"Whoever he is," Doyle said, shifting his aching buttocks on the vinyl seat, "he's dangerous. "
"Somebody we know?"
"No. I think he's a complete stranger."
"Then why is he after us?"
"Because he needs to be after someone."
"That's no answer."
Doyle thought about that special breed of madmen which had grown out of the previous decade, out of those pressure-cooker years when the very fabric of society had been heated to the boiling point and very nearly melted away. He thought about men like Charles Manson, Richard Speck, Charles Whitman, Arthur Bremer . . .
Though Charles Whitman, the Texas tower sniper who had shot more than a dozen innocent people, might have been suffering from an undiagnosed brain tumor, the others had not required any physical illness or rational explanations for the bloodletting they had caused.
The slaughter-which had been ' legitimized by a government which gloated over the "body counts" from Vietnam-had been, in itself, the reason and explanation for the event. There were at least a dozen other names that Doyle could no longer recall, men who had murdered wantonly but not sufficiently to gain immortality. Since a madman had to be either clever in his methods, selective enough to choose the famous as his targets, or ruthless enough to cut down a dozen or more people before he was at all memorable. The videotape replay of an assassination and the nightly broadcasting of a bloody war had dulled American sensitivities. The single murderous impulse had become far too common to be at all noteworthy . . . Doyle attempted to convey these thoughts to Colin, couching them in grisly terms only when no other terms would do.
"You think he's crazy, then? " the boy asked when Doyle was finished.
"Perhaps. Actually, he hadn't done much of anything yet. But if we had stayed on the throughway and let him follow us, given him time and plenty of opportunity . . . Who knows what he might have done, eventually? "
"This all sounds para-"
"Paranoid? "
"That's the word," Colin said, shaking his head approvingly. "It sounds very paranoid."
"These days you have to be somewhat paranoid," Doyle said. "It's almost a vital requirement for survival."
"Do you think he'll find us again?"
"No." Doyle blinked as the sun glimmered especially brightly against the windshield. "He'll stay on the Interstate, trying like hell to catch up with us again."
"Sooner or later he's going to realize we got off."
"But he won't know where or when," Doyle said. "And he can't know where, exactly, we'll be going."
"What if he finds someone else to pick on?" Colin asked. "If he just started to tail us because we happened to be going west on the same road he was using-won't he choose some other victim when he realizes that we've gotten away from him?"
"What if he does?" Doyle asked.
"Shouldn't we let the police know about him?" the boy asked.
"You've got to have proof before you can accuse anyone," Doyle said. "Even if we had proof, incontrovertible proof, that the man in the Chevrolet intended to hurt us, we couldn't do anything with it. We don't know whom to accuse, not by name. We don't know where he's headed, except westward. We don't have a number for the van, any thing the cops could use to trace it." He looked at Colin, then back at the blacktop road. "All we can do is thank our stars we got rid of him."
"I guess so."
"You better believe it."
Much later Colin said, "When he was following us, pulling off the road behind us, speeding to catch up with us-were you scared?"
Doyle hesitated only a second, wondering if he should admit to some less unmanly reaction: uneasiness, disquiet, alarm, anxiety. But he knew that, with Colin, honesty was always best. "of course I was scared.
just a little bit, but scared nonetheless. There was reason to be."
"I was scared too," the boy said without embarrassment. "But I always thought that when you got to be an adult, you didn't have to be scared of anything any more."
"You'll outgrow some fears," Doyle said. "For instance . . .
are you afraid of the dark at all?
"Some."
"Well, you will outgrow that. But you don't outgrow everything.
And you find new things to be afraid of."
They crossed the Mississippi River at Hannibal instead of St.
Louis, missing the Gateway Arch altogether. just before the turnoff to Hiawatlia, Kansas, they left Route 36 for a series of connecting highways that took them south once more to Interstate 70 and, by eight-fifteen, to the Plains Motel near Lawrence, Kansas, where they had reservations for the night.
