The trooper gave her his hard glare. “Do you know this woman?”
“Sure. She’s my sister. What’s the problem?”
“Tryin’ to steal fourteen dollars and sixty-two cents worth of gas, that’s what!” the cashier replied, her swollen ankles aching in the bitter cold and the breath pluming from her mouth.
“Oh, here’s the money. I went over there and bought us some breakfast.” Didi nodded toward the burger-joint section of Happy Herman’s, which had a sign announcing their trucker’s breakfast special of sausage and biscuits. She took the wallet out, counted a ten, four ones, two quarters, and two dimes. “You can keep the change,” she said as she offered the cashier her money.
“Listen, I’m sorry.” The woman brought up a nervous smile. “I saw her startin’ to drive away, and I thought…well, it happens sometimes.” She took the cash.
“Oh, she was probably just moving the car. I had to go to the bathroom, and I guess she was coming to pick me up.”
“Sorry,” the cashier said. “Frank, I feel like a real dumb-ass. You folks take it easy, now, and watch the weather.” She began walking back to the grocery store, shivering in the frigid wind.
“You ready to hit the road?” Didi asked Laura brightly. “I got us some coffee and chow.”
Laura saw the shine of fear deep down in Didi’s eyes. You wanted to run, didn ’t you? Laura thought. “I’m ready,” she said tersely.
“Hold on a minute.” The trooper planted himself between them and the car. “Lady, it might not be any of my business, but you look like somebody gave you a hell of a knock.”
A silence stretched. Then Didi filled it. “Somebody did. Her husband, if you want to know.”
“Her husband? He did that?”
“My sister and her husband were visiting me from Georgia. He went crazy and punched her last night, and we’re on the way to our mother’s house in Illinois. Bastard took a hammer to her new car, broke the window out and cut up the windshield, too.”
“Jesus.” The hardness had vanished from the trooper’s eyes. “Some men can really be shits, if you’ll pardon my French. Maybe you ought to get to a doctor.”
“Our father’s a doctor. In Joliet.”
If she weren’t about to jump out of her skin, Laura might have smiled. Didi was good at this; she’d had a lot of practice.
“Mind if we go now?” Didi asked.
The trooper scratched his jaw, and stared at the darkness in the west. Then he said, “All men ain’t sonsabitches. Lemme give you a hand.” He walked to his car, opened the trunk, and brought out a tarpaulin of clear blue plastic. “Go in there and get some duct tape,” he told Didi, and he motioned toward the grocery store. “It’ll be back on the hardwares shelf. Tell Annie to put it on Frank’s tab.”
Didi gave Laura the breakfast bag and strode quickly away. Laura was fighting a scream; with every second, Mary Terror was getting farther away. Frank produced a penknife and began to cut out a fair-sized square of blue plastic. When Didi returned with the silver duct tape, Frank said, “Long way to Joliet from here. You ladies need to keep warm,” and he opened the BMW’s door, slid across the driver’s seat under which the automatic pistol rested, and taped the plastic up over the window frame. He did a thorough job of it, adding strip after strip of the silver tape in a webbing pattern that fixed the plastic securely in place. Laura drank her coffee black and paced nervously as Frank finished the job, Didi looking on with interest. Then Frank came back out of the car, the duct tape reduced to about half its previous size. “There you go,” he said. “Hope everything works out all right for you.”
“We hope so, too,” Didi answered. She got into the car, and Laura was never so thankful in her life to get behind a steering wheel.
“Drive carefully!” Frank cautioned. He waved as the patched-up BMW pulled away, and he watched as it sped up and swerved onto I-94 West. Funny, he thought. The lady from Georgia had said her “friend” had her purse. Why hadn’t she said “sister”? Well, sisters could be friends, couldn’t they? Still…it made him wonder. Was it worth a call in to get a vehicle ID or not? Should’ve checked her driver’s license, he decided. He’d always been a sucker for a hard-luck story. Well, let them go. He was supposed to be looking for speeders, not giving grief to battered wives. He turned his back to the west, and went to get himself a cup of coffee.
“Fifteen minutes on us,” Laura said as the speedometer’s needle climbed past seventy. “That’s what she’s got.”
