Firestarter(20)

Another car went by out front.

The clerk initialed the card and tucked it away. "That's seventeen dollars and fifty cents."

"Do you mind change?" Andy asked. "I never did get a chance to cash up, and I'm dragging around twenty pounds of silver. I hate these country milk runs."

"Spends just as easy I don't mind."

"Thanks." Andy reached into his coat pocket, pushed aside the five-dollar bill with his fingers, and brought out a fistful of quarters, nickels, and dimes. He counted out fourteen dollars, brought out some more change, and made up the rest. The clerk had been separating the coins into neat piles and now he swept them into the correct compartments of the cash drawer.

"You know," he said, closing the drawer and looking at Andy hopefully, "I'd knock five bucks off your room bill if you could fix my cigarette machine. It's been out of order for a week."

Charlie walked over to the machine, which stood in the corner, pretended to look at it, and then walked back. "Not our brand," he said. "Oh. Shit. Okay. Goodnight, buddy. You'll find an extra blanket on the closet shelf if you should want it."

"Fine."

He went out. The gravel crunched beneath his feet, hideously amplified in his ears, sounding like stone cereal. He walked over to the evergreen shrub where he had left Charlie and Charlie wasn't there. "Charlie?" No answer. He switched the room key on its long green plastic tab from one hand to the other. Both hands were suddenly sweaty. "Charlie?"

Still no answer. He thought back and now it seemed to him that the car that had gone past when he had been filling out the registration card had been slowing down. Maybe it had been a green car.

His heartbeat began to pick up, sending jolts of pain up to his skull. He tried to think what he should do if Charlie was gone, but he couldn't think. His head hurt too badly. He-

There was a low, snorting, snoring sound from deeper back in the bushes. A sound he knew very well. He leaped toward it, gravel spurting out from under his shoes. Stiff" evergreen branches scraped his legs and raked back the tails of his corduroy jacket.

Charlie was lying on her side on the verge of the motel lawn, knees drawn up nearly to her chin, hands between them. Fast asleep. Andy stood with his eyes closed for a moment and then shook her awake for what he hoped would be the last time that night. That long, long night.

Her eyelids fluttered, and then she was looking up at him. "Daddy?" she asked, her voice was blurred, still half in her dreams. "I got out of sight like you said."

"I know, honey," he said. "I know you did. Come on. We're going to bed."

22

Twenty minutes later they were both in the double bed of Unit 16, Charlie fast asleep and breathing evenly, Andy still awake but drifting toward sleep, only the steady thump in his head still holding him up. And the questions.

They had been on the run for about a year. It was almost impossible to believe, maybe because it hadn't seemed so much like running, not when they had been in Port City, Pennsylvania, running the Weight-Off program. Charlie had gone to school in Port City, and how could you be on the run if you were holding a job and your daughter was going to first grade? They had almost been caught in Port City, not because they had been particularly good (although they were terribly dogged, and that frightened Andy a lot) but because Andy had made that crucial lapse-he had allowed himself temporarily to forget they were fugitives.

No chance of that now.

How close were they? Still back in New York? If only he could believe that-they hadn't got the cabby's number; they were still tracking him down. More likely they were in Albany, crawling over the airport like maggots over a pile of meat scraps. Hastings Glen? Maybe by morning. But maybe not. Hastings Glen was fifteen miles from the airport. No need to let paranoia sweep away good sense.

I deserve it! I deserve to go in front of the cars for setting that man on fire!

His own voice replying: It could have been worse. It could have been his face.

Voices in a haunted room.

Something else came to him. He was supposed to be driving a Vega. When morning came and the night man didn't see a Vega parked in front of Unit 16, would he just assume his United Vending Company man had pushed on? Or would he investigate? Nothing he could do about it now. He was totally wasted.

I thought there was something funny about him. He looked pale, sick. And he paid with change. He said he worked for a vending-machine company, but he couldn't fix the cigarette machine in the lobby.

Voices in a haunted room.

He shifted onto his side, listening to Charlie's slow, even breathing. He thought they had taken her, but she'd only gone farther back in the bushes. Out of sight. Charlene Norma McGee, Charlie since... well, since forever. If they took you, Charlie, I don't know what I'd do.

23

One last voice, his roommate Quincey's voice, from six years ago.

Charlie had been a year old then, and of course they knew she wasn't normal. They had known that since she was a week old and Vicky had brought her into their bed with them because when she was left in the little crib, the pillow began to... well, began to smolder. The night they had put the crib away forever, not speaking in their fright, a fright too big and too strange to be articulated, it had got hot enough to blister her cheek and she had screamed most of the night, in spite of the Solarcaine Andy had found in the medicine chest. What a crazyhouse that first year had been, no sleep, endless fear. Fires in the wastebaskets when her bottles were late; once the curtains had burst into flame, and if Vicky hadn't been in the room-It was her fall down the stairs that had finally prompted him to call Quincey. She had been crawling then, and was quite good at going up the stairs on her hands and knees and then backing down again the same way. Andy had been sitting with her that day; Vicky was out at Senter's with one of her friends, shopping. She had been hesitant about going, and Andy nearly had to throw her out the door. She was looking too used lately, too tired. There was something starey in her eyes that made him think about those combat-fatigue stories you heard during wartime.