The sisters, coming out of the roadhouse, with their white faces and wisps of black hair blowing free from the buns at the back of their heads, reminded him of a couple of strutting crows. Bathsheba was carrying the thermos and Rebekah had the sandwich in a paper bag. Salmon salad on whole wheat toast, as it turned out. At least she got that sort of thing right. He ate it while playing a CD of a biblical sermon—sometimes he got ideas for his own broadcasts this way—and then backed the car out of the lot.
They could have spent the night in Nome, but Charlie hated to waste money, and besides, he liked to be back in his own place, with the ramps and everything else he needed to be comfortable. Not to mention the fact that the chances of hearing any news out of nearby St. Pete’s were going to be better there than in distant Nome. This first part of the road was blissfully asphalt, with a white line down the center and shoulders on either side, but he knew the rest of the way back wasn’t going to be that smooth. At least the van was equipped for it, with two spare cans of gas (a necessity when traveling in the wilderness regions of Alaska), plastic headlight covers to ward off the flying gravel, and, in case he collided with anything big, a wire mesh screen in front to protect the radiator and the paint job. If you hit a moose head-on, it could be curtains for more than the moose.
He hadn’t gone twenty miles before he glanced in the rearview mirror and saw that Bathsheba had slumped over in the backseat, fast asleep. Rebekah noticed it, too, and in a low voice, said, “So, how much did you get from Voynovich?”
“Nothing.”
“What are you talking about?” She glanced into the backseat again to make sure her sister was out. Some things they kept from her, for fear she could blurt out a piece of news she wasn’t supposed to know.
“I hung on to it,” he said, patting his breast pocket.
Rebekah folded her arms across her breast and, barely containing herself, said, “You want to tell me why?”
“Because he offered me a grand up front.”
Now she really looked puzzled.
“And if it was worth that much to him just to keep me from walking out of the store with it, it must be worth a helluva lot more. If Harley and his idiot friends manage to find any more stuff like it on the island, I’m going to go on down to Tacoma and fence it all myself.”
In a mollified tone, she asked, “Did he at least tell you what it said on the back?”
“Yeah, but it’s just an endearment. Nothing that says Romanov about it.” Or at least so far as he knew. When he got home, and wasn’t online ministering to Vane’s Holy Writ flock, he planned to be doing whatever research he could. Dollars to donuts, Voynovich was already doing exactly the same thing.
He drove on into the night, sipping the tea, and watching as, first, the center white line disappeared, then as the breakdown lane evaporated; the road became a narrow, serpentine trail, wending its way through snowy hills and along frozen streambeds. There were old wooden bridges, reinforced and supported on cement blocks, stretching across frozen gullies, and highway signs warning of wildlife crossings. Moose, bear, elk, caribou, fox, Dall sheep. At the right times of year, if you had a mind to, you could survive off the roadkill alone in these parts.
Rebekah, too, soon fell asleep, her head leaning against her doorjamb, and Charlie tried to stay awake by paying attention to the biblical sermon on the CD. The preacher was an old man called the Right Reverend Abercrombie, and he spoke in a lulling, monotonous tone.
“And when we read, in Exodus 7–12, about the ten plagues that descended upon the Egyptians, what are we to make of them?” the reverend said. “What was God’s purpose?”
To kick Egyptian ass, Charlie thought, and to kick it hard.
“The purpose of the Lord was twofold,” the reverend continued. “Of course he wanted to persuade the Pharaoh to free the Israelites. But he also had a second reason—and that was to show just how strong the God of Israel was in comparison to the gods of Egypt. It was a point he wanted to make not only to the Egyptians, but to the Israelites themselves.”
While the Reverend Abercrombie went through his analysis of the ten plagues, one by one, and expounded on what each of them meant, Charlie kept his eyes peeled for trouble up ahead, looking out for the little red flags that were commonly posted along the roadside wherever there were loose gravel breaks, or where the pavement had cracked from frost heaval.
“ ‘If you do not let my people go,’ ” Abercrombie recited from the Old Testament, “ ‘I will send swarms of flies on you and your officials, on your people and into your houses.’ ”
What had always troubled Charlie about the ten plagues was that Yahweh seemed so willing to go another round all the time, whether it was with flies, or gnats, or frogs, or pestilence. For the Lord God Almighty, He didn’t know how to lower the boom, once and for all. No wonder Pharaoh kept agreeing to set the Israelites free before going back on his word every time.
An oil tanker, horn blaring as it came round a bend, barreled past him in the opposite direction, the wind from its passage buffeting the van.
But both of the sisters slept on.