Relentless (37 page)

   From the lay-by where we abandoned the Mountaineer, I turned south, away from the Landulf house and Smokeville.

Within moments, a sign announced TITUS SPRINGS—4 MILES. Waxx had told Brock that the southern roadblock was established this side of Titus Springs.

I traveled less than a quarter of a mile before I began to miss Penny, Milo, and Lassie. I wished that somebody else would have been available to drive, so I could be in the trunk with my family.

The road rose and fell through geography that might have struck me as grand and harmonious at another time but that seemed portentous now, and as full of pending violence as missiles in their launchers. Every unusual shadow was an augury to be interpreted, the westward-racing fog an omen of fast-approaching chaos, the suffocated morning light a presentiment of mortality. Cedars and hemlocks and pines stood on both sides of the pavement, like ranked
armies waiting only for a trumpet blast to signal the start of an epic engagement.

A low growl behind me instantly—and irrationally—brought to mind the deformed face of the man in Henry Casas’s painting, but when I glanced over my shoulder with alarm, I saw only our Lassie on the backseat.

I smiled, said “Good girl,” and returned my attention to the roadway before realizing that Lassie in the backseat was no less astonishing than if the Maserati monster had been there.

Only a couple of minutes earlier, I had lifted the dog into the trunk of the sedan. I had closed the lid on her.

Certain that I must have imagined her impossible liberation, I glanced back once more. She grinned at me.

My confidence in the reliability of my senses was so shaken that when, five seconds later, I decided to check on her presence one more time, I tilted down the rearview mirror with the expectation that a figment of my imagination would cast no reflection. But she regarded me with cocked-head insouciance.

She had
not
jumped out of the trunk before the lid slammed. I would stake a fortune on that wager.

Behind me, Lassie again issued a long, low growl.

Having been saved by something like a miracle when I was six years old, I decided two things: first, that a refusal to accept this phenomenon was not merely healthy self-doubt but was instead cynical skepticism that was unworthy of me; second, that young Milo had some explaining to do.

The land was repaying its debt of fog to the sea with such dispatch that already I could see much farther than when I had left the lay-by.

Downhill, on the left, headlights stabbed across the roadway and then arced toward me as an SUV appeared between trees and turned
onto the pavement from a narrow dirt road, heading north. As the vehicle approached, I saw that it was an Explorer.

Clearly, the driver was interested in me. As he came uphill, he rode closer and closer to the center line until he had edged a few inches into my lane.

Suspecting that Waxx’s protocols for his current operation required agents to acknowledge one another when they crossed paths, I remained close to the center line, reduced speed, and rolled down the window in the driver’s door.

In the lower corner of the windshield, on the driver’s side of the Explorer, was a square decal of a size suspiciously like that on the windshield of my sedan, but I could not at first discern what it might be. As we closed on each other, however, I recognized the red triskelion, three fisted arms forming a wheel.

His window was open, too, and as we coasted past each other, the driver gave me a thumbs-up sign with his left hand.

He had a blocky head suitable for breaking boards in a martial-arts exhibition, the bulging jaws of someone who might pull nails out of lumber with his teeth, the nose of a pugilist who had let down his guard too often, and the eyes of a pit viper. The guy riding shotgun was not nearly so good-looking.

After the briefest hesitation, I returned the driver’s thumbs-up sign with my left hand, and as we glided past each other, I sighed with relief, eased down on the accelerator, and rolled up my window.

In my side mirror, I thought I saw the Explorer come to a halt in the middle of the road.

After readjusting my rearview mirror to capture the back window, I confirmed that Blockhead had brought his vehicle to a full stop. He hung a left turn and fell in behind me.

Something about me had made them suspicious. Perhaps I was not
supposed to respond to his thumbs-up with a thumbs-up of my own, but was instead supposed to make the okay sign or wiggle my pinkie, or thrust my middle finger at him.

I could try my best not to be paralyzed by the viciousness of these evil people-of-the-red-arms, and I could strive to accommodate myself to their singular lunacy, but it just wasn’t right that they also expected me to play their game by some book of boy’s-club rules that included code signs, countersigns, and secret handshakes.

Because I had been accelerating and they had been stopped to ponder why I had not replied to their thumbs-up with a bird whistle appropriate to the moment, I was a hundred yards ahead of them. Now they began to close fast.

If I tried to run, they would
know
that I was not a faithful attendee at the altar of their asylum, and I would never get through the roadblock alive.

I had the pistol, and I could make a valiant stand, but it was two against one, and I wouldn’t get a chance to let Penny Annie Oakley out of the trunk to help me defend our little piece of the American dream.

In spite of my reputed flaming optimism, I concluded that we were screwed. Lassie’s growling in the backseat seemed to confirm my judgment, and I heard myself chanting over and over a four-letter synonym for
poop
.

He closed to within fifty yards as I ransacked my brain for strategy. To forty yards … to thirty … to twenty. Ten.

Then an inexplicable but not unwelcome event occurred.

In my rearview mirror, I saw the southbound Explorer abruptly swing hard left, into the northbound lane, as though to avoid a collision with something that had bounded into the driver’s path, such as a leaping deer, though there was no deer nor anything else from which he needed to swerve.

At risk of crashing into the trees that crowded close to the pavement, the driver braked hard and pulled the wheel to the right. Considering that he had been accelerating when he made his first sudden change of course and that he was on a downhill run, this maneuver proved too extreme, and the Explorer tipped precariously to port as it came back across the pavement toward the southbound lane.

