Also, who might come after them.
“Hey, Tim.”
He looked around at Nicky. “I thought you were asleep.”
“No, just thinking. Can I tell you something?”
“Sure. Tell me a lot. Keep me awake.”
“Just wanted to say thanks. I won’t say you redeemed my faith in human nature, but coming with Lukey like you did… that took balls.”
“Listen, kiddo, are you reading my mind?”
Nick shook his head. “Can’t do it just now. Don’t think I could even move any of the candy wrappers on the floor of this heap, and that was my thing. If I was linked up with them…” He inclined his head toward the sleeping children in the back of the panel truck. “It’d be different. At least for awhile.”
“You think you’ll revert? Go back to whatever you had before?”
“Dunno. It’s not a big deal to me either way. Never was. My big deals were football and street hockey.” He peered at Tim. “Man, those aren’t bags under your eyes, those are suitcases.”
“I could use some sleep,” Tim admitted. Yes, like about twelve hours. He found himself remembering Norbert Hollister’s ramshackle establishment, where the TV didn’t work and the roaches ran free. “I suspect there are independent motels where they wouldn’t ask questions if cash was on offer, but cash is a problem, I’m afraid.”
Nicky smiled, and Tim saw the fine-looking young man he’d be—if God was good—in a few years. “I think me and my friends might be able to help you out in the cash department. Not entirely sure, but yeah, probably. Got enough gas to make it to the next town?”
“Yes.”
“Stop there,” Nicky said, and put his head back against the window.
32
Not long before the Millinocket branch of the Seaman’s Trust opened at nine o’clock on that day, a teller named Sandra Robichaux summoned the bank manager from his office.
“We have a problem,” she said. “Take a look at this.”
She seated herself at the ATM video replay. Brian Stearns sat down beside her. The unit’s camera slept between transactions, and in the small northern Maine town of Millinocket, that usually meant it slept all night, waking up for its first customers around six o’clock. The time-stamp on the screen they were looking at said 5:18 AM. As Stearns watched, five people walked up to the ATM. Four of them had their shirts pulled up over their mouths and noses, like bandit masks in an old-time Western. The fifth had a gimme cap pulled down low over his eyes. Stearns could see MAINE PAPER INDUSTRIES on the front.
“Those look like kids!”
Sandra nodded. “Unless they’re midgets, which doesn’t seem very likely. Watch this, Mr. Stearns.”
The kids joined hands and formed a circle. A few lines of fuzz ran across the picture, as if from momentary electrical interference. Then money began to spew from the ATM’s slot. It was like watching a casino slot machine pay off.
“What the hell?”
Sandra shook her head. “I don’t know what the hell, but they got over two thousand dollars, and the machine’s not supposed to give anybody more than eight hundred. That’s the way it’s set. I guess we should call somebody about it, but I don’t know who.”
Stearns didn’t reply. He only watched, fascinated, as the little bandits—they looked like middle-schoolers, if that—picked up the money.
Then they were gone.
THE LISPING MAN
1
On a cool October morning some three months later, Tim Jamieson strolled down the driveway from what was known as Catawba Hill Farm to South Carolina State Road 12-A. The walk took awhile; the driveway was almost half a mile long. Any longer, he liked to joke to Wendy, and they could have named it South Carolina State Road 12-B. He was wearing faded jeans, dirty Georgia Giant workshoes, and a sweatshirt so big it came down to his upper thighs. It was a present from Luke, ordered on the Internet. Written across the front were two words in gold: THE AVESTER. Tim had never met Avery Dixon, but he was glad to wear the shirt. His face was deeply tanned. Catawba hadn’t been a real farm for ten years, but there was still an acre of garden behind the barn, and this was harvest season.
He reached the mailbox, opened it, started to paw out the usual junk (nobody got real mail these days, it seemed), then froze. His stomach, which had been fine on the walk down here, seemed to contract. A car was coming, slowing down and pulling over. There was nothing special about it, just a Chevy Malibu smudged with reddish dust and with the usual budget of bugs smashed into the grill. It wasn’t a neighbor, he knew all their cars, but it could have been a salesman, or somebody lost and needing directions. Only it wasn’t. Tim didn’t know who the man behind the wheel was, only that he, Tim, had been waiting for him. Now here he was.
Tim closed the mailbox and put one hand behind him, as if to give his belt a tug. His belt was in place and so was the gun, a Glock which had once been the property of a redheaded sheriff’s deputy named Taggart Faraday.
The man turned off the engine and got out. He was dressed in jeans much newer than Tim’s—they still had the store creases—and a white shirt buttoned to the neck. His face was both handsome and nondescript, a contradiction that might have seemed impossible until you saw a guy like this. His eyes were blue, his hair that Nordic shade of blond that looks almost white. He looked, in fact, much as the late Julia Sigsby had imagined him. He wished Tim a good morning, and Tim returned the greeting with his hand still behind his back.
“You’re Tim Jamieson.” The visitor held out his hand.
Tim looked at it, but didn’t shake it. “I am. And who might you be?”
The blond man smiled. “Let’s say I’m William Smith. That’s the name on my driver’s license.” Smith was okay, so was driver’s, but license was lithenth. A lisp, but a slight one. “Call me Bill.”
“What can I do for you, Mr. Smith?”
The man calling himself Bill Smith—a name as anonymous as his sedan—squinted up into the early sunshine, smiling slightly, as if he were debating several possible answers to this question, all of them pleasant. Then he looked back at Tim. The smile was still on his mouth, but his eyes weren’t smiling.
“We could dance around this, but I’m sure you’ve got a busy day ahead of you, so I won’t take up any more of your time than I have to. Let me start by assuring you that I’m not here to cause you any trouble, so if it’s a gun you’ve got back there instead of just an itch, you can leave it where it is. I think we can agree there’s been enough shooting in this part of the world for one year.”
Tim thought of asking how Mr. Smith had found him, but why bother? It couldn’t have been hard. Catawba Farm belonged to Harry and Rita Gullickson, now living in Florida. Their daughter had been keeping an eye on the old home place for the last three years. Who better than a sheriff’s deputy?
Well, she had been a deputy, and still drew a county salary, at least for the time being, but it was hard to tell just what her remit was nowadays. Ronnie Gibson, absent on the night Mrs. Sigsby’s posse had invaded, was now the acting Fairlee County Sheriff, but how long that would last was anyone’s guess; there was talk of moving the sheriff’s station to the nearby town of Dunning. And Wendy had never been cut out for boots-on-the-ground law enforcement in the first place.