He still felt travel-weary and headachy, but he was now presentable enough to face the night clerk at the motel.
Fifteen minutes later he was in his room in Dreamland. It was not much of a room. Ten-foot square, with a tiny attached bath, it seemed more like a place where a man was put than like one to which he went voluntarily. The walls were a dirty yellow, scarred, finger-stained, even marked with dust webs in the high corners. The easy chair was new and functional yet ancient. The desk was green tubular steel with a Masonite work surface darkened with the wormlike marks of cigarette burns. The bed was narrow, soft, the sheets patched.
George Leland did not really notice the condition of the room. it was merely a place to him, like any other place.
At the moment he was chiefly concerned with staving off the headache which he could feel building behind his right eye. He dropped his suitcase at the foot of the sagging bed and stripped out of his clothes. In the tiny bathroom's bare shower stall, he let the spray of hot water sluice the weariness from him. For long minutes he stood with the water drumming pleasantly against the back of his skull and neck, for he had found that this would, on rare occasion, lessen the severity of and even cure altogether an oncoming migraine.
This time, however, the water did no good. When he toweled off, all the warning signs of the migraine were still there: dizziness, a pinpoint of bright light whirling round and round and growing larger behind his right eye, clumsiness, a faint but persistent nausea . . .
He remembered that he had skipped breakfast and supper and had taken only half a lunch in-between. Perhaps the headache was caused by hunger. He was not hungry—or at least he did not suffer the pangs of unconscious self-denial. Nevertheless, he dressed and went outside, where he bought food from vending machines by the pay telephones in the motel's badly lighted breezeway. He dined on two bottles of Coke, a package of peanut-butter crackers, and a Hershey Bar with almonds.
He suffered the headache anyway. It pulsed out from the core of him, rhythmic waves of pain that forced him to be perfectly still lest he make the agony unbearable. Even when he lifted a hand to his forehead, the responding thunder of pain brought him close to the edge of delirium. He stretched out on his bed, flat on his back, twisting the gray sheets in both big hands, and after a while he was not merely approaching the edge of delirium but had leapt deep into it. For more than two hours he lay as rigid as a wooden construction, perspiration rolling off him like moisture from an icy cold water glass. Exhausted, wrung dry, moaning softly, he eventually passed from a half-aware trance into a troubled but comparatively painless sleep.
As always, there were nightmares. Grotesque images flickered through his shattered mind like visions formed at the bottom of a satanic kaleidoscope, each independent of the other, each a horrifying minim to recall later: long slender knives dripping blood into a woman's cupped palm, maggots crawling in a corpse, enormous breasts enfolding him and smothering him in a damp warm sexless caress, acres of scuttling cockroaches, herds of watchful red-eyed rats waiting to leap upon him, bloody lovers writhing ecstatically on a marble floor, Courtney nude and writhing on a bloody floor, a revolver snapping bullets into a woman's slim stomach . . .
The nightmares passed. Soon after, sleep passed as well. Leland groaned and sat up in bed, held his head in both hands. The head ache was gone, but the memory of it was a new agony. Afterward he always felt crushingly helpless, vulnerable. And lonely. Lonelier than a man could endure to be.
“Don't feel lonely,” Courtney said. “I'm here with you.”
Leland looked up and saw her sitting on the foot of the bed. This time he was not the least bit surprised by her magical materialization. “It was so bad, Courtney,” he said.
“Headache?
“And nightmares.”
“Did you ever go back to Dr. Penebaker?” she asked.
“ No.”
Her gentle voice came to him as if she were speaking from the far end of a tunnel. The hollow, distant tone was curiously in harmony with the shabby room. “You should have let Dr. Penebaker—”
“I don't want to hear about Penebaker!”
She said nothing more.
Several minutes later he said, “I stood by you when your parents were killed in the accident. Why didn't you stand by me when things first started to go sour?”
“Don't you remember what I told you then, George? I would have stood by you, if you had been willing to get help. But when you refused to admit that your headaches owl and your emotional problems might be caused by some-”
“Oh, for Christ's sake, shut up! Shut up! You're a rotten, nagging, holier-than-thou bitch, and I don't want to listen to you.”
She did not vanish, but neither did she speak again.
Quite some time later he said, “We could have it as good as it once was, Courtney. Don't you agree?” He wanted her to agree more than he had ever wanted anything else.
“I agree, George,” she said.
He smiled. “It could be just like it was. The only thing that's really keeping us apart is this Doyle. And Colin, too. You were always closer to Colin than to me. If Doyle and Colin were dead, I'd be all you had. You would have to come back to me, wouldn't you?”
“Yes,” she said, just as he wanted her to say.
“We'd be happy again, wouldn't we?”
“Yes.”
“You'd let me touch you again.”
“Yes, George.”
“Let me sleep with you again.”
“Yes.
“Live with me?”
“Yes.
“And people would stop being nasty to me.
“Yes.”
“You're my lucky piece, always were. With you back, it would almost be as if the last two years never even happened.”
“Yes,” she said.