Careening off the road just where an embankment rose, the driver turned hard left again, ran along the slope at an angle that was not sustainable, wrestled the SUV back onto the pavement, but then shot across the southbound lane into the northbound once more, this time listing wildly to starboard.

He seemed to have gone from sobriety to extreme inebriation in an instant, or perhaps they were transporting a beehive for some nefarious purpose and the wee critters suddenly erupted in a rage, mercilessly stinging Blockhead and his companion.

Rapt by this spectacle, I almost made a lethal error. Switching my attention back and forth between the road ahead and the mirrors, I braked gently and reduced my speed to compensate for the distraction.

Blockhead pulled his steering wheel too hard to the right again but also seemed to tramp on the accelerator when he wanted the brake. The heroic Explorer could endure no more, and it leaned disastrously toward port, went over, and completed a wonderfully destructive 360-degree roll.

Because we were on a downhill run and because gravity will always have its way, the Explorer didn’t lose speed in its tumble but came on as fast as ever as it rolled again—directly toward me.

I might have squealed, I’m not sure, but I swung the sedan to the right, onto the shoulder, but found room to get only half the car off the pavement.

Half proved enough, and the Explorer tumbled past as it came out of its second roll and with great exuberance executed a third.

I braked to a full stop and sat transfixed by the sight of the SUV rolling again and again, and yet again, down the hill, scattering pieces of itself in its wake. Finally the vehicle tumbled off the farther side of the road, ricocheted off a tree, caromed off another tree, and knocked this way and that into the woods, as if Mother Nature had decided to have a game of pinball.

By the time the Explorer came to a stop, both occupants were most likely dead, but for sure neither of them would be dancing by Christmas.

I suppose a good Samaritan would have hurried to the crash site and provided tender care to the survivors, if any.

After I considered what these people had done to the Landulf and Clitherow families—and what they hoped to do to mine—I found myself driving past the scene with a clear conscience. And if I spent 705 years in Purgatory instead of 704—well, I would just have to cope.

I drove on for perhaps half a mile in a daze.

Only then did I realize that Lassie no longer occupied the back of the sedan. At some point during the death plunge of the SUV, she must have clambered into the front. She perched now in the passenger seat, riding shotgun, gazing at the highway ahead with keen interest.

   Less than five minutes after Blockhead and his nameless sidekick arrived at the pearly gates with résumés that made Saint Peter call for the celestial security guards, I topped another rise and looked down another slope at a roadblock formed by two sheriffs-department cars parked nose to nose.

Although frightened, I was not a fraction as terrified as when we were playing let’s-shoot-each-other-in-the-head at the Landulf house. I had been through so much in the past seventy-two hours that I earned my good-scout medal for nerves of steel and was working on my titanium certification.

In fact, I have to admit that I got a cheap thrill from the fact that this police roadblock was in my honor. All my life, I had been a good boy, living by the rules: making my bed each morning, flossing my teeth twice a day, eating my vegetables dutifully…. When I was a lad and then a single young man, all those girls who liked bad boys— which, strangely enough, seemed to be most of them—thought of me
as a boring nerd, or thought of me not at all. If they could see me now—head shaved, carrying an unregistered concealed weapon, driving a vehicle stolen from a federal agent—they would swoon, become giddy with desire, and perhaps even throw their panties at me as if I were a rock star.

In truth, of course, I remained a good boy, trying my best to do the right thing. In this inverted world of the twenty-first century, the authorities were the unprincipled thugs, and the armed fugitive in the stolen car was a churchgoing family man who had a dog named Lassie.

As we approached the roadblock, I worried that having a dog beside me would blow my cover, but I didn’t want the sheriff’s deputies to see me stop and put her in the trunk. Then I decided that a psychopathic agent for a psychopathic federal agency might well have a service dog to assist him in chasing down and savaging the innocent.

That scenario would have been more plausible if Lassie were a Doberman or a German shepherd, weighed a hundred pounds more than she did, and were foaming at the mouth with rabies. But she was what she was, and I came slowly to a stop at the barricade with every intention of claiming that beside me sat a canine as highly trained as a circus bear and a thousand times more dangerous.

The four men manning the roadblock were uniformed sheriffs-department deputies. They looked wholesome, earnest, and sane. Two of them were leaning against the back end of a patrol car, drinking coffee and chatting.

Earlier, in the cellar of the Landulf house, Shearman Waxx told Brock that because he needed every man under his command to conduct the search for us, the two roadblocks would be manned solely by sheriffs-department personnel, and for once he was not lying like a snake in Eden. No plainclothes goons were in sight.

I was prepared to flash Rink’s badge and ID, held so that one of my
fingers covered his face in the photo, but the deputy at the point position reacted to the triskelion on the windshield and waved me around the barricade without delay.

The shoulder of the road was wide here, with sufficient room on the right to squeeze past the patrol cars, once the two deputies with the coffee cups politely moved out of my way. I almost gave them a thumbs-up sign, but then decided that might get me shot. Instead I remained stone-faced and ignored them, as I imagined an arrogant fed might disdain members of a rural police force, whom he regarded as hicks.

Perhaps eighty feet beyond the roadblock, a man walked in the northbound lane. Although his back was to me, I recognized Shearman Waxx. Ahead of him, past a couple of stone pines, off the road in a rest stop with a graveled area for parking and two picnic tables on a grassy sward, stood the black Hummer.

He must have been recently conferring with the four deputies. If I had arrived at the barricade two minutes sooner, Waxx would have recognized Lassie. Then the dog, Milo, Penny, and I would have been on our way to a torture chamber and thereafter to a wood chipper.