What Came After (35 page)

Bainbridge was happy to turn it over. Why not.

*

A checkpoint every fifty miles. Sometimes purpose-built and sometimes born from the ruins of whatever had come before. A service station or a shopping center or whatever. Truck traffic was heavier north of Philadelphia and the checkpoints were congested, but just the look of the car got them waved right to the front of every line. The air was thick with diesel fumes and loud with the sounds of engines idling and radio static and men calling out. The shriek and shudder of air brakes. Weller and Janey felt like insects in that low silent car among these fuming diesel-powered monsters, but they were treated like a king and a queen. Especially once money started changing hands. Tough National Motors security men climbing down from their glass-walled perches to greet them face to face. To look in the driver’s side window and marvel. Their sunglasses coming off and their habituated grimaces softening. They took the money and sent them on their way.

They may have seen the sacks of vegetables in the back seat or even the melon seeds drying to muck inside the cup holder, but they were interested only in the red white and blue AmeriBank scrip. There was plenty of it to go around. That other kind of green.

*

Carmichael was off having a good time in the great outdoors, but he looked angry when he picked up the phone. Either he turned angry fast, or else he’d been on the verge of it already. Judging by the video he was on a boat. A power boat in New York Harbor. Gunning the engine and leaping over some other boat’s wake and the Statue of Liberty behind him leaping the same way. Green Liberty jumping up and down against a blue sky. Her torch arm missing and the spikes sawn away from her crown for the copper until nobody needed all that much copper anymore and they started leaving her alone.

“Who is it.” Glaring at the black screen.

“Weller.”

Nothing. The roar of the power boat and the hammering sound of wind gusting. Carmichael turned his head away, his attention drawn elsewhere.

“Henry Weller. Remember me?”

“Huh?” Barking it toward the phone but not as if he cared.

“I’ve got your car.”

Which seemed to catch Carmichael’s attention. “Weller! Bainbridge said—”

“I guess he was wrong.”

“I guess he was.” Laughing and shouting into the cell phone over the engines and the wind noise, his face coming too near the camera and blowing up big. Cutting the engine back and saying something to somebody else beside him and the whole world spinning. Someone else at the wheel and fishing poles and antennas pointing up everywhere and then pointing sideways and the Statue of Liberty visible again for a fraction of a second before she disappeared for good. Everything getting dim. Carmichael gone into someplace quieter but not entirely quiet. Down below.

“How soon can you get my wife and daughter to the George Washington Bridge?” Weller asked. “The National Motors checkpoint on the George Washington Bridge?”

Carmichael checked his watch. His image still bouncing as the room bounced. “Three hours,” he said.

“Make it two.”

“No way. I’m in the middle of New York Harbor.”

“I know that. Make it two.”

“I’m on a boat, for Christ’s sake.”

“I know that. Nobody expects you to deliver them personally. Make a call.”

“I’d like to see them off myself.”

“Bullshit. You’d like to see the car. You can see it in two hours. No more.”

Carmichael glared into the camera. “After the weeks I’ve given you to get this thing done, you’re going to start pushing me now.”

“That’s right.”

“You’re going to start pushing me over an hour’s time.”

“I am.”

“What’s your hurry?”

“None of your business.”

“Then you’ll accommodate my schedule, Henry.”

“Try me.” He waited a second. Listening to the muffled churning of the engines and the crying-out of gulls. “You wouldn’t believe how much abuse this car might have taken along the way.”

A pause on Carmichael’s end. “Nobody ever said anything about abuse.”

Janey sat in the passenger seat, shaking her head, looking out the window at the fenced farmland and the empty suburbs as they flickered past in turn.

“Things happen,” said Weller.

“All right. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“Two hours,” said Weller. He pressed the screen to shut off the phone. “Carmichael’s a person who knows just what he wants,” he told Janey. “That means you can count on him.”

