The Night Parade(33)

He executed a quick Google search on his phone for Tim’s name, and was hastily assaulted with over five million results. He blinked and looked stupidly at the phone’s screen, his greasy fingerprints smudging some of the lines of text. This would require more extensive searching, at a time and a place where he could sit down and do it properly without worrying about the federal government tracking his cell phone via GPS. As it was, he was beginning to feel conspicuous parked out here all alone in the middle of a run-down, deserted shopping center.

He was about to power the phone off again and get back in the car, when the phone suddenly rang in his hands. The number wasn’t programmed into his phone, yet he recognized it nonetheless.

Anger twisted his guts. Suddenly, he was back in that horrible hospital room again, the smell of death clinging to everything, his wife’s eyes on him at first . . . then gone, distant, emptied of life. The utter helplessness of it all. And it was bad enough that they had broken in to his family’s house and stolen pictures of him and Ellie—goddamn family vacation photos!—to use for their bullshit news bulletin, but now they were calling him to goad him out of hiding . . .

Before he knew what he was doing, he answered the call.

“You sons of bitches,” he growled into the phone.

“David.” It was the heavily accented voice of Dr. Kapoor. He sounded surprised that David had answered the phone.

“You’ve got a lot of nerve,” he said into the phone.

“Please, David, hear me out—”

“I saw the news report. That’s some stunt.”

“It wasn’t my idea. I was against it.”

“Bullshit.”

“David, you must hear me out. You are acting out of impulse, and you are only causing greater harm. Believe me, I understand your grief, and I’m here to help you see things more clearly before you—”

“You’re here to help me?”

“If you’ll only listen—”

“Leave me and my daughter alone,” he said.

“David, please—”

“Listen to me. You stay out of our way or you’ll be sorry.”

“David, it doesn’t have to be this way. You have misunderstood the situation.”

“Don’t you f*cking tell me what I—”

“Listen to me, David. You can’t keep running.”

“You’ll never find us.”

“You can’t keep it up, David.” There was a hitch in Dr. Kapoor’s throat. “David, you’re sick.”

For a moment, Dr. Kapoor’s voice faded out . . . then faded back in.

“You’re sick, David. Your last blood test. You’ve got it.”

“You’re a liar,” David said. “You’re just trying to get me to come back. I won’t do it.”

“It’s not a lie. It’s no trick. David, please, think about your daught—”

“Fuck you,” he said, and ended the call.

His hands shook. Sweat rolled down his forehead, though the rest of his body felt strangely cold. Through the center of his body, he felt as though an electrical current pulsed, causing every fiber of his being to vibrate with a surge of power—of anger—that threatened to shatter him into a billion microscopic pieces. He wondered if it was a residual effect of Ellie’s touch or if it was generated internally, born of his own anger.

He closed his eyes, leaned against the car, and focused on controlling his respiration. The last thing he needed was for Ellie to see him upset. Things were already bad enough without that.

In his hand, the phone rang again.

He powered it off without a second thought.





17


For better or worse, he opted to drive to the nearest city identified as a black X on the newspaper’s map. It was a town in Kentucky called Goodwin, and he liked the sound of it. Even when he turned the map on its side, making all the X’s look disconcertingly like little black crosses, he clung to the plan and didn’t veer off in another direction.

While he smoked, he pulled up directions to Goodwin on his phone. He was fearful it might ring again in his hand—fearful he might actually answer it and scream at the person on the other end of the line right in front of his daughter—but the phone did not ring. He kept it on long enough to scribble the directions down on a slip of paper he found in the glove compartment, then shut it back off. He lit a fresh cigarette with a match and, for the first time since he was a little boy watching his mother smoke in the car, marveled at how there used to be cigarette lighters built into the dashboards of American automobiles.

As they drove, the horizon soured to the color of a bruise. The sun sizzled out like a dying fire. Ellie scrolled through the radio stations, hoping to find a broadcast that played music, but the reception was poor and there was nothing but static across the dial. Even the radio evangelists had disappeared. To keep her happy, he stopped at a gas station and bought a few used CDs from a bin, things he would never listen to in his real life—Roxette, Cyndi Lauper, Bananarama. They were only a dollar apiece. Ellie played them but remained unemotional. Detached. It concerned him.

That evening, they ate the remainder of the burgers from earlier, now cold, tasteless, the patties beginning to stiffen. Ellie kept the shoe box of bird eggs tucked between them on the console. As he drove, David kept glancing at her profile, desperate to decode her emotions. He didn’t like how silent she was being, didn’t like the distant look in her eyes. He knew it would only get worse tonight, when they arrived in Goodwin. He would have to put on a good face. He would have to somehow make it all palatable, them staying overnight in what promised to be a deserted ghost town.