“Let it open up here, on this side of the road,” I begged the whimsical ruler of the universe. “Let me find it, before they find me.”
I crawled along slowly, patting the embankment, praying for it to give way. About fifty feet from where the squad car stood, Benji tapped my shoulder with a soft, timid hand. He had found the entrance.
I crawled back after him. The opening was a black hole on the road side of the ditch, not high enough for me to stand upright but just wide enough for us to move side by side. It smelled of mold and animal droppings, and it was as dark as the entrance to death. We couldn’t afford to show a light. I grabbed Benji’s left hand with my right. He didn’t try to withdraw; indeed, he clung to me, trembling, as we squelched along the muddy floor.
It should have been a quarter mile, getting to the hedge, going under Powell Road, coming up in Anodyne Park, but the tunnel seemed to stretch endlessly in front of us. What if we weren’t under Powell Road at all, but were shuffling into the Deep Tunnel? We could wander for hours until we collapsed and died of hunger and thirst. No one would find our bones for years, if they ever came on them at all. Morrell, Lotty, everyone I loved who cared about me, they would forget me. Already they were so far away that they didn’t exist.
My breath rasped dry against my tonsils. My back ached from walking in a stoop, red darts flashed across my eyes. And then we were suddenly breathing fresh air, smelling the juniper berries, scrambling uphill, standing upright on asphalt.
I shuddered in relief. We stood trembling for a few minutes, stretching sore muscles, listening for pursuit. All was blissfully quiet. Anodyne, the healing of pain. All we needed was a car, and we’d be home free.
I led Benji up the winding path toward the town houses, where cars were parked for the night in the drives that lay behind them. In this wealthy
enclave I didn’t expect to find an old car, the kind where I could break the steering column and pull out the ignition rod. But the fifth house we came to, luck favored us: someone had left their keys in a Jaguar XK-12. I’d always wanted to drive one of these. I opened the door for Benji.
“You are stealing this car?”
“Borrowing,” I grinned. “The owner will get it back tomorrow”
CHAPTER 29
Back to the Briar Patch
So it’s you, my girl, is it? Been long enough since you showed your face around here. Come to serve early mass for me?” Father Lou stood at the rectory door in T-shirt and trousers, his face still red from shaving.
As I’d driven along Ogden Avenue into the city, I figured if I didn’t get to the rectory before Father Lou started robing, I could slip into the church with the handful of neighborhood people who came for the six A.M. service. As it was, even taking the long slow route, I managed to pull around to the back of the building by five-thirty.
Benjamin had fallen asleep before we reached Warrenville Road. I kept my window open, needing cold air on my face to keep my own longing for sleep from overpowering me, but I ran the heater so that the vents pointed on the young man. His book fell from his slackened hand; I leaned over at a stoplight and put it in his lap so he wouldn’t wake up distressed. He’d dropped it while we were in the ditch and revealed-in a defiant gasp, as if he expected me to strike him or abandon him on the spot-that it was the Koran, his father’s own copy, he could not lose it.
“In that case, we’d better hang on to it,” was all I said.
When I had us both strapped into the Jaguar, a wave of fatigue crested over me, pulling me under. I only woke a few minutes later because a
helicopter thundered directly over us, heading east. I blinked at it, hoping it was taking a teenager to a hospital, not to a morgue.
I put the car in gear and drove slowly past the guard station. The man in the booth nodded at the car: he was there to keep the world out. It didn’t matter who left the complex.
I bypassed the tollway, preferring to take Ogden Avenue. If Schorr decided to issue an APB on me, they’d stake out the expressways first. They wouldn’t know what car I was driving, but they might guess I’d taken someone else’s when I didn’t show up at the Mustang.