You Don't Know About Me (15 page)

I watched Ruah pacing out on the grass. He was on his cell and slicing the air with his hand. Then he shouted at whoever was on the other end. “I'll pull the trigger when I pull the trigger, okay? Until then, fuck off!” He hung up, turned his back, and stared at the sky.

I didn't know if “trigger” was just a figure of speech or the real thing. Whatever, it creeped me out. I figured it was time to find another ride.

I eased the door open and grabbed my backpack. As I slid out, Ruah was headed back to the camper.

“Billy,” he called, the anger totally gone from his voice, “you taking off?”

I shouldered my backpack. “Yeah.” He wrapped a hand
around the outside mirror. “It sounds like you've got some stuff to deal with, and I can probably get another ride at the welcome center.”

He shot me his friendly smile. “I'm sure you can, but what about the rest of
Huck Finn
? I'm hooked on the story of a black dude trying to free himself from the chains of his time. You can't leave me wondering what happens to Huck when the feud between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons is about to detonate.”

“Maybe they have a copy in the welcome center—one with a cover.”

He laughed. “I doubt that. Tell you what, if this is about what I think it's about, and you're freaked about my phone call, I'll make you a new deal. I'll tell you the twisted story of my call if you'll ride a little farther and finish the chapter you were reading so I know what happens to Huck. After that, we'll go our separate ways, and I'll find my own copy of
Huck
.”

I still needed to go a few more exits west before heading north. I also figured the ride you know is better than the ride you don't. Not that I completely knew who Ruah was, or what he was dealing with.

I was about to find out—most of it, anyway.

Back on the road, he told me about the phone call. “It was my agent, Joe Douglas. Remember how I said there are certain people I don't want tracking me down? He's top man on the list.”

“What does he want?”

“First, he wants me back in uniform and on the ball field. Every day I don't play he loses ten percent of my take. He loses seven grand a game.”

I did the quick math. No wonder Ruah could afford a Trek. He could afford a truckload of Treks. “You make seventy thousand dollars a game?”

“Yeah. Next year, after filing for free agency, I could make a lot more. Which is the second thing Joe wants: to negotiate my new contract so he can keep raking it in. But I'm done with him. I wanna fire him.”

“Why?”

“That's another story. The problem is I can't fire him.”

“Why not?”

“He's got something on me.”

“What?”

Ruah laughed. “If I told you, you'd have it on me too. The thing is, if I fire him he's gonna go public on me.”

“And if you don't fire him he'll shut up.”

“Now you're getting the picture.”

“That's blackmail.”

“Pretty much.” He thought for a moment. “It's a little like the feud in
Huck Finn
between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons.”

“How so?”

“Baseball has its own little feud. The two sides seem to be the nicest, most civilized people in the world when they're with their own. But put them together, and they wanna kill each other because that's how it's always been with the feud, no questions asked.”

“What feud are you talking about?”

He shrugged. “It's a baseball thing. The point is, I'm tempted to ditch it altogether.”

“Ditch what?”

“Baseball. I'm thinking about retiring.”

I stared for a sec, not getting it. “Aren't you too young to retire?”

“Yeah, but when you make seventy grand a game, you can retire anytime you want.”

We rode in silence. I could tell he didn't want to say any more about what Joe Douglas had on him and why he was AWOL from baseball. But there was one thing that kept bugging me. “If you borrowed your friend's phone so no one could track you down, how did Joe Douglas get your friend's phone number and call you?”

He stared ahead. “The best I can figure is that Joe went online, pulled up the call record on my cell phone, which I left back in Cincinnati, and called every frequently dialed number till he reached me on my friend's phone.”

“But if you had just let him call, and didn't call him back, he never would've gotten to you.”

He shot me a look. “True.”

“So if you didn't want him tracking you down, why did you call him back?”

He chuckled. “You're getting too good at this, detective. Like I said yesterday, life would be a bust without secrets.” He nodded toward the pages sticking out of my cargo pocket. “Now how 'bout finishing the chapter so we can find out what happens to Huck in the feud.”

I read the last few pages, about a bloodbath between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons. Huck feels terrible because it began after he delivered a note hidden in a Bible. A bunch of people get killed, Huck escapes and reunites with Jim, and they head back down the river on the raft. At the very end, Huck says:

There was another clue poem from my father scrawled at the bottom of the page, but I didn't risk reading it. Ruah might've seen me.

Ruah didn't say anything for a long time. The weird thing was how he didn't ask me to keep reading. It's almost like he knew I was out of pages, that there were no more in my pocket.

Finally, he said, “Alright, I coughed up a secret and told you why I'm on the run. Now I'd like to ask you something.”

I tensed up. But what he said was true. He'd told me about his agent and being blackmailed, even though he wouldn't tell me what his agent had on him, or what the feud in baseball was about. I figured I'd do the same: tell him something but not everything. “Okay,” I said, “ask away. But I may not be able to answer.”

He pointed at the pages I'd read. “What's with the yellow highlights?”

I pulled the pages closer, but it was too late. His eyes had been better than my lame attempts at hiding the highlights.

“You told me you bought it used. So someone must've read it and marked it up,” he said. “What do you think all the highlighting's about?”

I thought on it, just like Huck was always doing. Since Ruah was a multimillionaire, it didn't seem likely he would muscle in on my treasure hunt and try to steal the bad book. I mean, in four or five baseball games he made what my father said the book was worth.

