Firestarter(60)
Nothing came.
Never mind. Sit a little longer. Listen to the Stones. Shakey's Pizza. You get your choice, thin crust or crunchy. You pays your money and you takes your choice, as Granther McGee used to say. The Stones exhorting little sister to dance, dance, dance. Quincey saying they'd probably put her in a room so two hundred and twenty million Americans could be safe and free. Vicky. He and Vicky had had a hard time with the sex part of it at first. She had been scared to death. Just call me the Ice Maiden, she had said through her tears after that first miserable botched time. No sex, please we're British. But somehow the Lot Six experiment had helped with that-the totality they had shared was, in its own way, like mating. Still it had been difficult. A little at a time. Gentleness. Tears. Vicky beginning to respond, then stiffening, crying out Don't, it'll hurt, don't, Andy, stop it! And somehow it was the Lot Six experiment, that common experience, that had enabled him to go on trying, like a safecracker who knows that there is a way, always a way. And there had come a night when they got through it. Later there came a night when it was all right. Then, suddenly, a night when it was glorious. Dance, little sister, dance. He had been with her when Charlie was born. A quick, easy delivery. Quick to fix, easy to please...
Nothing was coming. The trail was getting colder and he had nothing. The airport or the turnpike? The lady or the tiger?
The Stones finished. The Doobie Brothers came on, wanting to know without love, where would you be right now. Andy didn't know. The sun beat down. The lines in the Shakey's parking lot had been freshly painted. They were very white and firm against the black-top. The lot was more than three quarters full. It was lunchtime. Had Charlie got her lunch? Would they feed her? Maybe
(maybe they'll stop make a service stop you know at one of those Hojos along the pike-after all they can't drive can't drive can't drive)
Where? Can't drive where?
(can't drive all the way to Virginia without making a rest stop can they? I mean a little girl has got to stop and take a tinkle sometime, doesn't she?)
He straightened up, feeling an immense but numb feeling of gratitude. It had come, just like that. Not the airport, which would have been his first guess, if he had only been guessing. Not the airport but the turnpike. He wasn't completely sure the hunch was bona fide, but he was pretty sure. And it was better than not having any idea at all.
He rolled the station wagon over the freshly painted arrow pointing the way out and turned right on Carlisle again. Ten minutes later he was on the turnpike, headed east with a toll ticket tucked into the battered, annotated copy of Paradise Lost on the seat beside him. Ten minutes after that, Harrison, Ohio, was behind him. He had started on the trip east that would bring him to Tashmore, Vermont, fourteen months later.
The calm held. He played the radio loud and that helped. Song followed song and he only recognized the older ones because he had pretty much stopped listening to pop music three or four years ago. No particular reason; it had just happened. They still had the jump on him, but the calm insisted with its own cold logic that it was a very good jump-and that he would be asking for trouble if he just started roaring along the passing lane at seventy.
He pegged the speedometer at just over sixty, reasoning that the men who had taken Charlie would not want to exceed the fifty-five speed limit. They could flash their credentials at any Smokey who pulled them down for speeding, that was true, but they might have a certain amount of difficulty explaining a screaming six-year-old child just the same. It might slow them down, and it would surely get them in dutch with whoever was pulling the strings on this show.
They could have drugged her and hidden her, his mind whispered. Then if they got stopped for busting along at seventy, even eighty, they'd only have to show their paper and keep right on going. Is an Ohio state cop going to toss a van that belongs to the Shop?
Andy struggled with that as eastern Ohio flowed by. First, they might be scared to drug Charlie. Sedating a child can be a tricky business unless you're an expert... and they might not be sure what sedation would do to the powers they were supposed to be investigating. Second, a state cop might just go ahead and toss the van anyway, or at least hold them in the breakdown lane while he checked the validity of their ID. Third, why should they be busting their asses? They had no idea anyone was onto them. It was still not one o'clock. Andy was supposed to be at the college until two o'clock. The Shop people would not expect him to arrive back home until two-twenty or so at the earliest and probably felt they could count on anywhere from twenty minutes to two hours after that before the alarm was raised. Why shouldn't they just be loafing along?
Andy went a little faster.
Forty minutes passed, then fifty. It seemed longer. He was beginning to sweat a little; worry was nibbling through the artificial ice of calm and shock. Was the van really someplace up ahead, or had the whole thing been so much wishful thinking?
The traffic patterns formed and re-formed. He saw two gray vans. Neither of them looked like the one he had seen cruising around Lakeland. One was driven by an elderly man with flying white hair. The other was full of freaks smoking dope. The driver saw Andy's close scrutiny and waved a roach clip at him. The girl beside him popped up her middle finger, kissed it gently, and tipped it Andy's way. Then they were behind him.
His head was beginning to ache. The traffic was heavy, the sun was bright. Each car was loaded with chrome, and each piece of chrome had its own arrow of sun to flick into his eyes. He passed a sign that said REST AREA 1 MILE AHEAD.