But it was no good. She was not as responsive and warm and open as he would have liked. indeed, talking with her was almost like talking with himself, a curiously masturbatory enterprise.
Angry with her, he turned away and refused to talk any more. A few minutes later, when he looked back to see if she was showing any signs of contrition, he found that she had vanished. She had left him again. She was always leaving him. She was always going away to Doyle or Colin or somebody else and leaving him alone. He did not think that he could tolerate much more of that sort of treatment.
A police cruiser blocked the entrance to the rest area off interstate 70, dome light and emergency blinkers flashing. Behind it, up on the clearing in the shelter of the pines, half a dozen other official cars were parked in a semicircle with their headlights on and engines running. Several portable kliegs had been hooked up to auxiliary batteries and arranged in another semicircle at the south edge of the clearing, facing the automobiles. In that vicinity, at least, night did not exist.
The focus of all this was, of course, Lieutenant Pulham's cruiser. The bumpers and chrome trim glinted with cold, white light. In the glare, the windshield had been transformed into a mirror.
Detective Ernie Hoval, who was in charge of the Pulham investigation, watched a lab technician photograph the five bloody fingerprints which were impressed so clearly on the inside of the right front car window, hundreds of fine red whorls. “They Pulham's prints?” he asked the lab man when the last of the shots had been aligned and taken.
“I'll check in a minute.” The technician was thin, sallow, balding, with hands as delicate and soft as a woman's. Yet he apparently was not intimidated by Hoval. Everyone else was. Hoval used both his rank and his two hundred and forty pounds to dominate everyone who worked under him, and he was annoyed with the technician when the man failed to be impressed. The soft white hands packed the camera away with deliberately maddening care. Only when that was all secured as it should be, did they pick through the other contents of the leather satchel beside the squad car and come up with file copies of Lieutenant Pulham's fingerprints. The technician raised the yellow sheet and held it beside the bloody prints on the window
.
“Well?” Hoval asked.
The lab man took a full minute, studying the two sets of prints. “They aren't Pulham's,” he said at last.
“Son of a bitch,” Hoval said, slamming one meaty fist into the other open palm. “It's going to be easier than I thought.”
“Not necessarily.”
Hoval looked down at the pale, narrow man. “Oh?”
The technician got to his feet and dusted his hands together. He noticed that in the cross-glare of all the lights, neither he nor Hoval nor any of the others cast a shadow. “Not everyone in the United States has his prints on file,” the technician said. “Far less than half of us, in fact.”
Hoval gestured impatiently with one strong hand. “Whoever did this is on file, believe me. Probably arrested in a dozen different protest marches - maybe even on a previous assault charge. FBI probably has a full file on him.”
The lab man wiped one hand across his face, as if he were trying to pull away his perpetually sorrowful expression. “You think it was a radical, a new leftist, somebody like that?”
“Who else?” Hoval asked.
“Maybe just a nut.”
Hoval shook his square, long-jawed head. “No. Don't you read the papers any more? Policemen getting killed all over the country these days.”
“It's the nature of their job,” the technician said. “Policemen have always gotten killed in the line of duty. Percentage of deaths is still the same as it always was.”
Hoval was adamant as he watched the other lab men and the uniformed troopers comb the murder site. “These days there's an organized effort to slaughter policemen. Nationwide conspiracy. And it's finally touched us. You wait and see. This asshole's prints will be on file. And he'll be just the kind of bastard I'm telling you he is. We'll have him nailed to a post in twenty-four hours.”
“Sure,” the technician said. “That'll be nice.
TUESDAY
Four
On the second day of May they rose early and ate a light breakfast, checked out of the Lazy Time Motel, and were on the road again shortly after eight o'clock.
The day was as bright and fresh as the previous one had been. The sky was high and cloudless. The sun, behind them once more, seemed to propel them on toward the coast.
“Does the scenery get better today?” Colin asked.
“Some,” Alex said. “For one thing, you'll get to see the famous Gateway Arch in St. Louis.”
How many miles to St. Louis?”
“Oh . . . maybe two-fifty.”
“And this Gateway Arch is the very first thing that we have to look forward to”
“Well—”
“Christ,” the boy said, shaking his head sorrowfully, “this is going to be a long, long morning.”
Interstate 70 took them west-southwest toward the border of Illinois, a straight multi-lane avenue carved out of the flatlands of America. It was a convenient, fairly safe, controlled access throughway made for fast travel, designed for a nation always in a hurry. Though Doyle was, himself, in a hurry, anxious to be with Courtney again, he shared some of Colin's dissatisfaction with their route. Though simple and quick, it was characterless.
Fields of spring wheat, short and tender and green, began to fill the open spaces on both sides of the highway. Initially, these crisp green vistas and the complex of irrigation pipelines that sprayed them proved moderately interesting. Before too long, however, the fields grew boringly repetitious.
Despite his professed pessimism about the long morning which lay ahead of them, Colin was in a particularly garrulous mood, and he made their first two hours on the road pass most pleasantly and swiftly. They talked about what it would be like to live in California, talked about space travel, astronauts, science fiction, rock-and-roll, pirates, sailing ships, and Count Dracula—this last, chiefly because Colin was wearing a green-and-black Count Dracula T-shirt today, his narrow chest gruesomely decorated with a menacing fierce-eyed, fanged Christopher Lee.