The Plains Motel was pretty much like the Lazy Time, except that it had only one long wing and was built of gray stone and clapboard instead of bricks. The signs were the same orange and green neon. The Coke machine by the office door might have been moved, during the day, from the Lazy Time near Indianapolis; the air around it was cool and filled with robotic noises.
Alex wondered if the desk clerk would be a stout woman with a beehive hair style.
Instead, it was a man Doyle's age. He was clean-shaven, his hair neatly trimmed. He had a square, honest, American face, perfect for recruitment posters. He could have made a fortune doing television commercials for Pepsi, Gillette, Schick, and full-page ads for Camel cigarettes in all the magazines.
"I noticed a no-vacancy sign outside," Doyle said. "I wondered if you'd held our room. We're an hour later than the reservations called for, but-"
"Is it Doyle?" the man asked, revealing perfect white teeth.
"Yes. " i "Sure, I held it." He produced a flimsy form from the desk.
"Hey, good news! I know you must have been worried about getting stuck-"
"Wasn't worried at all, Mr. Doyle. If you hadn't reserved it, I'd have had to rent it to coons.
Doyle was weary from a long day on the road, and he could not decide what the clerk meant. "Coons?"
"Naggers," the clerk said. "Three times they came in. If I didn't have your reservation, I'd have had to let one of them take 22 for the night. And I hate that. I'd rather let a room stand empty all night then rent to one of them."
Doyle felt as if he were giving his approval to the man's bigotry when he signed the registration paper. He wondered, briefly, why he, dressed and groomed as he was, made any better impression than the blacks who had stopped before him.
When the handsome young man gave Doyle the room key, he said, "What kind of gas mileage you get on that T-Bird?"
Alex had known his share of bigots, and he was expecting this one, like the others, to continue with his practiced invective. He was surprised, then, by the change of subject.
"Mileage? I don't know. I never checked."
"I'm saving for a car like that. Gas hogs, but I love them. Car like that tells you about a man. You see a man in a T-Bird, you know he's making it."
Alex looked at the room key in his hand. "Twenty-two,' Where's that?"
"To the right clear at the end. Nice room, Mr. Doyle."
Alex went out to the car. He knew why the clerk accepted him.
The Thunderbird was, for that man, a symbol which eclipsed reality. A car like that transformed a counterculture freak into a mere eccentric, so far as the clerk was concerned. That attitude depressed Alex. He had not expected that here in the heartlands a man was defined by his possessions.
George Leland spent Tuesday night in a cheaper place three miles west of the Plains Motel. Though it was a tiny single room, he was not always alone. Courtney was often there. Sometimes he saw her standing in a corner, her back to the wall. Other times she sat on the foot of the bed or in the poorly padded plank chair by the bathroom door. He got angry with her more than once and told her to go away. She would vanish as quietly as she appeared. But then he would miss her and long for her-and she would return, making the cheaper place seem far more luxurious and grand than the Plains Motel.
He Slept fitfully.
Two he)hours before dawn,
unable to sleep at all any more, he got up and showered and dressed. He sat on the bed, several maps opened on the covers, and studied the route that would be followed Wednesday.
He traced and retraced it with his blunt fingers.
Leland knew that somewhere in those six hundred miles he would have to take care of Doyle and the boy. He no longer needed to conceal this truth from himself. Courtney had helped him face up to it. He must kill them, just as he had killed that highway patrolman who tried to stand between him and Courtney. It was much too dangerous to put this thing off any longer. By tomorrow night they would be well over halfway to San Francisco. If Doyle decided to change their route for the last long leg of the journey, Leland might lose them for good.
Tomorrow, then. Somewhere between Lawrence, Kansas, and Denver.
Leland would finally be striking back at Them, at everyone who had put him down and worked against him these last two years. This was the new beginning. From now on, he was not going to be pushed around. He would teach everyone to respect him. His luck would pick up, too.
With Doyle and the kid out of the way, he and Courtney could go on together with their wonderful life. He would be all that she had, and she would cling to him.
