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 was 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.”
“No, he won't,” Doyle said.
“How can you be sure?”
“He's not clairvoyant,” Doyle said. “He's just been lucky, that's all. By chance, he's stayed in the approximate area where we've stayed each night—and equally by chance, he's started out around the same hour each morning that we started out. It's purely coincidental, the way he keeps catching up to us.” He knew that this was the only rational explanation, as weak as it was, the only thing that made any sense. Yet he did not believe a word of it. “You read about dozens of wilder coincidences in the newspapers. All the time.” He was talking, now, only to calm the boy. That old, familiar, dreaded fear of his had returned, and he knew that he would not be calm again, himself, until they were safely in San Francisco.
He pressed down on the accelerator.
The Thunderbird surged forward, opening a gap between them and the Chevrolet. The gap rapidly widened, even though the Automover put on its own burst of speed.
“You'll have a lot more driving to do if we go the back way,” the boy said, a vague apprehension in his voice.
“Not necessarily. We can go north and pick up Route 36 again,” Doyle said, watching the van dwindle in the rearview mirror. “That's a pretty good road up there.”
“It'll still mean an extra couple of hours. Yesterday you were really tired when we got to the motel.”
“I'll be all right,” Doyle said. “Don't you worry about me.”
They took Connecting Route 77 north to Route 36 and went west across the top of the state.
Colin no longer found the fields, grain elevators, oil derricks, and dust storms especially interesting. He hardly looked at the scenery. He tucked in his Frankenstein T-shirt and smoothed it down, played tunes on his bony knees, cleaned his thick glasses, and smoothed his shirt some more. The minutes passed like snails.
Leland let the van slow down to seventy, quieting the furniture and household goods which rattled noisily in the cargo hold when he drove any faster. He looked at the golden, transparent girl beside him. “They must have turned off somewhere along the way. We won't catch up with them until we get into Denver this evening.”
She said nothing.
“I should have stayed back a ways until I saw a chance to run them off the road. I shouldn't have pressured him like that right away.”
She only smiled.
“Well,” he said, “I guess you're right. The highway's too public a place to take care of them. Tonight, at the motel, will be better. I might be able to do it with the knife, if I can sneak up on them. No noise that way. And they won't be expecting anything there.”
The fields flashed past. The leaden sky grew lower, and rain spattered across the windshield. The wipers thumped hypnotically, like a club slammed again and again into something soft and warm.
Nine
The Rockies Motor Hotel, on the eastern edge of Denver, was an enormous complex in the shape of a two-story tick-tack-toe grid, with one hundred rooms in each of its four long wings. Despite its size—nearly two miles of concrete-floored, open-air, me
tal-roofed corridors—the place seemed small, for it stood in the architectural shadow of the city's high-rise buildings and, more impressively, in view of the magnificent snowcapped Rocky Mountains which loomed up to the west and south. During the day the high country sun gleamed on the ranks of precisely duplicated windows and on the steel rain spouting, transformed the tops of the long walkway awnings into corrugated mirrors, shimmered on the Olympic swimming pool in the enclosed center of the courtyard grid. At night warm orange lamps glowed behind the curtains in most of the rooms, and there were also lights in the pool and around the pool; and the front of the motel was a blaze of yellow, white, and red lights which were there chiefly to draw attention to the office, lobby, restaurant, and Big Rockies Cocktail Lounge.
At ten o'clock Wednesday night, however, the motel was dim and drab. Although all the usual lights were burning, they could not cast back the driving gray rain and the thin night mist which carried a reminder of the winter chill that had not been long gone from the city. The cold rain bounced on the macadam parking lot, thundered on the rows of cars, and pattered against the sheet-glass walls of the lobby and restaurant. It drummed insistently on the roofs and on the rippled awnings that covered the promenades on every wing, a pleasant sound which lulled most of the overnight guests into a quick, deep sleep. The rain chattered noisily into the swimming pool and puddled at the base of the spruce trees and other evergreens which dotted the well-landscaped grounds. It sloshed out of the rain spouting and swirled along curb gutters, and made momentary lakes around drainage grills. The mist reached what the rain could not, heading on sheltered windows and on the slick red enamel of the numbered room doors.
In Room 318, Alex Doyle sat on the edge of one of the twin beds and listened both to the rain on the roof and to Colin talking on the telephone to Courtney.
The boy did not mention the stranger in the rented van. The man had not caught up to them again during the long afternoon. And he had no way of knowing where they were spending the night . . . Even if this game had begun to intrigue him enough to send him out of his way in order to keep it going, he would be discouraged by the bad weather; he would not be searching all the motels along the Interstate in hopes of locating the Thunderbird—not tonight, not in the rain. There was no need to worry Courtney with the details of a danger which had passed and which, Doyle felt now, had never been much of a danger to begin with.
Colin finished and handed the receiver to Doyle
“How did you like Kansas?” she asked when he said hello.
“It was an education,” Doyle said.
“With Colin as your teacher.”
“That sums it up.
“Alex, is anything wrong with him?”
“Colin?
“Yes.
“Nothing's wrong. Why do you ask?”
She hesitated. The open line hissed softly between them like a subdued echo of the cold rain thundering across the motel roof. “Well . . . He's not as exuberant as usual.”
“Even Colin gets tired,” Doyle said, winking at the boy.
Colin nodded grimly. He knew what his sister was asking and what Alex was trying to avoid telling her. When he had spoken to her, Colin had tried to be natural. But his practiced chatterboxiness had not been able to fully cover over the simmering fear he'd kept on the back burner since the van had appeared early this morning.
