Now there were two of them against him.
And then suddenly there were three.
A man—older, big, and stiff-looking—emerged from the cab of the eighteen-wheeled truck. He had on a short-sleeved shirt and fuzzy gray sweatpants that looked like pajamas.
They were far away, but Destiny opened her mouth and screamed:
“Help! Help us!!! He’s trying to kill us!”
Most of the sound of her screaming voice disappeared into the rustling pine needles and the distant growl of the unseen highway. But bits and pieces of high-pitched distress filtered across the parking lot.
They could see now that the large man—the stiff-moving trucker—was trying to raise his right arm.
In his hand was a gun.
The Monster moved away from the black SUV and toward the big rig.
The older man struggled to take aim.
The girls watched.
But something was wrong. His arm wasn’t working.
Because the Monster was able to level his gun and fire first.
This was all wrong.
Some guy just comes out of the bathroom and starts shooting at a parked car, and there are two girls who look in trouble, so this guy is some kind of lunatic.
And one of the girls, the short one who might even be a child, shouts for help.
Well, he could get help.
Or at least he would if he could move. But he could only make things go slowly now. Even with a surge of adrenaline, his limbs were weak and seemed to belong to someone else.
They failed him.
Epic fail, as his grandson would say.
His arm only raised up half the distance that he needed it to go.
And then the guy pointed his gun.
Is he aiming at the big rig?
No.
He’s aiming at me.
No.
Yes.
No.
YES. Oh. Yes.
There was an explosion.
But then it was over.
A switch. Like the ignition. On and then off.
K.B. Walton had reached the end of the line.
He had a final thought as he sank to the ground.
There is a reason not to go into a rest stop when the sign says it’s closed. He wished he could write a song with that title.
46
The man who came out of the truck to rescue them had been shot.
He was on the ground, and his pale blue short-sleeved shirt was turning red.
The Monster had killed a man.
Right in front of them. In broad daylight.
And now that was what he would do to the two of them.
Emily had kept it together for the entire time they’d been in the car driving. She had found a way to focus. She hadn’t cried, and she’d barely moved a muscle. She had hardly made a sound.
But now she shattered into as many pieces of glass as the window of the silver car.
Emily started to shake as badly as when she had been locked in the restaurant freezer right before she was discovered. She couldn’t control her own body.
Destiny grabbed hold of Emily’s arm. But Emily couldn’t feel her touch.
Destiny said: “We’re going to run. He can’t run like we can. He limps. He’s got a messed-up leg.”
Emily didn’t think that she could even walk. Much less run.
She’d had dreams where bad people were chasing her and her legs turned to heavy, immovable parts that would not cooperate with her body.
It terrified her in her sleep, and now it was happening to her in real life.
Emily’s teeth were chattering when she said, “I can’t run.”
Destiny watched as the evil man started toward them.
Not fast. Not slow.
Just deliberate.
Destiny sized up the parking lot.
It was too far to the unseen highway, and there was a wire fence that ran between the planted grassy area and the trees.
Maybe they could go over the fence and then cut through the trees. But the fence was too high. The fence was to keep deer from running across Route 97.
And now they were the deer.
Destiny tightened her grip on Emily. “We can’t stay here.”
Her eyes were on the big rig. She shouted at Emily: “We’re going to the truck.”
Emily shook her head but babbled, “We can’t go there. That man’s dead. We—”
But Destiny was in charge. “We’ve got to run fast. We’ve got to go now.”
Emily looked at her. What was she saying? She couldn’t run. She couldn’t even walk. She was shaking. She couldn’t move.
And then Destiny’s sharp little fingernails, painted bright orange and looking like bits of candy, dug into her arm, and Destiny pulled hard on Emily.
“We’re not running together. It makes it easier for him to aim when it’s one large thing. Just follow me. But not right behind. Not in a straight line. Go, Emily! Go now! Don’t think, just go! We’re going!”
Who was that girl?
How did she go from the crapper out to the parking lot?
And why?
Why?
Why?
Why?
Why?
She broke the window and got into his car. And she had freed his girl.
She’d pay for what she’d done.
The old man in the truck had paid. Couldn’t they see that?
Well, now it was their turn.
It would be a doubles game. Shoot them both. And then run over their bodies with his car.
He heard a voice inside asking: Why do that?
He answered out loud: “Because I can.”
It would take the police longer to figure out what had happened. A truck. Three dead bodies. An SUV with flat tires.
And then the girls both took off.
They ran across the parking lot, away from the silver car to the big rig.
He didn’t expect that. He expected them to cower.
To cry.
To beg.
His anger, which had already rolled itself into a compost pile of rot, now ignited into a blaze of fire.
He lifted his gun.
Bang.
Bang.
Bang.
You’re dead.