As they passed the Indiana-Illinois border, there was a lull in the conversation, at last. With Doyle's permission, Colin unbuckled his seatbelt long enough to slide forward and locate a new radio station.
To make certain that nothing was coming up on them too fast while the boy was in such a vulnerable position on the edge of the seat, Alex looked in the rear-view mirror at the light flow of traffic on the broad throughway behind them.
That was when he saw the Chevrolet van.
He looked quickly away from it, looked at the road ahead.
At first he did not want to believe what he had seen, he was sure it must be his imagination. Then he argued with himself that since there were thousands of Automovers on the roads of America, this was most likely another of them, not at all the same vehicle that had hung behind them on the first leg of the journey.
Colin slid back onto his seat and buckled his seatbelt without argument. As he carefully smoothed down his T-shirt, he said, “Is that one okay?”
“What one?”
Colin tilted his head and stared curiously at Doyle. “The radio station, naturally. What else? “
“Sure. It's fine.”
But Alex was so distracted that he was not actually aware of what sort of music the boy had selected for them. Reluctantly he glanced at the rear-view mirror a second time.
The Automover was still cruising in their wake, no mere figment of his overworked imagination to be lightly dismissed, hanging back there a little less than a quarter of a mile, well silhouetted in the morning sun, nevertheless darkly sinister.
Unaccountably, Doyle thought of the service station attendant whom they had encountered near Harrisburg, and of the stout anachronism behind the desk of the Lazy Time Motel. That familiar and uncontrollable shudder, the embarrassment of his childhood which he had never fully outgrown, started in his stomach and bowels and seemed to generate, of itself, a quiet and possibly irrational fear. However, deep down inside, Doyle admitted to himself what he had been first forced to face up to more than twenty years ago: he was an unmitigated coward. His pacifism was not based on any real moral precepts, but on an abiding terror of violence. When you really thought about it, what danger did that van pose? What injury or threat of injury had it done? If it seemed sinister, the blame was in his own mind. His fear was not only irrational, it was premature and simple-minded. He had no more cause to be frightened by the Chevrolet than he had to be frightened by Chet or the woman at the Lazy Time.
“He's back there again, isn't he?” Colin said.
“Who?”
“Don't play dumb with me,” the boy said.
“Well, there is an Automover behind us.”
“It's him, then.”
“Could be another one.”
“That's too coincidental,” Colin said, quite sure of himself.
For a long moment Doyle was silent. Then: “Yes, I'm afraid you're right. That's too coincidental. He's behind us again, all right.”
Five
“I'm going to pull over and stop on the shoulder of the road,” Alex said, lightly pumping the power brakes.
“Why?”
“To see what he does.”
“You think he'll stop behind us?” Colin asked.
“Maybe.” Doyle sincerely hoped not.
“He won't. If he really is an FBI man, he'll be too smart to fall for that kind of trick. He'll just zoom on by as if he doesn't notice us, then pick us up later.”
Alex was too tense to play the boy's game. His lips set in a tight, grim line, he slowed the car even more, looked back and saw that the rental van was also slowing down. His heart beating too rapidly, he drove onto the burm, gravel crunching under the wide tires, and came to a full stop.
“Well?” Colin asked, excited by this turn of events.
Alex tilted the rear-view mirror and watched the Automover pull off the highway and stop just a quarter of a mile behind them. “Well, he's not an FBI man, then.”
“Hey, great!” the boy said,
apparently delighted by the unexpected turn the day had taken. “What could he be?”
“I don't like to think about that,” Doyle said.
“I do.”
“Think quietly, then.”
He let off the brake and drove back onto the interstate, accelerated smoothly into the traffic pattern. Two cars came between them and the van, providing an illusory sense of isolation and safety. However, within a very few minutes the Chevrolet passed the other vehicles and insinuated itself behind the Thunderbird once more.
What does he want? Doyle wondered.
It was almost as if the stranger behind the wheel of the van somehow knew of Alex Doyle's secret cowardice and was playing on it.
The land was now even flatter than it had been, like a gigantic gameboard, and the road was straighter and more mesmeric.
They had passed the exit ramp for Effingham; and now all the signs were warning far in advance of the connecting route for Decatur, and marking the tens of miles to St. Louis.
Alex kept the Thunderbird moving five miles faster than the speed limit, sweeping around the slower traffic but staying mostly within the right-hand lane.
The van would not be shaken.
Ten miles after their first stop, he slowed down and pulled over to the burm again, watched as the Chevrolet followed suit. “What the hell does he want?” Doyle asked.
“I've been thinking about that,” Colin said, frowning. “But I just can't figure him.”
When Doyle took the car back on the road again, he said, “We can make more speed than a van like that. Lots more. Let's leave him in our dust.”
“Just like in the movies,” Colin said, clapping his hands. “Tromp it down all the way!”