The Sovereign Era (Book 2): Pilgrimage (27 page)

Did they know the guy was after them?

It shouldn’t have taken that long to hit me, but looking back, I guess I can be forgiven for being a little dense, given my morning.

My dad was in some very serious danger, and he probably didn’t even know it.

I had to figure out where they were all going. Somehow, I had to catch up with them before…Evelyn’s…partner did.

If I could find them, if we could get to the partner…I couldn’t give the thought any more form than that, but it drove an urgency into my body that gave me a sudden burst of energy.

If I could figure this out. If I could find my dad. If I could stop the partner from doing whatever it was they had planned. Maybe…maybe, somehow, everything would work out.

I shot out of the chair, out of the bedroom, and down the hall. I had to get back to Denver’s.

The body stopped me.

She was so very, completely, absolutely dead.

It had happened. This thing had happened.

I closed my eyes. I just couldn’t look anymore. I let the rest of my sensorium guide me until she was behind me and I was at the front door.

If I could figure this out, maybe everything would work out.

Yeah. But she’d still be dead. And I’d still be the person who killed her.

From The Journal Of Nate Charters – Twenty One

I felt like every housewife and kid home sick from school in Kirby Lake could see me leave that house and slink next door to Denver’s. The skin on the back of my neck crawled. I couldn’t stand up straight; anything more than a crouch felt like I was painting a bull’s-eye on my back.

There was a dead woman back there. How was it possible the whole world didn’t know it?

If they did, they hadn’t had time to come running just yet. I made it around to the back of Denver’s house undetected, so far as I could tell.

I didn’t know how to get in. I didn’t have a key. He was like family, but that didn’t mean he trusted me with coming and going as I pleased.

I decided shit was too important to fuck around. I took advantage of what little energy I had left in me and kicked the door in.

The sound surprised me; it was very loud in the quiet of the neighborhood. I slipped inside the dim kitchen right away.

Bath or not, my father’s pungent animal scent was all over the inside of Denver’s house. I was probably the only person who would notice, but man, it was strong. I half expected to see him come around the corner.

The house was not quite silent in the way that only empty houses could be. I didn’t have anything to worry about, as far as that went, at least.

I had to figure out where my dad, Denver, and the mystery woman went. But first…

Standing in the kitchen with my energy reserves pretty much entirely drained from the awful business of the morning, I couldn’t resist opening the fridge. I wouldn’t be able to do a thing if I didn’t get some food in me.

I tore a few slices of butter-top bread out of its plastic bag and shoved them in my mouth. Apparently keeping bread in the fridge wasn’t so weird after all. While I chewed, I found a nearly empty tube of Braunschweiger wrapped in plastic wrap. I tossed the wrap aside and squeezed what was left of the sandwich spread into my mouth.

Denver had a half-gallon of milk. I gulped from the carton. I also ate a few slices of Swiss cheese, let pickle relish fall out of the bottle and into my mouth, and crunched down two handfuls of baby carrots.

I made a mess. I felt better.

Okay.

Now what?

I wandered out of the kitchen, hoping my gaze would fall on something useful. Instead, moving past the dining table, I was struck by a powerful sense of déjà vu.

I had just seen a view very much like the angle from one of the strange surveillance tapes next door.

I spun in a slow circle. Where in the hell were the cameras hidden? Were they watching me, taping me right now?

So creepy.

“Fuck it,” I said to myself. There was no time to care. Wherever my dad was, the PrenticeCambrian guy was getting closer. I had to find them.

I stepped into the living room. I saw Denver’s old rotary phone on an end table, right next to a small, lined spiral notepad.

I hunkered down to take a look. There were a lot of white paper scraps stuck in the metal spiral holding the thing together, as if a bunch of pages had been torn out. I flipped the cover back.

The very first page had some numbers scrawled on it. Was this something?

18, 15, 90, 93…

Oh, yeah. This was something. I knew it.

My love of maps was about to pay off. Over the last year, staring at the interwoven red and blue and black lines of the giant National Geographic map of the United States on my bedroom wall, I’d become pretty familiar with one particular potential “elsewhere.”