*

They blew a tire at high speed somewhere in the swamps of Jersey. Left it alongside the highway leaned up against a hurricane fence that had the National Motors logo rusting away on it and rolled onward with that little inflatable donut instead, the car tilting forward and to the passenger side as a reminder to take it easy. The manual said don’t go over forty-five miles an hour but they did. They went twice that. What was Weller going to do, call Carmichael and say never mind? Say you can have three hours if you need it, because I’ve run into a little difficulty? Let the rich man think he was weakening? No way. No way he’d lose that psychological advantage now that he’d earned it, and no way he’d let the people on the tobacco station go a minute longer than they had to.

They ran into a convoy of Black Rose vehicles just south of New Brunswick. Troop transports and big armored Humvees headed north in a line that looked from the rear as if it stretched for the better part of a mile. Old-fashioned Jeeps with their canvas tops up in spite of the heat and their lights on and their whip antennas lashed down back to front in long quivering arcs. The convoy went slow, and Weller and Janey came up on it from behind as if it weren’t moving at all. Weller saying, “I see those boys aren’t in any hurry.”

Because they were unstoppable after all, and there was nobody even to try. Nobody who knew where they were headed. Nobody who saw them coming. It was just a routine movement of troops and hardware as far as anyone who might see them would know, probably some kind of a drill, an event that would mean almost nothing to the truckers on Ninety-Five and less than that to somebody passing them in a low-slung four by four going eighty or ninety miles an hour toward a destination beyond their imagining.

One or two of them might notice such a car, though. One or two of them who’d registered Weller’s visit to Washington and recalled the mission he’d been on and were able to put two and two together. It was possible. And even if they couldn’t speed up to catch a car like that, they could still make a call. Report in to headquarters.

Weller touched the brakes and slowed down behind them. Pulled over onto the shoulder and braked the car to a stop and waited for them to disappear over a low rise. It took forever at the speed they were crawling. Weller sitting there tapping his foot. Thinking of Penny and Liz. Thinking of everybody on the tobacco farm and the progress they’d made in restoring something that had been taken from them.

Thinking of the world that lay ahead if only.

Janey unbuckled her seat belt and asked if he thought it was her turn to drive, and he said she’d been reading his mind. She got out and went around and got behind the wheel, while he crawled into the back.

A minute later they went sailing past the convoy, with the front windows open and Janey’s hair blowing like she was on some kind of pleasure trip. Weller crouching in the rear under burlap sacks. Janey honked the horn and waved out the sunroof to the men in every single vehicle she passed. And a hundred-fifty Black Rose mercenaries waved back, blowing little kisses, revved up and gleeful as schoolboys.

*

Janey told the man in the booth that they were here to meet Anderson Carmichael and he made a call and they sat for a while with the engine running and the air on until somebody came and showed them into a little parking area behind a low building. No one was back there. Not even any cars. There weren’t even any markings for cars painted on the old sunblasted pavement. Everyone who worked here came and went in big black National Motors vans. Like riding the bus, but how would riding the bus have looked. These career toughs riding a city bus like any other day laborers. Only out in the country, on those long desolate stretches where the sole inhabited structure every fifty miles was a National Motors checkpoint, did they commute in cars anymore. Only out in the country where the cost of living was low and they could save enough to drive themselves.

Weller got out and walked around a little, scoping out the route to the northbound exit. There was a garden hose alongside the building and he squirted the car for a while. He didn’t know why. It was just something to do. A way to distract himself from the fact that Carmichael was late and the fact that he was dying to see his wife and daughter and the fact that the Black Rose convoy got closer with every minute that passed. He couldn’t get much pressure out of the hose and it didn’t do much to clean off the mud but he kept at it for a while. Carmichael’s big ugly yellow Hummer arrived just as he was coiling up the hose. The rich man behind the wheel and his assistant in the passenger seat and Liz and Penny in the rear, blacked out by dark glass. Weller glanced at Janey and she goosed the engine just to reassure him that it was running. It ran so quietly you couldn’t tell. Just a shimmer of heat from the tailpipes mingling with other shimmers of heat from the pavement. All of it indistinguishable. Everything steaming and everything wet.