“Thirteen minutes,” Didi corrected Laura, and she began to tear into a sausage and biscuit.
The BMW reached eighty. Laura was even passing the massive trucks. The wind flapped the plastic a little, but Frank had done a good job and the duct tape held. “Better hold it back,” Didi said. “Getting stopped for a ticket won’t help.”
Laura kept her speed where it was, on the high side of eighty. The car shuddered, its aerodynamics spoiled by the caved-in passenger door. Laura’s gaze searched for an olive-green van in the gloomy light. “Why didn’t you leave me?”
“I did.”
“You came back. Why?”
“I saw him rousting you. I had your purse. I knew it was about to be over for you.”
“So? Why didn’t you just let him arrest me and you take off?”
Didi chewed on the tough sausage. She washed it down with a sip of hot coffee. “Where was I going to go?” she asked quietly.
The question lingered. To it there was no answer.
The BMW sped on, toward the steel-gray West while the sun rose in the East like a burning angel.
2
The Terrible Truth
LAURA HAD TO CUT her speed down to sixty-five again when she saw another state trooper car heading east. After almost half an hour, there was still no sign of Mary Terror’s van. “She’s turned off,” Laura said. She heard the desperation rising in her voice. “She took an exit.”
“Maybe she did. Maybe she didn’t.”
“Wouldn’t you?” Laura asked.
Didi thought about it. “I’d turn off and find a place to wait for a while, until you had time to pass me,” she said. “Then I could get back on the highway whenever I pleased.”
“Do you think that’s what she’s done?”
Didi looked ahead. The traffic had picked up, but there was no sign of an olive-green van with broken taillights. They had passed the exits to Kalamazoo a few miles before. If Mary Terror had turned off at any one of those, they’d never find her again. “Yes, I think so,” Didi answered.
“Damn it!” Laura slammed the wheel with her fist. “I knew we’d lose her if we couldn’t keep her in sight! Now what the hell are we going to do?”
“I don’t know. You’re driving.”
Laura kept going. There was a long curve ahead. Maybe on the other side of it they’d catch sight of the van. The speed was creeping up again, and she forced herself to ease off. “I didn’t say thank you, did I?”
“For what?”
“You know for what. For coming back with my purse.”
“No, I don’t guess you did.” Didi picked at one of her short, square fingernails, her fingers as sturdy as tools.
“I’m saying it. Thank you.” She glanced quickly at Didi and then fixed her attention on the highway once more. Behind them, the sun glowed orange through chinks in interlocked clouds the color of bruises, and ahead the sky was a dark mask. “And thank you for helping me with this, too. You didn’t have to call me when Mary was on the way.”
“I almost didn’t.” She looked at her hands. They had never been pretty, like Laura’s hands were. They had never been soft, never unworked. “Maybe I got tired of being loyal to a dead cause. Maybe there never was a cause to be loyal to. The Storm Front.” She grunted, a note of sarcasm. “We were children with guns, smoking dope and getting high and thinking we could change the world. No, not even that, really. Maybe we just liked the power of setting off bombs and pulling triggers. Damn.” She shook her h
ead, her eyes hazed with memory. “That was a crazy world, back then.”
“It’s still crazy,” Laura said.
“No, now it’s insane. There’s a difference. But we helped it get from there to here. We grew up to be the people we said we hated. Talk-talk-talkin’ ’bout our generation,” Didi said in a soft, singsong voice.
They rounded the bend. No van in sight. Maybe on the next stretch of road they’d see her. “What are you going to do now?” Laura asked. “You can’t go back to Ann Arbor.”
“Nope. Damn, I had a good setup, too. A good house, a great workshop. I was doing all right. Listen, don’t get me started or I might curse you out for this.” She checked her wristwatch, an old Timex. It was a little after seven. “Somebody’ll find Edward. I hope it’s not Mr. Brewer. He always wanted to set me up with his grandson.” She sighed heavily. “Edward. The past caught up with him, didn’t it? And it caught up with me, too. You know, you had a hell of a nerve tracking me down like you did. I can’t believe you talked Mark into helping you. Mark’s a rock.” Didi put her hand against the piece of plastic tarp and felt it flutter. The heater was keeping the car’s interior toasty now that the wind was blocked off. “Thanks for not bringing Mark to the house,” she said. “That wasn’t the place for him.”
