by Jeff Abbott
He slid down into the mossy-wet ditch, hauled himself up the side and skidded under another wire fence. The pine growth was heavy here. The rain strengthened, the wind rose. He bounced off the trees, trying to run as fast as he could. He roped the chains around his arms to silence their clinking.
He could hear the sound of pursuit behind him, moving past the trees, running. Suddenly a flashlight sparked on, caught his shoulders in its glow as he ran up to a jumble of fallen pines. He slid under the brush and where his leg had just been he heard a pop like a bullet. But it couldn’t fly straight, not in this rain.
A scream gelled in his throat and he moaned it away. He scrabbled into the earth and slid under the pyramid of tumbled, fallen pine trunks – there was a narrow passageway, formed by nature. Hoping to God he wasn’t sliding into a dead end, or a rattler’s nest. He saw an opening, slithered through it, staggered to his feet.
He ran, for several more minutes, before he collapsed against a heavy trunk.
Gasping, nearly drunk with exhaustion, he heard an engine ahead of him.
Soaked to the skin, he followed the fading roar. A minute later he stumbled out into another road. Paved. A painted line gleamed on the center, under a heavy cover of incessant rain. A highway or farm-to-market road. In the far distance he saw red taillights, a car. Inching into another lane because of a dark shape huddled on the road’s shoulder.
Someone pulled over because of the torrential rain. He ran toward the shape.
A semi tractor-trailer. He was twenty feet away when the truck’s blinkers flashed and the truck inched forward.
Heading back onto the road.
No, he thought. He had to get out of here now or they would kill him.
The back of the truck read WINGED FEET TRANSPORTATION Houston/Beaumont/Tyler.
The truck’s left wheels turned onto the asphalt.
Luke ran, every muscle in his body screaming. The truck’s back was now ten feet away from him; the pavement slick. He stumbled, nearly fell, stayed on his feet. He grabbed the back door of the semi and hauled himself onto the heavy metal bumper. He stood on it and looked for a way to open the truck’s doors. He found the handle but it was locked.
It didn’t matter – as long as he was getting away from his pursuers. He pressed his face close to the wet metal of the truck’s doors, steadied his feet on the wide metal bumper that served as a step into the vehicle.
He looped the chains around the door’s handle, an improvised safety belt. His arms felt like jelly. He considered signaling the truck – but then the driver would stop, and if they stopped, Mouser and Snow might catch them. Better simply to get away.
The truck eased its speed slowly up to a cautious forty – Luke guessed – and the wind and the rain plucked at him. His own breathing boomed in his ears. He shivered against the metal doors.
He heard a whoosh, then another, and the truck rocked in the wake of sudden hard surge of air. Two other trucks, passing in the opposite direction.
How many minutes had he piggybacked? Ten? Twenty? His legs ached, crouched on the bumper, lashed to the handle, trying to keep his balance. If he fell he’d break his neck.
Maybe his pursuers were still hunting him in the woods, blissfully ignorant that he was gone, speeding away on winged feet. His arms screamed in pain. He couldn’t keep this up forever; maybe it was time to signal the trucker…
He sensed the approaching lights behind him. He looked behind him and saw headlights – low to the ground, not a truck, a sedan. The lights were racing toward him, with the awful certain intensity of a snake slithering close, its unbroken gaze a hypnosis.
It couldn’t be them, Luke told himself. At the worst the car’s driver would signal the trucker and end Luke’s free ride.
The sedan veered up close to the truck’s rear, as though inspecting the odd big bug clutching the truck’s door. A Mercedes.
The Mercedes swung up closer.
The pulse of the truck’s brakes jostled him, the hiss of tires slowing on pavement. The trucker gave a warning tap on his brakes.
The sedan slowed a fraction, cut around the truck’s corner and sped up the side.
Through the curtain of rain as the car passed, Luke saw Snow staring at him. Smiling. Then the Mercedes was gone, out of sight, revving toward the truck’s cab, veering into the opposite lane to pass.
They’re going to cut him off, force him to pull over, Luke realized. But the truck was speeding far too fast for him to jump.