My father was on his way to Missoula, Montana.

To the Donner Institute for Sovereign Studies.

From The Journal Of Nate Charters – Twenty Two

With the food in me and my new knowledge, I had a fire under my ass. One way or another, I would retrace their route. Maybe I’d hitchhike. Maybe I’d have to get a bus, or something.

Whatever. I couldn’t do it without money, and I couldn’t do it in the clothes I was wearing. The woman’s blood was all over me.

I found Denver’s bedroom, stripped off my bloody sweatshirt, and raided his closet.

The old man’s flannel shirts didn’t fit too badly. His upper body was built up from decades of pushing himself around in his wheelchair. My chest and shoulders were freakishly broad just because I was a freak. It worked, especially once I rolled up the sleeves.

My jeans and shoes had some blood on them, but wearing Denver’s pants was out of the question—they were too small. If our upper bodies were similarly unusual, our lower halves were different as could be for the same reasons, kind of.

I’d have to get by with a fresh shirt and hope people didn’t realize what the other stains really were. Good enough. Clothes, done.

I’d need money. Denver had an empty bottled-water jug about a third full of coins, and I considered raiding that, but it would take a ridiculous amount of change to get me across three or four states. That would never work.

I tried to think like someone who would hide a bunch of money in my house. I looked under the mattress. I looked under the cushions of the couch in the living room. I remembered a movie I’d seen and looked in the tank behind the toilet. All of this was pretty much in a mad rush. I felt the clock ticking.

Denver didn’t have any money.

With a sigh of resignation, I realized who might. With another slouchy dash, I returned to the house next door.

The fancy car, of course, was still in their driveway.

I could take it. Somewhere in their house were the keys. I didn’t have a license beyond my learner’s permit, but shit, what was one more petty crime?

I had another thing to keep an eye out for in the house. Money and car keys.

I went back in like I lived there and stopped just inside the door.

She was still there.

Cold, on the floor.

There was no goddamned time to be a baby about it. She had tried to kill me, or might have. Now her partner was going to do the same damn thing to my dad, and he was the only person who could help me with my shit.

Fuck it.

Thin bravery aside, I still ended up doing a tiptoe dance around the body.

Once she was safely behind me, I turned my attention to the question of where I would stash my spending money if I was a couple of badass killers staking out a house.

I returned to the surveillance room. I opened the closet (empty) and glanced around and behind the assorted video recording boxes, but there was no secret hidey-hole of cash there.

The next room was the woman’s, if the lacy things in a dresser drawer were any indication. It made me feel a little strange, but I rifled through them. My mother kept fifty dollars in her bra drawer, after all.

This one didn’t. I couldn’t even find a purse.

Next up was the partner’s room. Definitely a guy. If his underwear drawer hadn’t clued me in, the pictures I found would have done the job.

They were under the bed in a shoebox I felt certain would be stuffed with hundred-dollar bills. The pictures made my stomach clench.

They were all of the woman. Evelyn. All of them had the same blocky quality of the surveillance videos, and it was pretty clear from the way she stood that she had no idea the photos were being shot.

In one, she was half-undressed, naked from the waist up. I didn’t want to think it, didn’t want to feel it, but seeing her in that snapshot, totally at ease, in the privacy of her bedroom, getting dressed or undressed…no idea her partner was taking secret dirty pictures of her, a whole box of them…

She looked…vulnerable. Soft. And I’m sorry, I couldn’t help thinking it. She was hot.

This was the person I killed.

The person in this picture was dead on the floor in the living room down the hall. Because of me.

I felt like crying. I shoved the picture back in the box, slammed the lid in place, and put the thing back under the bed instead.

There was no damn money in the bedrooms, and no car keys. Fine.

I went into the kitchen. It wasn’t until I was there that I realized it was getting easier to walk past the woman’s body. I didn’t like that. It should always be difficult. Always. Forever.

As I suspected, the kitchen drawers and cabinets were empty or nearly so. I already knew what was in the fridge. I tried the freezer compartment.