“I didn’t want him getting hurt.”
Didi turned her head to stare at Laura. “You’ve got balls, don’t you? Walking in there with Mary like you did. I swear to God, I thought we were both finished.”
“I wasn’t thinking about anything but getting my son back. That’s all I care about.”
“What happens if you can’t get him back? Would you have another baby?”
Laura didn’t answer for a moment. The car’s tires sang on the pavement, and a truck hauling lumber moved into her lane. “My husband…and I are through. I know that for sure. I don’t know if I’d want to live in Atlanta anymore. I just don’t know about a lot of things. I guess I’ll cross those bridges when I—”
“Slow down,” Didi interrupted, leaning forward in her seat. She was looking at something ahead, revealed when the lumber truck had changed lanes. “There! See it?”
There was no van. Laura said, “See what?”
“The car there. The Buick.”
Laura did see it, then. A dark blue Buick, its right side scraped to the metal and its rear fender bashed in. Earl Van Diver’s car.
“Slow down,” Didi cautioned. “Don’t let him see us. Bastard might try to run us off the road.”
“He’s after Mary. He doesn’t want us.” Even so, Laura cut her speed and lagged a hundred yards behind the Buick and off to the right.
“I don’t trust anybody who fires a bullet close enough for me to hear. Some FBI agent, huh? He didn’t care if he hit David or not.”
And that was the terrible truth of it, Laura thought. Earl Van Diver was hunting Mary, not to arrest her for her crimes, but to execute her. Whether he killed David or not made no difference to him. His bullets were meant for Mary, but as long as Mary had David, one of those bullets might rip through him just as easily as through her. Laura stayed far behind the Buick, and after a couple of miles she watched it pull over toward an exit ramp on the right.
“Getting off,” Didi said. “Good riddance.”
Laura eased the BMW over, following Van Diver toward the ramp. “What the hell are you doing?” Didi demanded. “You’re not getting off, are you?”
“That’s just what I’m doing.”
“Why? We could still catch up with Mary!”
“And we still can,” Laura said. “But I don’t want that bastard catching up with her first. If he stops at a gas station, we’re going to take his keys.”
“Yeah, right! You take his keys! Damn it, you’re asking to get shot!”
“We’ll see,” Laura said, and she turned onto the ramp in the wake of Van Diver’s car.
In the Buick, Earl Van Diver was watching the monitor under his dashboard. A little red light was flashing, indicating a magnetic fix. The liquid crystal display read SSW 208 2.3: compass heading, bearing, miles between the main unit and the homer. As he came off the ramp’s curve, he saw the display change to SW 196 2.2. He followed the road that led south from I-94, passing a sign that said LAWTON, 3 MI.
“He’s not stopping for gas,” Didi said. Van Diver had gone straight past a Shell station on one side of the road and an Exxon on the other. “He’s taking the scenic route.”
“Why’d he get off, then? If he’s so hell-bent on catching Mary, why’d he get off?” She kept a car and a pickup truck between them as she followed. They’d gone maybe two miles when Laura saw a blue building with a garish orange roof off to the left. INTERNATIONAL HOUSE OF PANCAKES, its sign announced. The Buick’s brake lights flashed, the turn indicator went on, and Van Diver made the turn into the IHOP’s parking lot.
Van Diver’s savage grin twitched. The olive-green van, its left side battered and scraped, was sitting in the parking lot between a junker Olds and a Michigan Power panel truck. Van Diver swung the Buick into a parking space up close to the building, where he could watch the exit. He cut the engine and unplugged the monitor, which read NNE 017 0.01.
Close enough, he thought.
Van Diver put on his black gloves, his fingers long and spidery. Then he slid the Browning automatic from beneath his seat, clicked the safety off, and held it against his right thigh. He waited, his dark eyes on the IHOP’s door. It opened in a few seconds, and two men in blue parkas and caps came out, their breath frosty in the morning air. They walked toward the Michigan Power panel truck. Come on, come on! he thought. He’d figured he could be patient after all these years. But his patience had run out, and that was why he’d hurried the first shot that had hit Edward Fordyce instead of Mary Terror’s skull.