A few minutes past six o'clock Tuesday evening, a call came through from the police lab. Detective Ernie Hoval took it in his sparsely furnished office on the second floor of the divisional headquarters building. "This about the Pulham case?" he asked before the man on the other end of the line could say anything. "If it's not, take it to someone else. I'm on the Pulham until it's solved, and nothing else."
"You'll want this," the lab man said. He sounded like the same balding, sallow, narrow man who had not been humbled by Detective Hoval the night before. "We got the fingerprint report from Washington.
Just came in on the teletype."
"And?
"No record."
Hoval hunched over his big desk, dwarfing it, the receiver clenched tightly in one hand, his other hand fisted on the blotter.
His knuckles were white and sharp. "No record?"
"I told you it might be that way," the technician said, almost as if he enjoyed Hoval's disappointment. "I think this looks more like a nut case with every passing minute."
"It's political," Hoval insisted, his fist opening and closing again and again. "Organized cop killing."
"I don't agree."
"You got proof otherwise,"' Hoval asked angrily.
"No," the technician admitted. "We're still going over the car, but it looks hopeless. We've taken paint samples from every nick and scrape. But who knows if one of them was made by the killer's vehicle?
And if one of them was-which one?"
"You sweep out the cruiser?" Hoval asked.
"Of course," the technician said. "We found a few hairs, pubic and otherwise. Nail clippings. Various kinds of mud. Blades of grass. Bits of food. Most of it had no connection with the killer.
And even if some of it does-the hair, a couple of torn threads we picked off the door catch-we can't do much with it until we have a suspect to apply it to. It "The case won't be solved with lab work," Hoval agreed.
"What other leads you have?"
"We're reconstructing Pulham's shift," Hoval said. "Starting with the moment he took the squad car out of the garage."
"Anything?
"There are lots of minutes to account for, lots of people to talk with," Hoval said. "But we'll come up with something."
"A nut," the technician said.
"You're all wrong about that." Hoval hung up.
Twenty years ago Ernie Hoval had become a cop because it was a profession and not just a job; it was work that brought a man a measure of honor and respect. It was hard work, the hours long, the pay only adequate, but it gave you the opportunity to contribute something to your community. The fringe benefits of police work-the gratitude of your neighbors and the respect of your own children-were more important than the salary. At least, that had been true in the past . . .
These days, Hoval thought, a cop was nothing more than a target.
Everyone was after the police. Blacks, liberals, spics, peaceniks, women's liberationists-all the lunatic fringe reveled in making fools of the police. These days a cop was looked upon, at best, as a buffoon. At worst, he was called a fascist, and he was marked for death by these revolutionary groups that no one but other cops seemed to give a damn about . . .
It had all started in 1963, with Kennedy and Dallas. And it had gotten much, much worse through the war. Hoval knew that, although he could not understand why the assassinations and the war had so fundamentally changed so many people. There were other political murders in America's history, all without profound effect on the nation. And there had been other wars which had, if anything, strengthened our moral fiber. This war had had the opposite effect.
He could not say why-except to point out that the communists and other revolutionary forces had long been looking for excuses to act-but he knew it to be true.
He thought about Pulham, latest victim of these changes, and he fisted both big hands.
it was political. Sooner or later they would get the bastards.
WEDNESDAY, 7:00 A.M, to THURSDAY, 7:00 A.M Seven The morning held the threat of rain. Gently undulating fields of tender new wheat shoots touched the far horizons, a green carpet under the low gray ceiling of fast-moving clouds. Here and there on the maddeningly level land, enormous concrete grain elevators thrust up like gigantic lightning rods to test the mettle of the pending storm.
Colin liked it. He kept pointing to the grain elevators and to the occasional skeletal oil derricks which stood like prison watchtowers in the distance. "It's great, isn't it?"
"This land's every bit as flat as that back in Indiana and Missouri," Doyle said.