He inched along the bumper, trying to get a view around the truck’s corner. The Mercedes winged close to the truck’s cabin, Snow’s window down, her hand waving at the trucker to slow.
The truck slowed, rocked, then picked up its speed.
Maybe the trucker didn’t like what he saw. Snow looked crazy as hell with that sickening grin. Maybe he had valuable cargo and he just wasn’t inclined to pull over in the middle of nowhere because another driver gestured at him.
He glanced around the corner again. The Mercedes swung out onto the opposite shoulder as another truck traveling the opposite direction barreled past, horns blaring over the growl of the storm.
Luke’s arms seized in bone-deep cramps, his muscles knotted in pain. He eased the chains out of the door handles, held onto the handles themselves and tested the locked doors again in blind desperation. If only he could have gotten inside the doors, squeezed inside, Mouser and Snow would have never found him…
He heard the crack of a shot. The truck lurched, convulsed, and nearly threw Luke to the pavement. He gripped the handles and braced his feet hard against the bumper.
The truck veered off the road. It rocked and surged as pines and oaks snapped in its path. A thick trunk splintered, flying past Luke in a cloud of pulverized wood and pine needles.
The truck rocketed down an incline and to his left he saw the beginning of a bridge rising past him.
The truck plummeted, smashing down through the trees as the speed slowed. Luke put his face to the metal as spears of mud flew past him.
The jackknifing came with a wrench and if he’d kept the chains looped in the door handle the force would have torn his arms from their sockets. He tried to time the jump in a flash of pure instinct but the crash was chaos.
You’ll be crushed under the rig, he thought and then the rig broke free and threw him; he cartwheeled past the edge of the crumpling trailer.
Air. He opened his eyes, falling, and saw the swelling river beneath him, rushing toward him.
Water. Cold beyond reason and dark.
Earth. His shoulder scraped the river’s stony bottom.
He kicked toward the surface, broke into air. Just long enough for a gulp.
Then the chains weighed him down.
Fire. Heat, surging through the river like a pulse. The current yanked him forward, the force of a blast pushed him into sweet oxygen again and he saw gray sky, dawn fighting to pierce the clouds.
Then the maddened river took him.
10
Luke kicked to the surface as the river swept him downstream, sinking again, fighting to rise. He rode the river’s raging current for what seemed an eternity. It was a constant ordeal to keep head above water, to breathe. He gathered the chains close around him, terrified they would snag on rock or sunken tree and yank him downward to death. The weight of the chains was like hands pulling him down to the sleeping depths. A sudden bend in the river twisted ahead of him and the current battered him into the shallows, cypress and pine lining the banks. Then he spun away. He struggled, tried to swim. The river hurried him close to shore again, and he spotted a black shape, toppled into the water. A rotting tree. Branches stuck out like spikes.
Luke gathered the last of his strength and tossed the chain over one of the trunk’s branches.
He stopped. He could breathe. He lay in the water, head above the surge, greedy for air. Slowly he pulled himself close to the tree. He used the chains to loop onto branches closer to shore and he collapsed onto the col
d mud.
He became aware of a fresh onslaught of rain. The pain in his arms, in his chest, brought him back to his senses. He got to his feet slowly and staggered into the heavy growth along the bank. Arches of cypress and pine spread above him, sheltering him from the worst of the downpour. Behind him the river was sick with rain, beige with muddy runoff. Chunks of white floated in the brown water; packages of shrimp and fish, fresh from the Gulf.
The truck’s cargo.
They’ll be looking for you.
He hurried up the rolling incline that led from the river and staggered into the deep cover of the pines.
Please, God, he thought, let the trucker have gotten out alive.
Luke headed away from both river and road and deeper into the woods. As he walked he took an inventory of himself. Pants caked with mud. Shirt torn open, buttons gone, ripped by the force of the river. He glanced down: the silver of the Saint Michael medal glinted on his chest. Thank God, he thought, he hadn’t lost it. He’d lost one shoe and sock but the mud felt soothing against his foot. His wallet and money were back in the cabin. His wrists were bloodied and scored raw from the shackles.
