He could never think about the people who were after him without igniting a resentment that flared into rage. Coming after him after all these years was a mistake, and he hoped that every minute he stayed aboveground was giving them pain. But during that summer, he managed to restore his calm for a time. He was watchful, but not angry.
It was the middle of September before his calm was shaken. Caldwell was out on foot in the daytime without Zoe or the dogs. He had walked to the post office, and then done some shopping for fall clothes, and now he was on his way home. As he approached a crosswalk, the traffic signal turned green. He turned his head to look over his shoulder and check for cars before he stepped into the crosswalk. There was the same young man. The shock made his body tense to fight or run, and the name James Harriman came back to him as though it had never left his mind.
James Harriman was driving a black SUV, signaling for a right turn. As Caldwell turned and looked through the windshield, they locked eyes for a second, and then the SUV accelerated past him, through the intersection without making the right turn. His sight of the driver was lost in the tinted side window, and in a moment the SUV was gone.
As Caldwell walked, he studied the image in his memory and tried to invalidate his impression. He might have convinced himself he had been mistaken, but Harriman had reacted to the sight of him. Harriman’s eyes had widened in startled surprise, and then he had looked away and brought his hand to his face as though to shade his eyes. He had sped up and gone straight instead of turning so he would be out of Caldwell’s sight more quickly.
The car had been a Lexus LX 570. Caldwell had been searching new car models recently, so he knew that the list price was north of ninety thousand dollars. This was the car being driven by the kid who’d had twelve dollars in his wallet, the one Caldwell had given a hundred bucks, because he had seemed broke and desperate.
Caldwell went through a list of possibilities that might explain what he’d seen. Was he sure this was the same young man? The young man’s reaction seemed inexplicable otherwise. Was there an explanation for his driving that kind of vehicle? He might have found a legitimate job and made his first purchase an expensive car. Maybe, but it wasn’t likely a dealer would sell a kid with a hundred bucks in his wallet and no credit cards a car like that on the installment plan. He might have found an illegitimate job, and paid cash for the car. But the kid had tried to mug Caldwell when? During Sarah McDonald’s spring break about six months ago.
In Caldwell’s limited understanding of the way criminal enterprises usually worked, it was only the older and more secure members who could survive having high-profile vehicles. Ostentation got people arrested or killed. Maybe he was just driving his boss’s car on an errand, or acting as chauffeur. The side and back windows were so darkly tinted that another man might easily have been in the backseat. That seemed most likely. The SUV wasn’t a young man’s car—not sleek and cool with too much engine. It was a rhinoceros with wheels.
Caldwell took all of the possibilities into account, and then returned to the one that had come to him first. Maybe James Harriman hadn’t been trying to rob any victim he met on the street that April night. Maybe the reason he’d had a revolver was that he was trying to kill a particular man and make it look to the local police like a street crime. And maybe now he was back, doing reconnaissance for a second try.
Caldwell reminded himself that this sighting might be a coincidence, and Harriman might not have been thinking about him. But then Caldwell remembered a moment about forty years ago, when he had been in a survival course at Fort Rucker, Alabama. The trainer had said, “Most of the people who don’t believe in coincidences are still alive. That’s not a coincidence, either.”
He ducked through the parking lot of a delicatessen, then down the passage between two apartment buildings to the street. He took several shortcuts to reach the apartment, went around the building to the rear stairway facing the garage, and went inside.
It was reassuring that the dogs had been perfectly aware he was coming before he arrived. They were waiting for him at the apartment door with a calm welcome that indicated he had not surprised them. They sniffed his shoes and the bags he was carrying and then escorted him into his bedroom.