“That's all?” Courtney asked Doyle. “He's just tired?”
“What else?”
“Well—”
“We're both road-weary,” Doyle interrupted. He knew that she sensed more to it than just that. Sometimes she was positively psychic. “It's true that there's a lot to see on a cross-country drive-but most of it is exactly what you saw ten minutes ago, and ten minutes before that.” He changed the subject before she could press for more details. “Any furniture arrive yet?”
“Oh yes!” she said. “The bedroom suite.”
“And?
“Just like it looked in the showroom. And the mattress is firm but full of bounce.”
He assumed a mock suspicious tone. “How would you know about that - what with your husband halfway across the country?”
“I jumped up and down on it for about five minutes,” she said, chuckling quietly. “Testing it, you know?”
He laughed, picturing the slim, longhaired, elfin-faced girl romping happily on their bed as if it were a trampoline.
“And you know what, Alex?”
“What?”
“I was nude when I tested it. How's that strike you?”
He stopped laughing. “Strikes me fine.” His voice caught in the back of his throat. He felt himself smile idiotically, even though Colin was watching and listening. “Why torture me like this?”
“Well, I keep thinking you might meet some saucy woman on the highway and run off with her. I don't want you to forget me “I couldn't,” he said, speaking beyond sex now. “I couldn't forget.”
“Well, I like to be sure. And - hey, I think I found a job.”
“Already?
“There's a new city magazine starting up, and they need a photographer to work full time. No tedious layout jobs. Just straight photography. I made an appointment to show them my portfolio tomorrow.”
“Sounds great.”
“It'll be good for Colin, too,” she said. “It's not an office job. I'll be running all over the city, setting up shots. That ought to make a pretty full summer for him.”
They talked only a few minutes more, then said their goodbyes. When he hung up the phone, the drumming rain seemed to get suddenly louder.
Later, in the intensely dark room as they lay in their beds waiting for sleep to come, Colin sighed and said, “Well, she knew that something was wrong, didn't she?”
“Yes.”
“You can't fool Courtney.”
“Not for very long, anyway,” Doyle said, staring at the lightless ceiling and thinking about his wife.
The darkness seemed to swell and shrink and swell again, to pulse as if it were alive, to press warmly down around them like a blanket.
“You really think we've lost him?” the boy asked.
“Sure.
“We thought we'd lost him before.”
“This time we can be certain.”
“I hope you're right,” Colin said. “He's a real crazy, whoever he is.”
The shushing snare-drum music of the spring storm soon put the boy, and then Doyle, to sleep . . .
Rain was falling as steadily as ever when Colin woke him. He stood beside Doyle's bed, shaking the man by the shoulder and whispering urgently. “Alex! Alex, wake up. Alex!”
Doyle sat up in bed, groggy and somewhat confused. His mouth felt furry and stale. He kept blinking his eyes, trying to see something, until he realized it was the middle of the night and the room was still pitch-black.
“Alex, are you awake?”
“Yeah. What's the matter?”
“There's someone at the door,” the boy said.
Alex stared straight at the voice but could see nothing of the boy. “At the door?” he asked stupidly, still not clear-headed enough to understand what was happening.
“He woke me up,” Colin whispered. “I've been listening to him maybe three or four minutes. I think he's trying to pick the lock.”
Ten
Now, above the background noise of the rain, Alex could hear the strange fumbling noises on the other side of the door. in the warm, close, anonymous darkness, the sounds of the wire probing back and forth in the lock seemed much louder than they really were. His fear acted as an amplifier.
“You hear him?” Colin asked. His voice cracked between the last two words, leaping up the scale.
Doyle reached out and found the boy and put one hand on his skinny shoulder. “I can hear him, Colin,” he whispered, hoping his own voice would remain steady. “It's okay. Nobody's going to come in here. Nobody's going to hurt you.”
“But it must be him.”
Doyle looked
at his wristwatch, which was the only source of light in the small room. The irradiated numerals jumped up at him, sharp and clear: seven minutes after three in the morning. At this hour no one had a legitimate reason for picking a lock on a room that . . . What was he thinking” There was no legitimate reason for such a thing at any hour, day or night.
“Alex, what if he gets in here?”
“Ssshh,” Doyle said, kicking back the covers and sliding out of bed.
“What if he does?”
“He won't.”
Doyle went to the door, aware that Colin was right behind him, and he bent down to listen at the lock. Metal rasped on metal, clinked, snicked, rasped again.
He stepped sideways to the room's only window, just to the left of the door. Careful not to make a sound, he lifted the heavily lined drapes and then the cold venetian blinds. He tried to look to the right along the covered promenade where the man would be bent over the lock, but he found that the outside of the glass was sheathed in a fine white mist which made the window completely opaque. He could not see anything through it except the vague, diffused glow of several scattered motel lights that made the darkness beyond somewhat less intense and more manageable than that within the room.
With as much care as he had employed in raising them away from the window, he dropped the blinds and the drapes back into place. He could not see any good reason for continued silence, but he took the precaution anyway, in order to waste a few more precious seconds . . . Any moment, he knew, the time would come for him to make a decision, to chart some response to this—yet he did not know for sure if he was capable of acting against whoever was out there.
He went back to the door.
The carpet was nubbed and prickly against his bare feet.
Colin had remained by the door, silent, invisible in the onyx shadows, perhaps too frightened to move or speak.
The icy sound of the wire scraping inside the lock was insistent and as loud as ever. It made Alex think of the surgeon's scalpel worrying at the hard surface of a bone.