Weller dropped the hose and went to the yellow car and opened the back door while Carmichael opened the front. Filthy as he was, and underweight from his weeks away, he looked like a ravenous animal—but they didn’t care. How could they. They all just threw themselves on one another in an embrace that wouldn’t end because none of them wanted to be the first to quit. The assistant in the front seat turned and looked back at them as if to say how could they. As if to ask had they no decency. It was the look of a person who had never been as bereft as they had been, a person who had never recovered what they had just now recovered. After a minute she pulled herself away and moved over to take the driver’s seat, ready to get shut of these individuals and head back into the city.

“Safe travels,” she said.

Not one of them acknowledged her.

Carmichael was at the window of the X9, trying to talk Janey out from behind the wheel but not having any luck. She’d unbuckled her seat belt, but that was it. She wouldn’t even unlock the door. He couldn’t blame her and he said so and she smiled back at him. He said he could hardly imagine driving a car like this all the way up the coast knowing the whole time that when it was over you’d have to turn it over to somebody else. You could get accustomed to this kind of luxury and this kind of performance. Letting her know that he wanted to start getting used to it himself right about now, after all the trouble he’d gone through to get his hands on it, but being generous and letting her enjoy it for a few more minutes since he’d have to wait anyhow. They’d want to empty out their things. There was no way he’d drive this beauty home loaded up with the crap they had in it. They’d been living in there like a couple of animals. What kind of relationship was going on between Weller and this girl wasn’t any of his business and he didn’t care what they’d been doing all the way from Spartanburg in his car but he figured Weller’s wife might have something to say about it. Good luck to the two of them. It was going to be a fun walk back to wherever. They’d certainly have plenty to talk about, and in front of the kid, too. It might be good for the kid. He’d seen to it that she’d gotten her sight back, and it was time she saw what the world was like. All of this going through his mind while the girl sat in the car with the engine running and cool air blasting out the vents and a screen in front of her with pictograms of some kind he couldn’t quite make out.

She ran her hands over the leather steering wheel and shot a quick look at that antique Hummer and told Carmichael it might take him a while to figure out the technology of a car this advanced. He just laughed. He said is that a phone there on the screen blinking and she said yes sir it is. We hardwired the Black Rose satellite phone into it but you can probably hook your cell up over the air without too much trouble. Won’t that be something. Bluetooth or whatever. He looked past her knees and saw the wires dangling down and the greasy Black Rose satellite phone on the carpet and he said you’d better get busy disconnecting that, I don’t have all day. She shrugged and said she didn’t know how. Said that end was Weller’s business and he’d take care of it just as soon as he got back.

So Carmichael stepped to the rear of the maroon car and shouted at them. Weller and Liz and Penny separated now by at least a few inches and talking but with the wife and child still sitting in the back seat. He got Weller’s attention, though, and Weller took the other two by the hands and brought them over. He opened the rear door on the other side and got his wife busy emptying stuff out of the back seat. Just piling it on up the ground. Trash or what looked to him like trash. Then he came around to Carmichael’s side and did the same himself. Lifting the little girl up once he’d cleared an empty spot for her to sit in and letting her enjoy herself for a minute up there. The little girl looking all around inside the car like this was the only time she’d ever see anything quite like this in her whole life because it was. Memorizing the interior for safekeeping. Weller tossing a couple of things over into the trunk behind the seats and Carmichael not thinking anything of it. The girl behind the wheel leaning out the window and handing him an owner’s manual a couple of inches thick. Saying we found this and brought it along in case you could use it. Saying there’s a maintenance schedule that’s separate but it’s in the glove box. Carmichael paging through for the part about how to hook up that cell phone because he just couldn’t get over it. Amazing. A car like this was worth the trouble.