He walked. Listened for the sounds of pursuit but heard only the soft hammering of the rain.
Mouser and Snow were from the Night Road. It existed, as a vicious force beyond his database of potential malcontents. It was real. He was convinced of it. Their talk of casinos being bombed. His mind spun. They said they were from his stepfather. It didn’t make any sense. They couldn’t be from Henry and also from the Night Road.
The realization hit him like a stone dropped from the clouds. Could Henry be involved with the Night Road? It didn’t seem possible. But Henry refusing to ransom him didn’t seem possible, either.
Who is your client for this project? he’d asked Henry. What are you doing with this research? Henry had smiled and dodged and maybe bribed him with a lucrative job offer to stop him from asking questions.
Luke had given him the discussion-group postings and the names, and a way to contact hundreds of people who might be extremists. He’d handed them to Henry on a plate. God only knew who his client really was.
He had to find a phone. Call the police.
Suddenly he stumbled into a clearing in the pines. A tidy little cottage stood in the glooming rain. White paint, a back porch that faced the river, a swing and wicker chairs, empty of cushions. A small fishing pier jutted into the river.
He ran to the cottage’s back door and knocked, but there was no answer. The curtains were drawn on all the windows. He listened at the glass; no sound came from within. He walked around the porch; on the other side was a small one-car garage, a dirt road driveway leading down to it from a paved road, and a tool shed.
A lock bolted the tool shed door shut. He got a rock from the flowerbeds and smashed down on the lock with four jackhammer blows. But the lock held.
He ran back to the cottage. His conscience made him hesitate at breaking and entering. But he was desperate and this was his new reality. He had to adjust to it.
He broke the window. No screech of an alarm accompanied the tinkling glass. He fingered the lock, twisted it, and stumbled inside.
He shivered and turned on the central heating. It vroomed to life and the vents perfumed the air with a dusty burnt smell. The cottage was well furnished; someone’s riverside weekend getaway, he decided. He wanted food, a shot of whiskey to warm him, and to be out of his filthy sopping clothes. But most of all he wanted to be free of the shackles. He searched the kitchen and in a drawer he found a ring of keys.
He hurried back out to the tool shed and tried the keys. The third opened the lock, chalked with dust from his earlier attempts.
The orderly wall held a nice array of tools. He saw what he needed: a power drill, nestled in its charger.
He inserted the drill’s bit into the lock; he had to hold the drill at an awkward angle. It revved to life and bit into the lock’s mechanism. Metal ground, hissed, and began to shred. The shackles shook, dancing to the bit’s beat, and the lock gave way. He uncuffed his right hand and felt the delicious feeling of the weight dropping away. His skin under the cuffs was raw, bloodied, swollen. He freed his left hand in short order.
Luke put the tools back into place and relocked the tool shed door. He threw the shackles into the kitchen trashcan.
No phone in the kitchen. He searched the rest of the vacation home, found two bedrooms, two bathrooms and a den, and no phone. Bizarre. But this was a world choking on cell phones, so maybe the owners didn’t feel the need for a landline for their weekend house.
He went back to the curtained window. No sign of pursuit; no Snow or Mouser emerging from the dripping pines. He was safe, but God knew for how long.
He kept the lights off. He stripped off his ruined clothes and stood in the stinging spray of the shower. He scrubbed himself raw, hating to leave the reviving heat of the water. When he was done, he wrapped a towel around himself. In the master bedroom closet he found men’s clothes. Luke was six-two and the man’s jeans were surprisingly a bit too long and too wide in the waist. But better, he decided, than too small. He found a gray long-sleeve T-shirt, a flannel shirt and a jacket. He found no shoes but galoshes; he put them on, with a pair of white socks he found, in case he had to leave quickly.
In the bathroom he slathered antibacterial gel on his hurt hands and wrapped them with gauze. He looked like he was hiding an attempt at slashed wrists. But he felt human again. The medicine cabinet held a few prescription bottles in the name of Olmstead. He was hiding in the Olmsteads’ house. He hoped the Olmsteads were nice, understanding people. A sharp, sudden hunger – dulled for long hours by adrenaline – punched his stomach. He hadn’t eaten since lunch the day he dropped Henry off at the airport, which felt like a lifetime ago.
