“I don’t think she’s going to let me take a picture just so I can do a background check on her.”
“Then my hands are tied on the kid.”
“It was a Hail Mary pass anyway,” Hank said. “So what’s going on with the roadblocks?”
“Slow, and dull, and uneventful,” Jane said. “We haven’t come up with anything, and adding semitrailers to the search has just about shut everything down to a crawl. Hank, there are a lot of those bastards running around out there. I was thinking about getting them to expand it, start going into the truck stops, but they’re already looking at me funny, and I can’t keep telling them I’m getting tips from a CI. But I was thinking, what if you let me tell them it’s you…?”
“That’s going to hurt your cause more than help it, Jane,” he said, and just saying it caused his blood to boil.
“It might still be worth a shot,” Jane said.
He wasn’t sure if she was saying that for his benefit or if she really believed it. But how could she? She knew, more than anyone, the situation in which he had left the job. It hadn’t been pretty, and it certainly as hell hadn’t been voluntary.
“No,” he said.
“Why not?”
“You’ve worked too hard to get this far, kid. Don’t blow it by getting my stink anywhere close to you. Don’t tell them it was me.”
She sighed, and he thought he could even hear her frustration through the line. That, again, made him smile with pride.
“I gotta go, Hank,” Jane said. “They’re waving me to the office.”
“Did something pop?”
“I don’t know, but everyone’s converging. I’ll talk to you soon!” she said, and hung up on him.
Hank pulled the phone away and stared at it. The desire to be there, in the thick of all of the chaos, made him grind his teeth.
Christ, he missed it. After all these years, after all the endless boozing sessions where he cursed everyone involved in his exit from the job, he still missed it in every part of his bones.
“You done?” the manager asked from the other side of the counter.
“Yeah,” he said, and hung up the phone.
Kent Whitman’s good stuff was starting to wear off, so Hank had to double the dose. It worked like a charm, and he barely had a limp as he walked. The downside was that adding an extra pill made him drowsier faster. Of course, it probably didn’t help that it was just an hour before ten, which was about an hour later than his usual bedtime these days. Oh, who was he kidding? He didn’t have anything as respectable as a curfew; it almost always depended on whether he had found himself a nice full bottle to accompany him or not.
Still, the headlights of oncoming vehicles from the other side of the road seemed to be growing in size and he was pretty sure that wasn’t supposed to be normal. The steering wheel was slightly heavier than he remembered, and although he wasn’t aware of it, the Bronco kept picking up speed and he had to keep telling himself to ease his foot off the pedal.
“You okay?” Lucy asked from the front passenger seat. Her head was tilted slightly, and it was obvious she’d been observing him for some time now without him being aware of it. The kid was either very sly or he was just not paying attention.
“Sure,” he said. “Why?”
“You look kind of weird.”
“Weird? Weird how?”
“I don’t know. Like you’re falling asleep.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, and picked up the new can of soda from the cup holder between them, then took a long drink. The taste was disgusting, but at least it was packing enough sugar to perk him up some. “It’s not going to poop in my truck, is it?”
The “it” was the dog, squatting in the backseat behind them. The big mutt seemed to know he was talking about it and actually looked in his direction for a few seconds before turning his attention back to the outside world of flashing white headlights and red taillights. The idea of a dog in his Bronco, without a leash — or hell, without anything for it to sit on, for that matter — made him a little uncomfortable, but the girl wouldn’t go anywhere without it.
“Apollo’s way more well-mannered than most people,” she said. “He lived in the city with Allie in her small apartment for years.”
“Just as long as it doesn’t drop a big one back there.”
“Nice image,” Lucy said and rolled her eyes.
He chuckled. “I’m just saying…”
“I didn’t know old people say that.”
“What?”
“‘I’m just saying.’ I thought that was a kid thing.”
“How old do you think I am, Lucy?”
“Old enough,” she said.
He grinned, because he didn’t know what else to do. It wasn’t like she was wrong. He was old…enough.
Hank looked up at the rearview mirror at the dog. “What kind of breed is it, anyway?”
“You need to stop calling Apollo an ‘it,” Lucy said, sounding very annoyed with him.
He smiled. “My mistake. Him. He. What kind of breed is he?”
“I have no idea.”
“You don’t know?”
“Nope.”
“Didn’t it ever occur to you to find out?”
“Why?”
“What do you mean, why?”
“I mean, what does it matter what kind of breed Apollo is? He’s a dog. He’s Apollo. That’s all that matters.”
“Where’d Allie find it—him.”
“He was living in the woods with some hunters. Allie never said, but I don’t think they treated him very well. Probably made him do a lot of bad things. Don’t let his puppy dog appearance fool you, though; Apollo’s way more dangerous than he looks.”
“Puppy dog appearance?”
“Doesn’t he look like a puppy?”
“Uh, no.”
He gave the dog another look. Apollo didn’t have any “puppy dog appearance” about him, but then again, it also didn’t look too dangerous right now either, unlike the first time he saw the animal.
I guess they were right; never judge a book by its cover. Or a dog.
“I haven’t seen any roadblocks so far,” Lucy said. “I thought your buddies were stopping cars all across the state?”
“You won’t see them because we haven’t crossed the state line yet. And given the direction where that van was headed, they’ll be setting shop mostly along the west end, not south where we are now.”
“Oh. Makes sense, I guess.” Then, “Thanks for bringing me with you. I was starting to feel useless back there.”
“Well, I couldn’t just let you stay at that motel all by yourself all night.”
“I wasn’t alone.”
“I know, I know, the dog.”
“I don’t know why you don’t like him. He likes you just fine.”
“How do you know that?”
“Well, for one, he hasn’t tried to rip your throat out yet, and he’s usually pretty aggressive around people with guns.”
“Oh,” Hank said.
Behind him, the dog continued to perch, as if it was watching for unseen dangers outside the moving Bronco. Hank couldn’t decide if the girl’s stories about the dog ripping people’s throats out was real or just something she made up to toy with him. She was only sixteen years old, but he could tell Lucy had seen and done more than most kids her age. He had suspected that when they first met, and he was one-hundred percent sure of it now.
“You packed pretty light,” Hank said after a while.
She reached into her backpack sitting on the floor and pulled out her tablet. “This is the only thing I need.”
“What’s in the luggage we tossed into the back?”
“Clothes, but those can be replaced.” She tapped the device. “Well, you can replace this, too. Almost everything’s backed up to the cloud anyway.”