Two long, wrapped packages of white paper sat on the frosty metal mesh shelf. It looked like they might be pieces of fish.

I grabbed one and knew right away that it wasn’t frozen fish. I unwrapped it with rising anticipation and found a loose bundle of fifty-dollar bills.

“Holy fuck,” I breathed. I grinned and started counting it, but I realized the exact amount wasn’t important. What mattered was that it was a shitload of money. I shoved it in my front left jeans pocket.

I tore open the other package. No fifties there.

That bundle was of hundreds.

Into my front right jeans pocket that went.

I had the money I needed. Where the fuck were the car keys?

I made another circuit through the house, but after a minute or two I knew I was just avoiding the obvious. After all, where did I keep my own house keys?

In my pocket, that’s where.

I would have to search the woman.

Evelyn. “Her name is Evelyn, Nate.”

I bent down next to her, my back to her face. It made it a little easier, but there was still the blood in the carpet squishing under my shoes, the awful pallor of her skin, the sheer…weight of her body.

I looked at her jeans. They were tight on her hips. The pocket on her left side had a kind of keys-shaped lumpiness to it.

I had to reach into the tight jeans of a dead woman, my fingertips just a few layers of cloth away from the bare skin of her thigh, just a few inches away from her crotch, to get those keys.

It made me think of being with Lina. I hated it. I hated myself. I felt like some kind of necrophiliac. I mean, not that I wanted to do something to the body, nothing fucked-up like that…but the whole thing was just…

It was bad.

I had the keys.

The phone rang.

I straightened up fast, my heart in my throat, my skin flushing.

The phone rang three more times while I stared at it. A click, and the answering machine picked up. I heard Evelyn’s voice, curt and short, instruct the caller to leave a message. The machine beeped.

I held my breath.

“It’s Uldare. Lou. Obviously.” The voice on the machine laughed. He sounded a little nervous. “You there? C’mon. Goddamn it. Okay. I’m in…Baker, I think. Baker, Barstow, you know, it doesn’t matter. Based on the gizmo, I’m not too far behind the target. Engaging as planned shouldn’t be an issue. Let the big guy know if he calls. I’ll make contact again after the package is delivered.” He laughed. "’The package is delivered.’ What a crock. Okay, talk to you later, Ev.”

Click.

After touching the body, I really, really, really wanted to wash my hands. But that was the guy—that was the partner! Lou.

And if he was in Baker, he had a pretty damn big head start, and that meant my dad was even farther away.

I had to go. Time to see if I could drive well enough to keep from attracting the attention of the highway patrol. In my stolen car.

Andrew Charters – Five

They’d been on the road for nearly three hours since stopping in Baker for gas and snacks. Andrew had taken a pass on getting out of the van then. Even though he looked more normal than any time in the last fifteen years with his fresh haircut and shave and Denver’s clean clothes, internally Andrew still struggled to hang on to his slippery humanity. Exposing himself to the busy humanity, the oily smells, and the jarring sounds of cars and trucks coming and going at a gas station was a little too much, too soon.

But by the time they approached the border of Nevada and Arizona, Andrew felt like anything was preferable to the interior of Denver’s van.

“Need a break!”

Denver looked over his shoulder from the front passenger seat. “Need to stretch your legs, buddy? Squeeze out the bladder?”

Sandy harrumphed from the driver’s seat. “Denver.”

“What?” He laughed. “Oh, I’m so sorry! There’s a lady present!”

“You’ll watch your step, mister,” she said with a smile in her voice, “if you want anything to do with this lady in the near future.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Andrew couldn’t really follow their banter. The best he could do was catch whiffs of their pheromones in the close air of the van. Their attraction was cloying and increasingly irritating.

“Need a break!” he said again.

Sandy said, “He’s not the only one. Let’s fill the tank and stretch our legs.”

“If you’ll pardon the expression,” Denver said.

“Get over yourself,” Sandy said.

Denver chuckled. “One of these days. Hey, don’t stop in Mesquite. Might be easier on Andy if we go somewhere a little less busy.”