He found scant offerings in the fridge – a jar of strawberry jam, expired containers of milk and sour cream, a few bottles of beer. In the pantry he found peanut butter and canned vegetables and soups. In the freezer were several packages of steak, a loaf of bread and two vegetarian pizzas. The steak would take too long. He heated tomato soup and put one of the pizzas in the oven.
He stood over the soup, the mist of it warming his face, and, in the distance, under the fading thunder, he heard the chop-chop-chop of a helicopter. There and gone by the time he got to the window.
He clicked on the television while he drank the hot soup, surfed to a twenty-four hour Texas-based news channel. The heavy rains drenching east Texas and western Louisiana were the lead story. Apparently there’d been a derailment of a train carrying chemicals in the small town of Ripley and a massive chlorine leak, and the rainstorms had helped ground the poison. Thirty dead, hundreds hurt, the entire town and everything around it for twenty miles temporarily evacuated. But the storm had stopped the threat.
‘Of course, whether this was an accident, or as some sources on the scene have suggested, a bombing of the rail line itself to cause the leak…’
A bombing. And here were Mouser and Snow, talking about bombings.
Luke sank to his knees before the TV, the soup tasteless in his mouth. The story went back to the wider effects of the wide-ranging rainstorms: two people drowned in Lufkin, another swept away in Longview, and a dramatic truck crash near Braintree – they went to an aerial shot of a semi, junked in an engorged river. The truck driver was missing, a search was underway.
Missing. Please be okay, he thought. Please. But he knew, from the shot, from the force of the crash, that it was a forlorn hope.
He ran to the sink and waited for the wave of nausea to pass. He looked up at the screen as the anchor returned. ‘A brutal street shooting near downtown Houston is caught on an ATM machine’s camera, and the stepson of the leader of a prominent political think-tank is implicated.’ Cut to a reporter, standing in the rain-soaked morning daylight of the bank parking lot where Eric had gunned down the homeless man.
Cut to a grainy tape aimed at the bank’s parking lo
t. He saw his own BMW roar into focus. His own face closer to the camera as he slammed on the brakes to cut off the guy running toward the ATM. Then Luke lurched toward Eric, who could not be seen clearly. The BMW jerked out of the camera’s shot, then returned as it exited the lot past the dead man, the license plate grainy but visible. The police must have enhanced the footage to read the plate.
‘The car used in the shooting is registered to Luke Dantry of Austin, stepson of noted political think-tank president Henry Shawcross. Dantry is described as six-foot-two, brown hair, blue eyes, slim build, age twenty-four, a master’s candidate in psychology at the University of Texas-’
The camera cut to his driver’s license picture, a soft smile on his face. He’d never liked the photo but now he looked like one of those people who try to look too sincere and fail.
‘The car was found abandoned at a parking lot near the Dallas/Fort Worth airport. Dantry received a speeding ticket outside Mirabeau a few hours before the shooting, where it was reported by the officer that he was not alone in the car. Dantry’s stepfather had this to say last night.’
Then cut to Henry, gaunt and pensive, as though he’d aged ten years: ‘I hope my stepson will immediately turn himself in to the authorities. Luke is a good kid who has made a few unfortunate choices in his past. Luke, if you can hear this, just turn yourself in, that’s for the best.’ Henry blinked wetly into the camera.
Then cut to some jerk who lived in the condo below him: ‘Dantry is kind of a loner. He didn’t say much to people, didn’t socialize, you know, but I guess I never thought he’d shoot someone.’ Then, with a shake of his head. ‘He should have been smarter not to do it in front of a camera. Grad students aren’t known for common sense.’
He never liked that neighbor, a little snot who he’d had to ask to turn down his stereo several times. Being branded a loner on national television stung. It’s what the commentators always said about the guys a jury would find guilty in five seconds. And Henry, talking about his past mistakes.
