Cornell held up the novel so that the boy could see the jacket and the author’s name. “Something Wicked This Way Comes by Mr. Ray Bradbury. It sounds very scary, but it’s not really. It’s magic.”
“Scary is okay,” the boy said. “Scary is just the way things are sometimes.”
And in this manner they had passed the long afternoon: Cornell reading and the boy listening and the dogs—sometimes one, sometimes both—sharing the La-Z-Boy with their young master. At first reading aloud to someone was the strangest thing, though after a while it wasn’t strange at all.
What a nice day it had been.
Now night fell on Borrego Valley.
47
AFTER STRIPPING OUT of her clothes and removing the wig, she took her pistol into the bathroom and put it on the vanity. Although the shower was gloriously hot, she didn’t linger in the spray.
She dressed in fresh clothes. The pixie-cut wig smelled less of smoke than did the garments she’d shed. New contact lenses made her blue eyes brown. She put on stage-prop glasses with dark frames.
After washing her underwear and T-shirt in the bathroom sink, she hung them to dry on the shower-curtain rod.
She paged through an issue of Palm Springs Life magazine and found an ad for a dry cleaner. She drove there and paid an express charge to be able to pick up her sport coat and jeans the next morning.
She thought it darkly amusing: the most-wanted fugitive in America tending to such mundane tasks. In the movies, a protagonist on the run never took a break from the chase to buy toothpaste.
In a restaurant, she ordered a twelve-ounce filet mignon. Hold the baked potato. Double vegetables. A glass of Caymus cabernet.
After ordering dinner, she took a pill from a bottle of acid reducer and chased it with water. From a pocket, she retrieved the cameo that Travis had given her. Waiting for the wine, she worked the soapstone carving between thumb and forefinger, as a penitent might caress the beads of a rosary while petitioning for mercy.
48
THE TRAILWAYS BUS STATION in Killeen, Texas, is so thinly sketched that only a fool would believe it’s real. A single-story white metal building with a minimum-pitch roof. Not even a pretense of style. There is no landscaping whatsoever, unless you are of the opinion that half an acre of medium-gray asphalt paving mottled with darker oil stains is the equivalent of greenery, predicated on the fact that blacktop and plants are both carbon-based.
Garage bays—where buses are parked, cleaned, serviced, and repaired—occupy most of the structure, and the public area is cramped and drab, but tidy.
Although the space is clean, the twentysomething woman at the ticket counter is immaculate and more detailed than her environment. Pleasant to look at, she wears her lustrous blond hair in a ponytail tied with white ribbon. No makeup, no eye shadow, no lipstick. Her well-scrubbed skin is smooth, with a slight pink flush. When she smiles, her teeth look as if they have never made contact with food or drink to sully them, and the whites of her eyes are as clear as purified milk. She wears a spotless white dress with a Peter Pan collar, and as Egon Gottfrey approaches the counter, the woman’s hands glisten with sanitizing gel as she works them together.
He flashes his FBI photo ID. “I need to talk to whoever worked this counter this morning.”
She is Sue Ann McMaster, who never before met an FBI person, who can’t imagine what she could tell him about anything that would be worth his time, who is near the end of her second shift today because Lureen Klaven took a bad fall this morning and couldn’t work the afternoon. She says she loves the smell of Purell hands, and as the last of the gel evaporates, she asks what he needs to know.
When she sees the photo of Ancel and Clare, she smiles broadly. “Oh, yes, they were lovely people, going to Houston for the birth of their first grandchild. Just bubbling with excitement about it.”
“What time did their bus leave?”
“It was supposed to depart at ten twenty-five, and maybe it was five minutes late. We have three buses a day going to Houston, and our on-time departure performance is over ninety percent.”
“What time do they arrive in Houston?”
“Oh, hours ago. Three o’clock is the ETA.” She checks her computer. “Pretty close perfect. They docked in Houston at nine minutes past three.”
“Can you give me the address of the terminal in Houston?”
When Gottfrey comes out of the bus station, Rupert and Vince are leaning against their Jeep Wrangler, staring at the sky. The darkness and the wealth of stars should create a perception of the immensity of the universe and the emptiness between its infinite suns, but it feels no less heavy than before and still seems to be coming down on him—in spite of the fact that it’s only an illusion.
He is beginning to think that this perception of a looming, crushing weight arises from an intuitive sense that somehow he is screwing up, that Ancel and Clare are slipping away in spite of all the resources at his disposal, that he no longer understands the script and is in the process of displeasing the Unknown Playwright.
The Killeen Police Department is within a block of the bus station. The watch commander is pleased to provide three FBI agents with a private office and computer.
Houston is one of the increasing number of cities from which the NSA now receives real-time input of video from airports, train stations, and bus depots.
While Rupert Baldwin back-doors the NSA Data Center in Utah and swims through the immense ocean of digital data, seeking archived video from the Houston terminal to which the passengers from Killeen were delivered hours earlier, Gottfrey bounces some questions off Vince Penn. He expects no useful answers, but this helps him frame his own theory of what Ancel and Clare’s intentions might be.
“At the hour they left the Longrin ranch, say two-thirty in the morning, with hardly any traffic on the roads, they should have been here in Killeen by four-thirty, if not sooner. According to Jim Lee Cassidy they had just parked their Mercury Mountaineer outside his real-estate office at a few minutes after ten o’clock. That leaves five and a half missing hours. Where were they all that time?”
“Maybe a motel. Getting some shut-eye,” Vince suggests.
“After that TV show, they figure they’re targeted, they’ll be injected, so they go on the run—only to stop for some shut-eye?”
“Everybody’s got to sleep. Even Dracula sleeps, and he’s the living dead.”
“When you go on the run, don’t you take essentials, a few changes of clothes, toiletries? Cash?”
“I never been on the run.”
“Jim Lee Cassidy didn’t say anything about them having luggage. If they’d had bags of any kind, when he saw them go two blocks and turn right at the corner, he would have known they were going to the bus depot. He wouldn’t have had to guess.”
“Well, he’s a Realtor,” says Vince.
Gottfrey knows he shouldn’t ask. “What does that mean?”
“They’re like surgeons. They work with real things, so if they can’t be certain, they won’t say they are. They’ll only guess.”
“Surgeons and Realtors, huh?”
“And astronauts,” Vince adds.
“Here we go,” Rupert Baldwin says. “Their bus, pulling into the terminal in Houston earlier today.”
The three of them huddle before the computer, watching as one by one the travelers disembark. The camera provides a clearer image than is sometimes the case. Ancel and Clare are not on the bus.
49
THE NIGHT FEATHERED by palms and ferns, perfumed by jasmine, now by burgers on a barbecue … the blood-red blooms of a trumpet vine in a lighted arbor … young women’s laughter so innocent that it seems to come from another world in which no degradation of any kind exists … and one block later Glenn Miller’s softly swinging “String of Pearls” issuing from the open window of a house …