Two Days Gone (Ryan DeMarco Mystery #1)(26)

Out in the store, he shopped carefully, tried to think ahead. Protein, nutrients. Be smart so you don’t have to do this again. A loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter. A can of cashews, four small bags of beef jerky. When he opened the cooler to reach for a gallon of orange juice, the tin of cashews clattered to the floor. He sank to his knees, gathered it in, and cradled everything against his chest.

“Here you go,” the cashier said, startling him. The boy had come up behind him and stood there smiling now, holding out a small plastic basket.

“Yeah, thanks,” Huston said. He dropped the items into the basket, took the basket from the boy’s hand. “Car food,” he told him.

“Where you headed?”

“Toronto,” said Huston. “Started out from Texas two days ago.” He stood facing the cooler, kept his head turned to the side as if he were searching for another item.

“That’s what? Fifteen hundred miles at least. You drive straight through?”

“We stopped at a rest area a couple times for a little sleep, but yeah, mostly straight through.”

The boy nodded and stood there waiting, apparently eager for conversation.

Huston turned his back to the boy, faced the shelves stocked with chips and crackers, little boxes of overpriced cookies. “My wife drove Jamie over to Mickey D’s for a Happy Meal. Which makes me the designated shopper.”

“You finding everything you need?”

“I was hoping for something healthy, you know? Kind of hard to find in a convenience store.”

“At the end of the aisle there’s some apples and bananas.”

“No kidding?” said Huston, turning away.

The bananas were three for a dollar, the Fuji apples seventy-five cents each. Huston chose three of each, then crossed to the counter. “How much for one of these pizzas?”

“The whole thing? Nine ninety-five. Two dollars extra for pepperoni.”

“Skip the pepperoni,” Huston said. He set the basket on the counter. “Tell you what. If you want to start ringing me up, I’ll grab one or two more things real quick.”

“Will do,” the boy said.

Huston felt strange again, a character in a story. A character pretending to be a corpse pretending to be normal when in fact the world had ended, the bomb had gone off, all was devastation. What else did this corpse need to keep the show going a while longer? A toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste. A pair of mirrored sunglasses. A black ball cap with a yellow P embroidered on it. He placed these on the counter with the other items, watched the digital display adding up the prices. He could feel his reflection looming in the convex mirror suspended from the ceiling, could feel the probing eye of the security camera.

The cashier said, “Sixty-eight fifty-six.”

Huston withdrew three twenties and a ten from his wallet, then dropped the change back inside. Twenty-four dollars and a few coins left, he told himself. The sum assets of your life. He picked up both plastic shopping bags and the jug of orange juice with his left hand, the pizza box with his right.

“You going to drive through to Toronto tonight?” the boy asked.

“That’s the plan.” He started for the door.

“Well…have a good one.”

“You too.”

Already the night felt several degrees cooler. Where to now? he wondered. He tore the tag off the ball cap, bent a curve into the bill, placed the hat on his head. The McDonald’s was several blocks to his left so he headed in that direction just in case the cashier was watching. After a block, he turned back toward the woods. Think! he told himself. You know where you are. Think of a place to go for the night.

Twenty yards into the woods, he could wait no longer. He sat behind a tall pin oak, pulled the pizza box onto his lap. He ate quickly, two slices in little more than a minute, a long swallow of orange juice, with little recognition of the flavors. Then he forced himself to slow down. Unfortunately, that allowed the memories to start again—Tommy at his last birthday party, stuffing his face at Pizza Hut, letting long streamers of cheese dangle from his mouth…

Huston squeezed shut his eyes, drove the happy images away. Gone, gone, all was gone.

“‘Whose woods these are,’” Huston mumbled aloud and focused his thoughts, tried to fill his mind’s eye with the words themselves. “‘I think I know. His house is in the village though…’”





Nineteen


DeMarco awoke to the gray emptiness of dawn. The house was empty and the world was empty and all he had to fill it with was another day’s work. This day and the next day and the next day and the next. For a while, he did not care about any of it, did not want to face another parade of slow hours, but as always, after staring at the dull light in the window for a couple minutes, he told himself to get his sorry ass out of bed. “Do somebody some good today,” he said.

A few minutes later, coffee was dripping into the decanter. Then he was in the shower and the water was steaming the glass. Then he dried himself and wiped the fog off the mirror, and just like that, the routine took hold as always, the mechanics of living, step one, step two, step three, and the wind-up man was moving again.

On his desk at the barracks, he found another CD from Trooper Carmichael. The trooper had managed to unlock all of Huston’s password-protected and deleted files. DeMarco inserted the disk and opened the file marked Deleted. The file contained drafts of several letters of recommendation for former students, each letter distinguished by a kind but insistent honesty.