The skin prickled on the back of his neck. Van Diver sensed movement behind him and to his left. His head swiveled in that direction, his hand coming up with the Browning in it and his heart hammering.
He looked into the snout of a pistol pressed against the window’s glass, and behind it stood the woman he’d first seen on the newscasts from Atlanta and later had met in Bedelia Morse’s kitchen.
She wasn’t a killer. She was a social columnist for the Atlanta Constitution, and she was married to a stockbroker. She had, up until the kidnapping of her baby, never felt the agony of heartrending pain. She had never suffered. All these things Earl Van Diver knew, and weighed in the balance as he prepared to bring his gun up and fire through the window at her. His shot would be faster and more deadly because she didn’t have the courage to kill a man in cold blood.
But he didn’t do it. He didn’t, because of what he saw in Laura Clayborne’s bruised face. Not hopelessness, not pleading, not weakness. He saw desperation and rage there, emotions he knew all too well. He might get off the first shot, but she would certainly deliver the second. Bedelia Morse suddenly reached past Laura and opened the door before Van Diver could hit the lock. “Put the gun down,” Laura said. Her voice was tight and strained. Could she shoot him if she had to? She didn’t know, and she hoped to God she wouldn’t have to find out. Van Diver just sat there, grinning at her with his frozen face, his eyes dark and alert as a rattlesnake’s. “Put it down!” Laura repeated. “On the floor!”
“Take the clip out first,” Didi added.
“Yeah. Like she said.”
Van Diver looked at the automatic in Laura’s hand. He saw it shake a little, her finger on the trigger. When Van Diver moved, both women flinched. He popped the bullet clip out of his Browning, held it in his palm, and put the gun on the floorboard. “Take your keys and get out of the car,” Didi told him, and he obeyed.
Laura glanced over at Mary Terror’s van and then back to Van Diver. “How’d you know she was here?”
Van Diver remained silent, just staring at her with his fathomless eyes. He’d taken off his woolen cap, and his scalp was bald except for a few long strands of gray hair pressed down on the s
kin, a fringe of gray-and-brown hair around his head. He was slim and wiry, standing about five ten, by no means a large man. But Laura knew his strength from painful experience. Earl Van Diver was a taut package of muscle and bone powered by hatred.
“What’s the antenna for?” Didi asked. She had already checked out the Buick’s interior. “There’s no car phone.”
No answer. “The bastard can’t talk without his throat plug,” Didi realized. “Where’s your plug, shitface? You can point, can’t you?” No reaction. Didi said, “Give me your gun,” and took it from Laura. She stepped forward and jammed the pistol up against Earl Van Diver’s testicles, and she looked him right in his cold eyes. “Came to Ann Arbor to find me, didn’t you? What were you doing? Staking out my house?” She shoved the gun’s barrel a little harder. “How’d you find me?” Van Diver’s face was a motionless mask, but a twisted vein at his left temple was beating fast and hard. Didi saw a garbage dumpster back toward the rear of the IHOP, where a patch of woods sloped down to a drainage ditch. “We’re not going to get anything out of him. He’s nothing but an”—she pressed her face closer to his—“old fucked-up pig.” The pig sprayed bits of spittle onto Van Diver’s cheeks, and his eyes blinked. “Let’s walk.” She pushed him toward the dumpster, the gun moving to jam against his back.
“What are you going to do?” Laura asked nervously.
“You don’t want him following Mary, do you? We’re going to take him into the woods and shoot him. A bullet in one of his knees ought to take care of the problem. He won’t get too far crawling.”
“No! I don’t want that!”
“I want it,” Didi said, shoving Van Diver forward. “Son of a bitch killed Edward. Almost killed us and the baby, too. Move, you bastard!”
“No, Didi! We can’t do it!”
“You won’t have to. I’m paying Edward’s debt, that’s all. I said move, you fucking pig!” She punched him hard in the small of the back with the gun’s barrel, and he grunted and staggered forward a few paces.