The sound of the bullets echoed in the parking lot.
One.
Two.
Three.
But they were moving.
Emily’s legs were not pillars of stone. Her legs were strong.
And they were totally in charge.
They propelled her suddenly right past Destiny, and while bullets whizzed by, she moved across the wide, open space until she was safely behind the big rig.
And that was when Destiny, several paces back, went down.
One of her little slippery silk shoes from Thailand, which were meant for a traditional ceremony in a teahouse, got stuck in a rut in the alligator-back asphalt that made up the west section of the parking lot.
Emily looked over her shoulder to see her fall. She didn’t even consider the options.
Bang.
Bang.
Bang.
She ran back out into the open and grabbed Destiny’s arm, pulling her up off the ground as the shots continued to ring out.
Bang.
Bang.
Bang.
Destiny’s knee was a bloody mess, but not from gunfire. She’d fallen, but she hadn’t been shot. She was already up on her feet.
With her first step forward, her left orange slipper flew right off her heel.
But she kept running.
He fired the gun, but the bullets missed the targets. His closest shot had been the first one discharged. After that, he was dealing with the recoil from the gun.
He couldn’t steady himself. It was the missing leg’s fault. He had trouble with his balance.
When the smaller girl went down, he thought that he had her.
But with the sun in his eyes, and his stability compromised, their mov
ement was too much for him to be accurate.
He watched bitterly as his girl helped the small one to her feet. And then the two of them disappeared behind the truck.
Why were they doing this to him?
Why were they making it all so difficult?
Once behind the big rig, Emily and Destiny pressed up against one of the wheels.
Destiny’s little chest was heaving like a bird’s as they both struggled to catch their breath.
By looking under the truck, they could see the almost-dead man on the ground on the other side. Fluid was seeping from the back of his head. And blood soaked his short-sleeved shirt.
His eyes were open, and he was staring up at the sky, unblinking. It looked like he was resting. He might have been in a trance, gazing straight at the hot sun.
He was preparing.
Emily was transfixed as his chest suddenly deflated with a muscle spasm. It was a cough that had a gurgle mixed in, and then his body changed and was perfectly still.
And she saw the transition from life to death.
The vanishing.
She felt it inside. His body was still there, but his soul was now gone.
Right there, behind the big rig, lay a man who only minutes before had never seen her or the Monster. Now his life was over, because he’d parked his truck in the wrong place that day.
47
Destiny struggled to catch her breath. Maybe she would never again have lungs that worked right. Was that possible? Hadn’t she almost just died out there?
How had Emily, the girl who lived in that perfect house with the perfect yard and the perfect driveway made of bricks set at perfect angles, gotten into this mess?
Dark-haired Emily, who had that most perfect boyfriend, now had the worst luck in the world.
Because this was just all messed up.
What would have happened if Emily hadn’t gone back and pulled her off the ground?
Destiny might be lying out there like the dead guy on the other side of the tires.
They hadn’t been hit by a bullet running from the silver car to their hiding place behind the truck, but the maniac was still out there.
Destiny tried to focus.
She did know her way around a big rig. The guy she had married, Wynn, was a driver. And she’d been one, too. She never got licensed, but she’d driven Wynn’s eighteen-wheeler enough miles to feel confident behind the wheel. Hadn’t Wynn said all the time that she was a natural?
She guessed that the trucker lying on the ground on the other side of the axle hadn’t thought to take his keys. Destiny looked at Emily, who was still staring at him, and said, “I’m sure he left the keys inside.”
Destiny moved like an acrobat. She hoisted herself up the side of the cab to the door, and it opened.
It was hot inside the truck. And it smelled like banana peels. But it also felt a whole lot more protected.
Once Emily was in, Destiny locked the door behind her. She then checked the ignition, and sure enough, that was where she found the keys.
They were looking down on their tormentor now. The view out the front windshield gave the two girls an angle on him.
Destiny’s voice was high-pitched and shaky. “Who is that guy?”
Emily was going to answer “Sam’s father,” but the need to protect him, always, was so great that what came out was: “Satan.”
Destiny was tossing things now, looking through the mess of crap in the center console. She pushed aside coffee cups and medicine bottles.
“The trucker had to have had a cell phone—right?”
There was a GPS system. A thermos. A stack of inventory sheets. She didn’t see a cell phone.
She frantically shouted at Emily, who had never taken her eyes off Clarence. “Don’t you have a cell phone?”
“It’s dead. No battery. I didn’t charge it last night. And besides, it’s in my purse, which is gone.”
Destiny was shrieking now. “Help me look!”
Emily shouted back, “He’s coming to get us!”
Destiny opened her mouth to say something and then bam.
The right panel of the windshield suddenly exploded.
The bullet pierced the glass and lodged in the metal wall behind the driver’s seat.
