With the back of his hand, Charlie checked his own forehead, and he was as cool as a cucumber. Didn’t have a cough or anything else, either. At least not so far. But if Harley did have something contagious, and he gave it to Charlie, there was going to be hell to pay.
A sign flashed by in the darkness, saying NEXT FOOD AND FUEL—50 MILES, and Charlie glanced at the gas gauge; he had about half a tank left, but with the extra canisters in the back he could easily make it to Nome without stopping. He didn’t want to risk using his credit card at a service station, or showing his face at a diner. One thing he’d learned was, people remembered the guy in the wheelchair, and just in case anyone came along trying to follow his trail, he didn’t want to leave any more clues than he had to. Let ’em guess what the Vane boys were up to.
In a weird way, he found it exhilarating to be out on the road like this. It reminded him of his former life, before he’d given himself over to the Lord. When they weren’t out crabbing, he and Harley had always been off running some scam, or hijacking somebody’s boat, or burglarizing some rich bastard’s vacation home. He knew now that what he’d been doing was wrong, that he was breaking the third, or was it the fourth, commandment, the one about not stealing, but he also knew that he’d felt a rush nothing else could come close to. These days, when he was preaching and really getting into it, really feeling the Presence of the Lord, it was sort of like that.
But if he was completely honest with himself, it still wasn’t as good as cracking open somebody’s wall safe and finding a stack of hundreds inside. Why was that? It was something he would have to take up with Jesus during his next heart-to-heart.
Fumbling inside his coat, he pulled a cigarette and a Bic lighter out of his shirt pocket. With the women gone, he could sneak in a smoke. He inhaled deeply, and dropped the lighter on the passenger seat. Funny, how a cigarette could make your lungs feel bigger even as, in actual fact, it shrunk ’em up.
A gust of wind slapped the side of the van so hard it roused Harley from his stupor. “The icon,” he said, in a worried voice, “what did you do with it?”
“It’s right here in the glove compartment. Same as the cross.”
“I need it.”
“What for?” Charlie couldn’t tell if his brother was in his right mind or not.
“To save me.”
Now he knew. “How’s it gonna save you, Harley?”
“It’s got the baby Jesus on it. Jesus saved you, right?”
“Yes, He did. But you don’t need an old icon for that.”
“I do,” Harley croaked. “I need something ’cuz I’m gonna die tonight.”
Charlie had never heard his brother say anything like that, not ever, and when he looked in the rearview mirror again, he saw that Harley’s eyes were burning like black coals and his whole head was shaking.
“Nobody’s dying tonight,” Charlie said. His mind went back to the night he’d seen—imagined—the hollow-eyed man in the long coat, reaching for the cross from the backseat. He didn’t care how much this Russian stuff was worth anymore—he was starting to wish he’d never laid eyes on any of it. “As soon as we get to Nome, we’ll take you to a doctor. Get you fixed right up.”
The road was veering now, as it began to track along the rim of the Heron River Gorge. Normally, that alone—the site of the accident that had left Charlie a paraplegic for life—was enough to rattle him, even if all this other crap hadn’t been going on.
But it was going on, which made his apprehension just that much worse.
A sign said the bridge was coming up ahead. Huge, snow-covered hunks of granite, left by ancient glaciers, lined the shoulders like train cars waiting to be hitched.
“There’s not enough time,” Harley said. “Give me the icon now.”
“I can’t reach over that far. I’ll get it for you once we cross the bridge.”
“Too late,” Harley said, with chilling certainty. “That’ll be too late.”
The van rocked and swayed as it hit a stretch of asphalt buckled from frost heave. Every year, the highway department had to come out in the spring and repair the damage done in the winter. Once in their youth, Charlie and Harley had tried to make off with one of their road graders, before realizing that its top speed was about ten miles per hour.
The gorge cut a deep swath through the land for nearly nine miles, and the bridge over it had been built at the narrowest spot available, between two rocky bluffs. He kept a close eye on the road, which was rapidly disappearing under a shifting scrim of snow and ice. Even with four-wheel drive and chains on his tires, he was losing traction now and then. His brother moaned, and when he glanced in the rearview mirror to check on him, what he noticed instead was a tiny pinprick of light, way down the road behind them.
A tiny pinprick that was moving.
“Harley, quit your moaning and turn around!”
“Why?”
“Just tell me what you see down the road!”
The blanket still wrapped around his shoulders, Harley turned and looked.