So I told him how the pages were from my father, and he was the one who had marked them up. I told him the highlights were clues to towns and coordinates. I showed him my GPS, told him about how I was using it to geocache, and that it was going to lead me to a rare book my dad had left me. And that's what I was hoping to find in St. Petersburg.

He was fascinated by all of it. At one point he said, “Man, I thought I had secrets!”

Then he asked a bunch of questions that made me tell him about getting the Bible with the DVD in it from my father. I told him how I'd never really met my father, but now it was too late because he was dead.

But I didn't tell him about being a bastard, and I didn't tell him about the bad book being some sequel to
Huck Finn.
I trusted Ruah, but not that much. And besides, if he wasn't going to tell all neither was I.

When he was done asking questions, he said, “If you want a ride to St. Petersburg, I'm good for it.”

I looked north. There was nothing but wheat and rangeland, not a farm, a house, or a vehicle in sight. Looking at the vast emptiness between me and St. Petersburg I did a little rewrite. The ride you have sure beats the one you may never get. “That would be great,” I said, grinning. “Thanks.”

“There's just one problem.”

“What?”

“You haven't told me where it is.”

I pulled out my GPS and turned it on. The compass arrow was now pointing north-north
east.
“We just passed the turn north.”

Ruah took the next exit and we backtracked.

As we drove north on Route 59, the road was more deserted than western Kansas. A sign said
COPE 27 MILES
.

I checked my GPS. “After Cope it's another sixty miles, and St. Petersburg isn't on the map.”

Ruah gazed at the empty road. We hadn't passed a vehicle yet. “Hitchhiking this might've been tough.”

“I could've found a bike and ridden to St. Petersburg in a day.”

“Yeah, you could've.” Ruah patted the dashboard. “But then Giff would've never swum across the Sea of Nothing.”

After Cope, we kept heading north, through rangeland scattered with islands of pale green grass. It was so wide open and treeless it actually began to look like a rolling sea.

When my GPS ticked down to 40 miles, a plume of black smoke rose on the horizon. We figured it was a brush fire or someone burning a field. As we came over a rise, about a mile away, we saw the flames. They were licking up from something on the road. It was a burning car.

Ruah slowed down. The car was engulfed in flames and just off the road. There were two men near it. As we got closer, they waved for us to stop. One of them moved to the middle of the road. Ruah slowed and started to pull onto the shoulder. When the man in the road came toward us,
Ruah suddenly swerved back on the road and gunned it. Shooting past them, they yelled at us. The closest man hardly had any teeth. He punched the end of the camper as it sped by.

I whipped around to Ruah. “What'd you do that for?”

His eyes darted between mirrors. “It didn't look right.”

“Their car was on fire! They needed help.” I gestured to the back. “And we have a fire extinguisher.”

“No fire extinguisher was gonna put that out. I didn't like the look of 'em. It could've been a setup for a robbery.”

I started to say something and stopped. I mean, it was his camper.

He looked over. “Besides, with all that smoke, the police and fire trucks will be coming. The last thing we need is the cops asking you or me for ID.”

He was right about the ID but I was still feeling guilty and annoyed. “We're in the middle of nowhere. The nearest cop or fire truck could be fifty miles away.”

He handed me his cell phone. “Okay, be a Good Samaritan; call nine-one-one.”

I called 911 and told the operator about the burning car and the two men stranded on Route 59. I gave her the mile-post number we'd just passed. When she asked me if I was at the scene I said, “No,” and hung up.

“Feel better?” Ruah asked.

“A little, but I still feel like a bad Samaritan.”

“Neither of those guys looked hurt. Part of being a jock is going with your gut, and something told me not to stop.
If it was wrong, I'm sure God will find a way to punish me. He usually does.”

It was a weird thing to say for someone who was blessed with being a millionaire baseball player. If T.L. punished me like that, in a few years I'd have money and bulging muscles and be a champion biker. It made me wonder if Ruah was on the run from more than his agent blackmailing him over a dark secret. Maybe the reason he didn't want to talk to the cops was because he was a fugitive. I mean, what did he see that made him think the two men were bad guys? It takes one to know one, right?

Before I went off the paranoid deep end, I reminded myself that even if he
was
a fugitive it wouldn't be the first time I'd traveled with one. Mom was a double fugitive: from the law and my father.

When we got to a town called Yuma we started following county roads north. The miles on my GPS clicked under 30. Whenever we came to an intersection we took whatever turn kept the compass pointing due north. At about 14 miles from St. Petersburg we headed up a road called RD XX. It was perfect. X marks the spot. When the GPS showed less than 10 miles the readout went to tenths of a mile and clicked down even faster. My heart was banging away at the same pace.

The compass arrow began swinging east. We were about there but it was off to the right. When the needle hit three o'clock we came to an intersection. A big sign pointed east:
ST. PETER'S CHURCH 1 MILE
. I could see a few buildings down the road. I asked Ruah to stop. I pulled out my last
pages of
Huck Finn
and read out loud the clue poem my father had written.

We got out in front of St. Peter's Church. There were only three houses in the place, so there weren't a lot of “letter boxes,” or mailboxes, to check. The weird part was that my GPS was pointing out of town, and saying we were 0.22 miles from the geocache.

The first house, all closed up, had a mailbox pole but no box. The second house had a mailbox but no name on it. The third house, a farmhouse to the southwest, was where the compass pointed.

As we started walking toward the farmhouse a pickup pulled up. A farmer leaned out the window. “Can I help ya?”