“Go fuck yourself.” David hung up. His whole body vibrated. The milk shake in his stomach felt as if it had started to curdle.
He stood there for a moment, not trusting himself to maintain his composure if he returned to Ellie too soon. He watched the dust swirl in off the roadway. He listened to a pair of young boys playing behind the burger joint, probably the children of the proprietor. He looked in their direction and saw two dark-skinned, slender boys chasing butterflies through a field. So many butterflies. Whole regiments of them.
Beyond the boys, deeper in the field, stood a figure. It was a man, though his face was obscured by a plain white mask with two eyeholes cut into it. It looked eerily like the paper plate mask Sandy Udell had been wearing the day he threw himself from the classroom window.
Despite the distance between them, the figure appeared to be staring directly at him.
Then a sound registered in his ears. Upon hearing it, he realized he had been hearing it for several seconds now, but was only now realizing it. The goddamn whirring blades of a helicopter.
No sooner did he realize this than he looked up and saw the bright silvery frame of a chopper cruise out from behind the roof of the burger joint. It was much too low to the ground to be a casual flyby, and it sent dust and debris twirling like dervishes across the parking lot. The striped umbrellas above the picnic tables rattled and flapped in their frames. Ellie looked up as the helicopter rushed by overhead, its shadow momentarily darkening her as it whipped along the earth. She covered her eyes with one hand as grit whipped across the ground.
David watched it head in the direction of the setting sun. The land was flat, and he was able to watch it for a good long time before it shrank first into a pinpoint, then vanished into nothingness altogether.
“Who were they?” Ellie asked, staring out at the horizon. “Cops?”
He hadn’t made out any insignia on the helicopter. “Not sure. Military, I think.”
“Should we get back in the car?”
“Yes.”
Before leaving, he looked back toward the field. The two boys were still frolicking in the tall grass, but the man in the mask was gone.
38
Fifteen minutes later, as they continued heading east along I-70, a police car appeared in the rearview mirror. It seemed the past couple days could be summed up by a procession of police cars in rearview mirrors. They’d passed a few on this lonely stretch of highway, either parked on the shoulder against endless fields of corn or seated behind a billboard, their windshields golden with pollen, but this was the first one on the road. David kept his eyes on it for a while, and at one point he thought that the cruiser was keeping a deliberate distance between them. When David slowed, it appeared that the police car slowed, too. For a moment, he considered pulling onto the shoulder of the road to see if the cop would pass him, but he decided that was a stupid idea. What if the cop stopped to see if he needed some assistance? He’d be inviting disaster.
After a time, his mind returned to the man back at the burger and ice cream shop, the guy who’d been appraising the Oldsmobile while spooning frozen yogurt into his gullet. Ninety-nine Cutlass, am I right? It wasn’t a goddamn Lamborghini; why had that guy been so interested in the car?
But it wasn’t really the car, was it? he thought now. He hadn’t been looking at the car; he’d been checking out the license plate.
“Goddamn,” David muttered, glancing up at the rearview again at the police car. It maintained its distance.
A Maryland license plate in Kansas was certainly unusual but not something overtly suspicious, was it? The guy had definitely been looking at the license plate . . . yet despite his friendly banter, he never once commented on the fact that David and Ellie were roughly twelve hundred miles from home. He’d commented on Ellie, though. That your boy?
“Back at the milk shake place, when you went to the bathroom, which restroom did you use?”
“What?”
“Which restroom, El? Do you remember? Men’s or women’s?”
“Oh, uh . . .” She just stared at him.
Back at the roadside joint, she’d had the baseball hat on, a boy’s shirt. She had been playing her role. The stranger had recognized her as a boy, and had said as much to David—That your boy? Yet he realized that Ellie had come out of the goddamn women’s restroom, and the stranger had seen it.
“I can’t . . . I think . . .” Her voice trembled.
“Never mind.” His eyes flitted back toward the cop car in the rearview. Suddenly his bladder felt heavy. His heart felt like a piston jackhammering against the wall of his rib cage.
Cooper’s gun was under his seat.
As they approached an exit, David decided to take it. He turned onto the ramp, silently praying that the police car would not follow them, would not follow them, would not follow them.
David Arlen held his breath.
39
Ten weeks earlier