Now, calming himself, becoming more controlled as he winds through the ghost of some long-lost businessman's folly with the funky and meaningless name Bluetown, squeezed behind the wheel of a hot Merc Cougar, he begins acting more in character. Itemizing automatically, he remembers the plates that he took last night in the suburbs when he dumped the woman's tiresome Datsun. He decides which pair he will change to as he smiles over the kill last night, his thoroughly enjoyable suffocation of the salesman whose vehicle he now drives.
Wrenching his mind back to the current problem at hand, he brakes, pulling the Cougar over to the curb beside an abandoned gypsy storefront with the peeling legend USED RNITURE, and reconsidering, coasts into a narrow alley between the stores. With great effort he propels his bulk out from behind the wheel, and getting out of the car with a massive creaking of springs, he takes a small oil can and tool bag from his duffel and heads to the rear of the Merc.
He selects the most appropriate of the plates (he has memorized the current plate prefix and number code for all fifty states), gives the oil can a few squirts, and with bolts soaking briefly contemplates his current options. He then begins to unscrew the woman's rusted license plate bolts from out of the plates, and he substitutes a fresh tag.
Completing that task, he then bends the plates into an unrecognizable metal accordion and locks them back in the trunk to be pitched into the next creek he crosses. He will repaint the vehicle tomorrow if circumstances permit, and the words MASKING TAPE, and NEWSPAPERS, are mentally added to a subconscious list of want items he has filed away, his shopping list. He slams his humongous body behind the wheel again and takes off, leaving the desolate streets as he found them, dead and blue.
Out on the highway again he drives carefully, but with the rapid flow of dawn highway traffic, keeping it as close to sixty as the rest of the rapidly speeding cars and trucks will permit, trying to stay within a string of vehicles as much as he can without going to extremes of speed. At this hour a car moving at the legal fifty-five would probably be as conspicuous as one doing ninety, so he lets his heavy foot press the accelerator a little closer to the floor.
Driving on one level, planning on another, lucid, coolly introspective, he methodically dissects, probes, examines—all with a cold objectivity unusual in even the extreme precognates. Rocking down the highway, crammed into his borrowed wheels, listening to the endless hum of the white line, the hypnotic white that never ends, humming between the wheels as he excogitates.
He knows, just as he always knew in Vietnam, in prisons of one kind or another, exactly the degree of danger to which he's exposed himself. Analyzing his recent carelessness and general ineptitude, he intuitively can feel himself being pulled down into a viscid pit of jeopardy that is taking him under like quicksand.
Three hours and ten minutes later he's whipping the Mercury down off a blacktopped levee access and beside an old, railless wooden bridge over an apparently deep drainage ditch, crashing through the chained gate that sports a rusty, CLOSED—DO NOT ENTER warning sign, and slamming to a stop in a cloud of sandy dust. Large, prominently placed admonitions nailed to ancient oaks and cottonwoods advise NO TRESPASSING, as they oxidize in the moist, cool shadows.
He limps back to the demolished gate, covering his tracks with a leafy tree limb, and with hard-eyed concentration does his best to right the gate again, restoring it to some semblance of its original state of disrepair. The broken chain and padlock lie in the nearby grass and he hefts the chain, liking the weight of it, thinking how easily he could put a human to sleep with it, but he repositions the chain back on the broken gate, the lock still attached and dangling from one end.
He fastens the whole thing to the gate with a couple of lengths of rusting fence wire and returns to the car. Years of experience have taken over and he moves now as he did on night jungle stalks, giving himself to animal instinct, each decision viscerally made, choices assessed and arrived at instinctively, deeply controlled, as he operates on some alien wavelength, responding to vibes, following the silent drum of the hunter and hunted.
The Mercury bounces along the overgrown pathway that now is beginning to buffet the underside of the chassis with hard stubble that feels as tough as corn stalks. He perseveres, roaring on undaunted through he tall, wet weeds, being forced to slow finally as the pathway becomes more and more difficult to follow as it winds its way down around the levee and heads toward the nearby river.
Now running parallel to the riverbank the path such as it was all but disappears, and the stolen car is splashing through even taller wet weeds, and then actually running in water, almost to the floorboards in the lower spots; and still he keeps going. He is driving through very deep water now, driving as he always does by following a secret magnetic pole, some inner compass, going with the flow, barely moving as water sloshes back over the chrome grillwork and threatens to drown out the motor.
Yet Daniel Bunkowski keeps on straight ahead, keeps pushing it, keeps moving, driving without apprehension, quite calm in fact, oblivious to the rising water. And then, sure enough, the vehicle is back on higher ground and the windshield-high weeds part as he drives up beside a trio of dilapidated summer cottages that sit waterlogged alongside the riverbank in an overgrown fringe of tall watergrass.
He senses that he is alone here, and his ability to detect the presence of other human life is quite uncanny, having kept him alive in Southeast Asia time and time again. He stops the vehicle and quickly prepares a crude camouflage of weeds and the huge, folded cammie-cover he carries in his ever-present duffel bag. He is deciding how he will set his people traps, and at this he has no equal. He is the absolute master of the final surprise.
He imagines, reasons, PRECOGNATES how they will come as he looks down the trail toward the winding levee road and the wooden bridge. He makes the estimates in his computerlike mind. How long he has before they find him. Not long. How many will come. Many. How they will make their play. Several clear options. He is in harmony with his physical being, and at one with the terrain as he meticulously rigs the traps that begin alongside the camouflaged Mercury Cougar.
One of the elements that makes Bunkowski such an inordinately dangerous killer species is his automatic pilot light. It is on again now, and as he finishes rigging his people traps he automatically and subconsciously begins retracing his route of the past twenty-four hours, stealing the plates, the exit out of the blue ghost town, the squirting of the oil on the bolts that held the license plates, the manner in which he scanned the street, positions of dead bodies, finger-and footprints, residue of skin under fingernails, microscopic traces of fabric, the most minute forensics feed into his on-line terminal.
Each minute detail is viewed under the magnifier of his trenchant analysis: credit cards, blood trails, parking spaces, it all floods back across his mental viewscreen as he sets his booby traps. In his mind he is also Killing again, coldly now, on automatic pilot, taking each one down as he feels the snap and crunch of bone, the gasps of asphyxiation, the final signs of ebbing life. He is driving again, mentally winding down the hillside, breaking the gate, wiring it back together, retracing each moment of the past day and night, relentlessly probing, dissecting, looking for the forgotten mistakes, the tiny flaws, the hidden tripwires.
He finishes and selects one of the cabins where he will make his hideout. He is light on his feet like a fat man dancing, a five-hundred-pound ballet star, easing toward the steps with grace and agility, an incongruous daintiness—if that's the word—to his precise movements as he cautiously negotiates the rotting steps leading up to one of the tar-paper shanties. Watching him you might see him as an oafish, dancing grizzly, smiling blimp of a man, grinning clown daintily stepping on the rotten boards.