"Less than half an hour ago, Staten side of the Verrazano. Driving an old Ford Country Squire."
"They holding him?"
"Well, no," Connally said. "Whoever it was slipped through. He was alone. No kid anywhere in sight. Might not have been him. The trooper was pulling him over but got drawn away by an accident."
"He got away?"
Renny leapt from his chair, spilling his coffee across the top of his drab green desk. He couldn't believe it. Even though it wasn't Connally's fault, he wanted to strangle him.
"Yeah, but they think they got the island sealed off in time."
"They think?"
"Hey, look, Renny. I'm only telling you what they told me, okay? I mean, they're not even sure it was him, but they took precautions, and as soon as they got the phone working, they—"
Renny felt a thrill go through him like an electric shock.
"The phone? What was wrong with the phone?"
"The one in the toll booth. They said there was a hysterical kid on it and they couldn't get him off it."
"That was him in the wagon!" Renny shouted. "Goddammit, that was him! We'ye got the son of a bitch! We've got him!"
Made it!
Bill snatched the ticket jutting from the slot in the machine and started up the southbound ramp of the New Jersey Turnpike. He must have reached the Goethals just in time. He'd been watching in his rearview mirror as much as he dared while the wagon fishtailed up the slippery span. Through the haze of falling snow, as he reached the crest of the bridge, he spotted a group of flashing blue lights converge behind him at its Staten Island base.
If they were confining their search to Staten Island, he was home free. But he couldn't count on that. So the best thing to do was to put another state between himself and New York. He noticed on his toll ticket that Exit 6 was the Penn Turnpike Extension. That was where he'd go. Take that about a hundred miles into Pennsylvania and leave the car in a shopping mall. Then he'd buy a bus ticket and double back to Philadelphia. From there he'd Amtrak south, all the way to Florida. And after that, who knew? Maybe hitch a ride on a fishing boat to the Bahamas. That would put him less than a hundred miles from Florida but he'd be in a British territory, essentially a foreign country.
He felt so tired. He tried to look to the future but could see nothing there. And he couldn't look back. God no—not back. He had to forget—forget Danny, forget America, forget the God he had trusted, forget Bill Ryan.
Yeah. Forget Bill Ryan. Bill Ryan was dead, along with everything he had'ever believed in.
He had fo get away to a place where no one would recognize him, a place where he could lose himself, lose his memories, lose his mind.
A place with no phones.
A heaviness grew in his chest. He was alone now. Truly alone. No one in the world he could turn to. Anything he had ever loved or cared about was either gone or closed to him. His folks were gone; his family home was a vacant lot with a charred spot at its center; he was barred from St. Francis; and the Church and the Society would turn him in and disown him if he went to them for help.
And Danny was gone… poor dear Danny was gone too.
Wasn't he?
Of course he was. Safe and at peace, smothered beneath four feet of frozen, snow-covered earth. How could he be otherwise?
Shuddering, he shook off the horrifying possibility and accelerated, leaving it behind. But its ghost followed him south through the white limbo of the blizzard.
PART III
NOW
JANUARY
TWENTY
Pendleton, North Carolina
Saturday morning and it was top-down weather.
Bill reveled in the warmth of the sun on his shoulders and the back of his neck as he pulled from a parking slot on Conway Street. Warm for late January, even a North Carolina January. He'd just picked up a bargain-priced CD of The Notorious Byrd Brothers and he was itching to play it. How long had it been since he'd heard "Tribal Gathering" and "Dolphin Smile," tunes they never played on the radio, especially down here.
He pressed the scan button on his radio—one of the old Impala's few nonvintage accessories—and stopped it when he heard someone singing a plaintive, countrified version of "Yellow Bird." A wave of nausea sloshed against the walls of his stomach as he was jerked back to the Bahamas, back to the two lost years he had spent among that cluster of tiny islands straddling the Tropic of Cancer.
He'd arrived in West Palm by train late on New Year's Day. First thing the next morning he rented a sixteen-foot outboard, loaded it up with extra gas, and followed one of the tour boats out toward the Bahamas. He ran out of fuel a quarter mile short of Grand Bahama and had to swim the rest of the way in. When he came ashore at West End, he sat on the beach for a while, barely able to move. He was now on British soil, which meant he had to add his native country to the things he had left behind.
Besides his life, he had only one other thing left to lose. He wrote William Ryan, S. J. on the wet sand, turned his back, and began walking.
His clothes were dry by the time he reached Freeport.
He experienced most of the next year or so through a haze of cheap rum. There were drugs too. Why not? What did he care? He didn't trust God anymore, at least not the God he'd been raised to believe in. And he didn't think of himself as a priest anymore, either. How could he? He could barely think of himself as human. Not after what he'd done. He'd smothered a child he'd loved more than anything in this world. Buried him alive. No matter that he'd done it out of love, to put the boy out of reach of the forces that were torturing him—he'd done it! He'd dug the hole and placed the child within and then he'd filled it.
An atrocity—The Atrocity, as he came to call it. And the memory of the weight of the dirt-laden shovel in his hands, the image of that small, struggling, blanket-shrouded form disappearing beneath the cascades of falling earth, was more than he could bear. He had to blot it out, all of it.
He lived in back-street rooms in Freeport on Grand Bahama, in Hope Town on Great Abaco, in Governor's Harbor on Eleuthera. His money didn't last long and he soon wound up on New Providence, bedding down on the sand each night—as hollow as the empty shells scattered around him—and during the day wandering Cable Beach selling bags of peanuts or shilling for the ride operators off Paradise Island, getting two bucks a head for every passenger he rounded up for the banana boats and five each for the parasails, spending it all on anything he could smoke, swallow, or snort to blot out the memory of The Atrocity.
He spent more than a year continually stoned or drunk or both. He recognized no limits. Whatever it took, he'd take. A couple of times he overdid it and nearly did himself in. More than once he seriously considered getting together enough stuff for a fatal overdose, but he kept putting it off.
Finally, his body rebelled. His flesh wanted to live even if his mind did not, and it refused to stomach any more liquor. He sobered up by default. And he found a clear head bearable. The Atrocity had receded into the past. The wounds it had left hadn't healed, but they had evolved from open sores to a cluster of steadily throbbing aches that flared only occasionally into agony.
And that agony plunged him again and again into the blackest despair. He was in a drugged stupor at the time, so he didn't remember the first anniversary of The Atrocity, but he'd never forget the second: He'd spent most of that New Year's Eve with the bore of a borrowed snub-nosed .357 Magnum pressed against his right eyelid. But he couldn't pull the trigger. By the time the sun rose on the new year, he'd decided to live a while longer, to see if he could set what was left of his life into some semblance of order.