The Old Man(10)
Moving the transponder had been a waste of time. The man ran unerringly to Caldwell’s car. Caldwell saw the red dot sweep up from the ground to the car’s windshield, and then to the side, into the backseat.
Caldwell used the time to get behind the man. He was still about twenty feet away when he said, “Drop the gun.”
The man’s body gave a startle reflex, as though he’d received an electric shock. He became still, the pistol with its laser sight still in his hand, its red dot on the side window of Caldwell’s car, with the beam passing through to the backseat.
Caldwell said, “Drop it. You won’t have time to do anything else.”
Caldwell felt despair. The man wasn’t reacting correctly. Maybe he didn’t even speak English. Caldwell went to one knee and used the left mirror of the car beside him to steady his aim on the man’s torso. The red dot moved.
Just as Caldwell had expected, the man tried to spin around to fire at the spot where Caldwell’s voice had come from, and as Caldwell had predicted, the laser sight went too high. The man saw his mistake and tried to lower his aim, but Caldwell’s shot found his chest.
Caldwell ran to the place where the man lay, but the two dogs reached him first. They sniffed the burned propellant in the air, the man’s body, the blood, the death, and began to whine. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go.” He turned to let the two dogs into his car, but as he shut the back door, he heard the sound of another car approaching. As he ducked down he noticed the dead man’s gun lying beside the body, the laser sight still emitting the beam of red light. He snatched up the pistol and pocketed it, then slithered under his car and lay on his belly.
The car’s engine was too loud, the driver’s impatience with the laws of physics bringing him around the building too fast. Caldwell kept track of the turn by listening to the squeal of the tires. The man drove directly to Caldwell’s car, stopped his Town Car in front of it to block it, and then slid out the passenger side of his car and crouched behind it for protection as he drew a pistol and aimed it over the hood.
Caldwell used the only opportunity he could see. He remained on his belly and aimed the pistol with the laser sight under the man’s car. When the red dot settled on the man’s ankle, he fired.
The man went down, and Caldwell could see that the man’s leg and the right side of his torso were now on the pavement as he clutched at his wounded ankle. Caldwell fired beneath the car again, then twice more. Caldwell saw the man’s body jump twice, and then lie still.
Caldwell got into the Town Car and swung it into a parking space, and then ran to look into the backseat of his own car to be sure the dogs were still where they should be. He got in and started the engine. In a moment the car was back on the road. “I’m sorry about that, my friends,” he said. “You’re safe now.” He hoped they would take it as a kind thing to say, and not just a lie.
5
The difficulty at the hotel had cost him time. He couldn’t proceed in a straight line on the same highway and hope nobody would be waiting for him somewhere ahead. He took the first southbound highway. He used the night as well as he could, driving as fast as possible and never slowing unless he needed to.
When he reached the place for sleep it was beginning to turn light again. He was on a flat road through farm country, and he had not seen another car for an hour. There was a barn made of boards that had been rough cut many years ago and erected on a foundation of mortared fieldstones. At some point the barn had been painted on one end with a broadside advertisement that might have been for tobacco, but the paint had worn to illegibility. The wood on the barn had turned gray, and right now it was almost uniform. There must have been a farmhouse and outbuildings once, but there was no vestige of them now.
The headlights swept across the fields as he turned off the highway onto what had once been the barnyard, and he could see that nothing had been planted here for a very long time. There were mature trees in places where rows of corn or wheat had once been.
Caldwell drove the car inside the barn and parked. He took out the bowls, gave Carol and Dave a big bowl of bottled water, and another bowl with dry kibble.
When they had gobbled up their breakfast, he talked to them for a while. He used the word “good” many times, and petted and stroked them, and when they wanted him to, he rubbed their bellies.
As they ventured out of the barn and trotted around the area sniffing the air and zigzagging across the untilled weedy fields, Peter went into the backseat of the car, opened both doors, and lay down to sleep.
He slept deeply in the shade of the ghostly gray-board barn. He dreamed a selection of his usual nightmares, in which he got into predicaments that made him fear a deception of his was about to be uncovered. This time, as often happened, he was with his daughter, Emily, who in his dream was still a toddler and prone to tripping or falling into holes or not quite making it through doorways in time to save herself. The worst part was when Anna made an appearance.
She was twenty-four years old when they met, and she had lived only until she was forty-five, so he always remembered her as a young woman, her face almost unlined and her eyes still sharp and bright and blue, her hair the color of dark chocolate. She came into his vision, not through a doorway, just there. She smiled at him and put her hands on his shoulders almost the way she would sometimes, and he tried to place his hands on her waist, but then she was gone.