It took only a microsecond for the whole sheet of glass to crack into a spiderweb of small chunks and then fall apart.
Both girls dropped.
Emily hid behind the front seat, and Destiny crouched in the space between the front seat and the passenger’s seat, next to the gearshift.
Destiny slid over on the floor mat, which was now covered in glass. She put her bare left foot on the brake. She then reached up and grabbed the key in the ignition and turned.
“We gotta get out of here!”
Clarence had put the dummy on wrong.
That was the problem. He was struggling to move now, because the metal pin wasn’t in right.
But he was almost there. It was going to take real effort to pull himself up into the cab of the truck, but he could do it.
And then a loud rumble echoed across the parking lot.
A cloud of black smoke belched from the tall chrome exhaust pipe running up the side of the cab as the entire truck shook to life.
Was there someone else inside the big rig besides the two girls?
He couldn’t see anyone.
Half the windshield was gone, and the other side was still intact, but no one appeared to be there.
And then the truck’s transmission whined as the eighteen-wheeler lurched forward.
There were ten gears, and it required a driver to double-clutch.
She’d done that before.
But there was a problem.
When she was married to Wynn, he had built her a special seat, like a kid would use in a family-style restaurant.
It pushed her forward and raised her up, on an angle, so that she could see over the steering wheel but could also reach the pedals.
Now she had no booster seat, and she couldn’t risk half standing and being so visible. So Destiny crunched up on the floor mat, her knees against her chest, as she worked the pedals.
Once the truck made its first heave forward, Emily inched her way through the glass. “What should I do?”
Destiny pumped the clutch like an expert. “You can steer.”
Emily grabbed the bottom of the steering wheel. “But I can’t see!”
Destiny had all her concentration on the gas pedal. “Just turn. Maybe we’ll hit him.”
The truck was driving itself.
That wasn’t possible, of course, but from his vantage point, that’s what he saw.
He’d never even taken that second handful of pain pills, so it couldn’t be some kind of hallucination.
Somehow the truck had started, and it was moving.
Now it needed to be stopped.
Clarence fired at the front tire.
Bang.
The bullet pierced the enormous rubber tire, but it didn’t appear to accomplish anything, because there were two tires, side by side, and behind them, two more.
And these things didn’t blow out.
They shredded and they fell apart, but they didn’t explode and they didn’t disable.
What the hell was that about?
The truck was turning now. It was, he realized, suddenly heading right at him.
Clarence moved to the right. But the truck continued in an arc in the same direction, and it was picking up speed.
And so he changed course and hobbled, as quickly as he could, backward.
Once Clarence had dodged out of the way, he watched as the big rig lurched into a higher gear.
It swung in a wide curve across the blacktop and then, as if aiming for a target, the huge truck slammed right into the black SUV parked in front of the cinder-block bathrooms.
Just the forward motion made them feel as if they were free.
Destiny’s feet worked the clutch and the gas; she shifted
by pulling low on the gear stick.
The truck was designed to go from second to third to fourth gear while not even topping twenty miles an hour. And Destiny was making that happen.
Emily pulled on the steering wheel with one arm.
They could tell that they were turning, but they had no idea of much else.
And then they hit Robb Ellis’s SUV.
The sound was worse than the jolt of impact.
There was the low-pitched snarl of metal on metal mixed with shattering glass as the big rig, still going forward, pushed the crumpling SUV like a tin toy.
Emily and Destiny popped up from the floor to see.
And for a split second, they both forgot about their tormentor and their predicament.
Destiny’s mouth dropped open. “OhmyGod… Robb’s car.”
The SUV was destroyed.
But the truck was still moving. Destiny kept her foot on the gas and turned the wheel hard.
The SUV, now a hunk of twisted metal, spun off to the side, set free.
And that was when they saw Clarence on the blacktop, with his gun aimed right up at them.
48
Both of the cats were in Riddle’s lap.
Jared was next to him on the couch. Close. Beto had stayed at home.
Debbie Bell was on the phone across the room. Her husband was talking on a phone outside.
Riddle shut his eyes and tried to breathe. He took a black pen, and for the first time he didn’t draw. He wrote words in his sketchbook.
We brot the bad in to this howz.
We shud be punisht.
Not Emily.
Not her.
Not now.
Not evur.
We will not sirfive with awht Emily.
She is what holds us all to this growd.
Riddle then shut the book and leaned against Jared. And in silence they were for the first time really brothers.
After Sam hung up with Riddle, he got Tim Bell on the phone. Emily’s father called the police department.
And it took only minutes to confirm that Clarence Border was out of prison.
The dominoes were falling.
So Sam had seen him on the neighbors’ porch at night. He had been there.
Riddle was right. There had been a man in that house next door.