He became aware of a fresh onslaught of rain. The pain in his arms, in his chest, brought him back to his senses. He got to his feet slowly and staggered into the heavy growth along the bank. Arches of cypress and pine spread above him, sheltering him from the worst of the downpour. Behind him the river was sick with rain, beige with muddy runoff. Chunks of white floated in the brown water; packages of shrimp and fish, fresh from the Gulf.
The truck’s cargo.
They’ll be looking for you.
He hurried up the rolling incline that led from the river and staggered into the deep cover of the pines.
Please, God, he thought, let the trucker have gotten out alive.
Luke headed away from both river and road and deeper into the woods. As he walked he took an inventory of himself. Pants caked with mud. Shirt torn open, buttons gone, ripped by the force of the river. He glanced down: the silver of the Saint Michael medal glinted on his chest. Thank God, he thought, he hadn’t lost it. He’d lost one shoe and sock but the mud felt soothing against his foot. His wallet and money were back in the cabin. His wrists were bloodied and scored raw from the shackles.
He walked. Listened for the sounds of pursuit but heard only the soft hammering of the rain.
Mouser and Snow were from the Night Road. It existed, as a vicious force beyond his database of potential malcontents. It was real. He was convinced of it. Their talk of casinos being bombed. His mind spun. They said they were from his stepfather. It didn’t make any sense. They couldn’t be from Henry and also from the Night Road.
The realization hit him like a stone dropped from the clouds. Could Henry be involved with the Night Road? It didn’t seem possible. But Henry refusing to ransom him didn’t seem possible, either.
Who is your client for this project? he’d asked Henry. What are you doing with this research? Henry had smiled and dodged and maybe bribed him with a lucrative job offer to stop him from asking questions.
Luke had given him the discussion-group postings and the names, and a way to contact hundreds of people who might be extremists. He’d handed them to Henry on a plate. God only knew who his client really was.
He had to find a phone. Call the police.
Suddenly he stumbled into a clearing in the pines. A tidy little cottage stood in the glooming rain. White paint, a back porch that faced the river, a swing and wicker chairs, empty of cushions. A small fishing pier jutted into the river.
He ran to the cottage’s back door and knocked, but there was no answer. The curtains were drawn on all the windows. He listened at the glass; no sound came from within. He walked around the porch; on the other side was a small one-car garage, a dirt road driveway leading down to it from a paved road, and a tool shed.
A lock bolted the tool shed door shut. He got a rock from the flowerbeds and smashed down on the lock with four jackhammer blows. But the lock held.
He ran back to the cottage. His conscience made him hesitate at breaking and entering. But he was desperate and this was his new reality. He had to adjust to it.
He broke the window. No screech of an alarm accompanied the tinkling glass. He fingered the lock, twisted it, and stumbled inside.
He shivered and turned on the central heating. It vroomed to life and the vents perfumed the air with a dusty burnt smell. The cottage was well furnished; someone’s riverside weekend getaway, he decided. He wanted food, a shot of whiskey to warm him, and to be out of his filthy sopping clothes. But most of all he wanted to be free of the shackles. He searched the kitchen and in a drawer he found a ring of keys.
He hurried back out to the tool shed and tried the keys. The third opened the lock, chalked with dust from his earlier attempts.
The orderly wall held a nice array of tools. He saw what he needed: a power drill, nestled in its charger.
He inserted the drill’s bit into the lock; he had to hold the drill at an awkward angle. It revved to life and bit into the lock’s mechanism. Metal ground, hissed, and began to shred. The shackles shook, dancing to the bit’s beat, and the lock gave way. He uncuffed his right hand and felt the delicious feeling of the weight dropping away. His skin under the cuffs was raw, bloodied, swollen. He freed his left hand in short order.
Luke put the tools back into place and relocked the tool shed door. He threw the shackles into the kitchen trashcan.
No phone in the kitchen. He searched the rest of the vacation home, found two bedrooms, two bathrooms and a den, and no phone. Bizarre. But this was a world choking on cell phones, so maybe the owners didn’t feel the need for a landline for their weekend house.
He went back to the curtained window. No sign of pursuit; no Snow or Mouser emerging from the dripping pines. He was safe, but God knew for how long.
He kept the lights off. He stripped off his ruined clothes and stood in the stinging spray of the shower. He scrubbed himself raw, hating to leave the reviving heat of the water. When he was done, he wrapped a towel around himself. In the master bedroom closet he found men’s clothes. Luke was six-two and the man’s jeans were surprisingly a bit too long and too wide in the waist. But better, he decided, than too small. He found a gray long-sleeve T-shirt, a flannel shirt and a jacket. He found no shoes but galoshes; he put them on, with a pair of white socks he found, in case he had to leave quickly.
In the bathroom he slathered antibacterial gel on his hurt hands and wrapped them with gauze. He looked like he was hiding an attempt at slashed wrists. But he felt human again. The medicine cabinet held a few prescription bottles in the name of Olmstead. He was hiding in the Olmsteads’ house. He hoped the Olmsteads were nice, understanding people. A sharp, sudden hunger – dulled for long hours by adrenaline – punched his stomach. He hadn’t eaten since lunch the day he dropped Henry off at the airport, which felt like a lifetime ago.
He found scant offerings in the fridge – a jar of strawberry jam, expired containers of milk and sour cream, a few bottles of beer. In the pantry he found peanut butter and canned vegetables and soups. In the freezer were several packages of steak, a loaf of bread and two vegetarian pizzas. The steak would take too long. He heated tomato soup and put one of the pizzas in the oven.
He stood over the soup, the mist of it warming his face, and, in the distance, under the fading thunder, he heard the chop-chop-chop of a helicopter. There and gone by the time he got to the window.
He clicked on the television while he drank the hot soup, surfed to a twenty-four hour Texas-based news channel. The heavy rains drenching east Texas and western Louisiana were the lead story. Apparently there’d been a derailment of a train carrying chemicals in the small town of Ripley and a massive chlorine leak, and the rainstorms had helped ground the poison. Thirty dead, hundreds hurt, the entire town and everything around it for twenty miles temporarily evacuated. But the storm had stopped the threat.
‘Of course, whether this was an accident, or as some sources on the scene have suggested, a bombing of the rail line itself to cause the leak…’
A bombing. And here were Mouser and Snow, talking about bombings.
Luke sank to his knees before the TV, the soup tasteless in his mouth. The story went back to the wider effects of the wide-ranging rainstorms: two people drowned in Lufkin, another swept away in Longview, and a dramatic truck crash near Braintree – they went to an aerial shot of a semi, junked in an engorged river. The truck driver was missing, a search was underway.
Missing. Please be okay, he thought. Please. But he knew, from the shot, from the force of the crash, that it was a forlorn hope.
He ran to the sink and waited for the wave of nausea to pass. He looked up at the screen as the anchor returned. ‘A brutal street shooting near downtown Houston is caught on an ATM machine’s camera, and the stepson of the leader of a prominent political think-tank is implicated.’ Cut to a reporter, standing in the rain-soaked morning daylight of the bank parking lot where Eric had gunned down the homeless man.