"But there's history here." Today the boy was wearing a red-and-black Frankenstein T-shirt. It had pulled up out of his corduroy trousers, but he paid it no attention now.
"History?" Doyle asked.
"Haven't you ever heard of the Old Chisholm Trail? Or the Santa Fe Trail? All the famous Old West towns are here," the boy said, excited about it. "You have Abilene and' Fort Riley, Fort Scott, Pawnee Rock, Wichita, Dodge City, and the old Boot Hill."
"I didn't know you were a cowboy-movie fan," Doyle said.
"I'm not, that much. But it's still exciting." Alex looked at the great plains and tried to picture them as they had once been: shifting sands, dust, cactus, a stark and foreboding landscape that had barely been touched by man. Yes, once it must have been a romantic place.
"There were Indian wars here," Colin said. "And John Brown caused a small civil war in Kansas back in 1856, when he and his boys killed five slave owners at Pottawatomie Creek. "
"Bet you can't say that five times, fast."
"A dollar?" Colin asked.
"You're on."
"Pottawatomie, Pottawatomie, Pottawatomie, Pottawatomie, Pottawatomie!" he said, breathless at the end of it. "You owe me a buck."
"Put it on my tab," Doyle said. He felt loose and easy and good again, now that the trip was turning out to be what they had planned.
"You know who else came from Kansas?"
"Who? "
"Carry Nation," Colin said, giggling. "The woman who went around breaking up saloons with an ax."
They passed another grain elevator sitting at the end of a long, straight blacktop road.
"Where did you learn all this? " Doyle asked.
"Just picked it up," Colin said. "Bits and pieces from here and there."
Now and then they passed fields which were standing idle, rich brown patches of land like neatly opened tablecloths. in one of these, a fifty-foot-high whirlwind gathered dust in a compact column of whining spring air.
"This is also where Dorothy lived," Colin said, watching the whirlwind.
"Dorothy who?"
"The girl in The Wizard of Oz. Remember how she got carried to oz by a tremendous tornado?"
Alex w
as about to answer when he was startled by the brash roar of an automobile horn immediately behind them. He looked in the mirror-and sucked air between his teeth when he saw the Chevrolet van. It was no more than six feet from their rear bumper. The unseen driver was pounding the palm of his hand into the horn ring: beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beeeeeep!
Doyle looked at the speedometer, saw that they were doing better than seventy. If he had been so surprised by the horn that he had stomped the brake pedal, the Chevrolet would have run right over them.
And they would all be dead.
"Stupid sonofabitch," he said.
Beep, beeeeeeep, beeeeeep . . .
"Is it him?" Colin asked.
"Yes. " The van moved up, so close now that Doyle could not even see its bumper or the bottom third of its grill.
"Why's he blowing his horn?" Colin asked.
"I don't know . . . I guess-to make sure we know he's back."
Eight The van's horn played a monotonous dirge.
"Do you think he wants you to stop?
Colin asked, gripping his knees in his delicate hands and leaning forward as if bent by the tension.
"I don't know."
"Are you going to stop?"
"No."
Colin nodded. "Good. I don't think we should stop. I think we should keep going no matter what."
Doyle expected that any second now the stranger would stop blowing his horn and let the van fall back to its customary quarter of a mile.
Instead, it just hung in there, only three feet away from their back end now, cruising at seventy miles an hour, horn blaring.
Whether or not the man in the Chevy was as dangerous as a Charles Manson or Richard Speck, he was most certainly unbalanced. He was getting some sort of kick out of terrorizing complete strangers, and that was far from normal. More than ever before, Doyle knew he did not want to confront this man face-to-face and test the limits of his madness.
Beep, beep, beeeeeep "What can we do?" the boy asked.
Doyle glanced at him. "Seatbelt on?"
"Of course."
"We'll outrun him again."
"And go to Denver on the back roads?"
"Yeah."
"He'll pick us up again tomorrow morning when we leave Denver on the way to Salt Lake City."
Dean Koontz - (1973) Page 7
