—I mean, not him, not Father, he doesn't know anything, but he has people working for him who maybe could do it, but the card, it's just one of those you buy in the store. Maybe you can trace a user through the phone line, but I didn't tell anyone—”
except Silverfish the Ubiquitous
“—I swear it.”

Allen looked out of the corner of his eyes at the boy, sweating with earnest denial. It was within the realm of probability, he thought, that someone with the know-how and resources of a Gina could trace the uses of a specific phone card. However, there remained another possibility: Maybe it was time to jettison the boy's backpack, just to be safe. “Are those new clothes you're wearing, or things you brought with you from California?”

In confusion, the boy looked down at his legs. “I think, yes, it's all stuff Rachel bought me.”

“Even the shoes?”

“Yeah.” They weren't as cool as his old ones, but they didn't hurt his toes.

“Jamie, we'll have to leave your pack behind, in case it has some kind of tracking device in it.” Which sounded so melodramatic, Allen couldn't believe he'd even thought it, but stranger things had happened than a parent planting a location bug on a child. And it was easier to believe than the alternative, which would be that a gun-wielding maniac happened to be driving country roads shooting at perfect strangers.

Before the boy could protest, Allen spotted a road sign that said “
SPEED LIMIT
45.” Someone had neatly plinked half a dozen holes through the two numbers, leaving them rusted but legible. The sign stood in front of an enormous chestnut tree: probably the most distinctive spot they'd passed in miles. He slowed and pulled onto the shoulder. “Empty your pockets and put everything in your pack,” he told Jamie, and when the pack's zipper was shut, he said, “You take a good look at this sign, okay? So when we come back for your pack, we can find it again.”

He reached across himself to work the door handle with his right hand, and eased down from the truck. The pain took his arm in its teeth and shook it, so that the thin dawn flared and sparkled for a few moments before his eyes. Allen undid one of the buttons on his shirt and gingerly took his left hand over to rest it inside, just above the belt, as an impromptu sling. That was better. He reached back for the boy's drab green backpack and carried it under the wide branches of the chestnut. At the bottom of the tree, he looked up: The sky between the branches was noticeably lighter than it had been. Taking a breath, he swung the pack hard by its straps and let go; it dropped directly down in the tree's fork. Two steps away, it was invisible. Unless some child decided to go tree-climbing, nobody would spot it until winter.

It was work getting back into the high truck one-handed. Allen reached up for the steering wheel, and froze.

There was a gun in his face, inches from his eyes, the round hole of the pistol he'd dislodged under the seat. A hush dropped over the truck's cab, no sound of breath or rustle of clothing.

Then: “Jamie,” Allen whispered, and forced his gaze upward to the boy's face.

The handsome features were a mask, rigid and betraying nothing of whatever it was the boy was seeing.

“Jamie,” Allen said more firmly, his body motionless. “I'm not your father, Jamie, not Howard. I'm just a friend. You and I are going to figure this out, Jamie. I'm going to help you.”

The dark eyes slowly focused, and in a moment the boy's finger uncurled slightly from the trigger guard, his hand pushing slightly forward in an offer. “I thought, if Howard is after us, you might want this.”

Allen swallowed, finished pulling himself up, and then reached to remove the gun from the boy's thin hand. He had to brace it between his knees under the truck's steering wheel in order to work the cylinder open: three bullets. One of them ready in the chamber. He spun the cylinder around to place an empty chamber in front of the hammer, then after a brief hesitation, returned the gun to the glove compartment a hand's breadth from the boy's knees.

“Let's leave it there for the moment,” he said hoarsely, and started the truck's engine.

It took them a couple of hours to regain the freeway, with Allen keeping to the back roads and navigating by the compass in his head. They came to the I5 a bare fifty miles south of Seattle, but Allen resolutely turned away, following the signs toward Olympia.

Jamie stirred. “I thought we were going to Seattle.”

“I can't endanger Alice,” was Allen's terse answer.

On a Sunday morning, even gas stations on the interstate were not busy. Allen drove around until he found one with a freestanding phone booth, one of the old-time glass-walled booths with a folding door. He pulled in close beside it and turned off the key; the heavy old engine shut off smoothly. His arm burned and thudded, his head spun dangerously.

In the ticking silence, he and Jamie stared at the vacant booth.

“I've got to make a couple of phone calls,” Allen told him. “Are you going to run off as soon as I get out of the truck?”

“No!” Jamie said, sounding surprised. “Why would I do that?”

“Jamie, I don't know what's going on with you, and I don't have the strength to find out right now. If you've made some kind of arrangements with your father's ‘associate' Howard, let me just give you some change so you can make your phone call, and I'll leave you here.”

“I don't want you to go.” The young voice was so urgent, Allen had to believe him, although there might be any number of reasons for the boy's desperation.

“Okay. I'll make my phone calls, and then we'll go to another place and buy gas.” Allen reached for the heavy jacket, draping it across his upper body to hide the bloody sleeve. He'd look like a hunchback, but it couldn't be helped.

“Okay, I'll stay here. Unless . . . Look, shouldn't I go buy some bandages or something? I mean, you're bleeding all over the place.”

Allen looked at the boy. He could find no trace of deception in the young face, no blatant innocence or lurking secrecy, only a concern for an injured companion. Still, he had to be sure.

“Jamie, do you
want
to go back to your father?”

The boy twitched, a physical shudder accompanied by an unmistakable look of fear and revulsion, and although there was longing in the expression as well, Allen reached for his wallet. Surely no twelve-year-old could school himself to react like that.

Handing over two twenty-dollar bills, he said to Jamie, “Don't buy bandages, that would be too obvious.” The logical alternative was women's menstrual pads, sterile and absorbent, but he could hardly ask a boy Jamie's age to casually pick up a package of those. “If they have any cotton T-shirts, get a big one, or another sweatshirt. And a couple of candy bars—not a whole bunch, we'll stop down the road and buy more.”