Centralia (6 page)

The front door crashed open with the suddenness and intensity of a gunshot and nearly pushed Peter out of his chair. He instantly, instinctively, grabbed Amy by the arm and ducked into the kitchen, drawing the pistol he’d stashed in his waistband at the small of his back.

His reaction time was amazingly quick, and a feeling of déjà vu came over him, as if he’d done this exact thing at some other time in some other place. If indeed he had been the target of assassins and hit men before, and if indeed he had been shot at before
 
—and enough times to have developed an almost-involuntary reaction to it
 
—at least he’d been lucky. His body had no scars from gunshot wounds.

Amy eyed the weapon, then Peter. Fear widened her eyes,
and her mouth formed an almost-perfect O. From the look on her face, Peter assumed she was just as surprised at his newfound skills as he was. He put an index finger to his lips and shook his head.

Heavy footsteps sounded in the foyer, then the dining room. Quickly Peter pulled Amy by the arm and shuffled across the kitchen to the back door. They would have to make an escape that way. He didn’t know how many uninvited visitors there were and didn’t want to get into a shootout and put Amy in the line of fire.

After lifting a key ring from a peg by the counter, he opened the door and the two of them slid onto the back porch. Peter said, “Is the garage unlocked?”

“You have the keys,” Amy said.

Down the porch steps they ran and to the garage, where Peter handed the keys to Amy, who opened the door to the garage.

In the garage sat a late-model Ford F-150, red and shiny, with knobby tires and tinted windows.

“Really?” Peter said.

Amy tossed him the keys. “You drive.”

Peter got in and cranked the engine to life as Amy hit the button to open the overhead door. The electric motor hummed, the chain engaged, and the door lifted with a low rumble. When it was four feet off the ground, Peter saw two legs from the knees down
 
—khaki dress pants, military-style boots
 
—standing in the middle of the driveway.

Amy saw too. She pushed back against the seat and braced herself. “Go!”

Not waiting for the door to reach its full height and give the invader a clean shot at the windshield, Peter shifted into gear and
stomped on the gas. The engine roared triumphantly as if it were a beast that had been caged for far too long and had finally found its freedom. Tires screeched on the concrete flooring as the truck lurched forward and the grille crashed into the lower edge of the door. The door tore loose from its track, dragging the rubber-coated edge along the truck’s hood and up the windshield.

When the truck cleared the garage and the door, the man came into view, feet wide, handgun pointed at the cab. His eyes drilled Peter with intensity but not hatred, not like the big man who had invaded his home and tried to kill him. Peter thought he saw a flash of surprise, too, just long enough to prevent the man from aiming and squeezing off a shot. The truck was upon him in a fraction of a second and he dove to the side.

Peter lifted his foot off the gas pedal for an instant. His Jetta and a black Lincoln blocked any exit from the driveway.

Amy looked out her side window, whimpered, and banged the dash as if she could push the truck forward simply by willing it to do so. “Ram ’em,” she hollered.

Once again Peter hit the gas and the truck’s engine growled and pushed forward. But instead of striking the Jetta and shoving both it and the Lincoln into the street, he yanked the wheel to the right and steered the truck into the yard beside the driveway, toppling three shrubs and a portion of a neatly trimmed hedge.

Bouncing back onto the driveway, the truck’s side front bumper clipped the back of the Lincoln, causing an awful screech as metal bent and twisted and the paint was stripped off the Lincoln’s rear quarter panel. Peter stole a quick glance in the side mirror. The gunman was back on his feet, lumbering after the truck.

Peter pressed harder on the gas as a bullet struck the cab’s framing.

Furious and spitting curses, Lawrence threw open the Lincoln’s door and jumped in. He brought the engine to life, jammed the gear stick into reverse, and laid down rubber getting out of the driveway.

Jed Patrick. The job might have identified someone named Peter Ryan, but Lawrence knew the man he’d seen in the cab of that truck. After training together, after facing countless life-and-death situations, how could he not know the man on sight? Jed Patrick was the only reason Lawrence was alive today. And Lawrence had allowed that personal connection to get the better of him. He was not only angry with himself for not taking the shot when he had it, but he was infuriated by Patrick’s audacity. He would have run Lawrence over had he not dived out of the truck’s path.

Tearing down the road after the truck, Lawrence slammed his palm against the steering wheel and once again released a string of the most extreme curses he could devise. His blood bubbled in his veins and his foot pressed heavy on the accelerator. Up ahead, the F-150 slowed and turned right. Seconds later, Lawrence did the same. The tires of the Lincoln stuttered around the turn, and he had to fight the steering wheel to keep from ending up in a ditch that bordered the shoulder.

“What was that? Who was that man?” Amy said, bracing herself against the dash with one hand while gripping the seat belt with the other.

Peter checked the mirrors. The black Lincoln hung on their tail
but was still a good ways off. The truck had a nice engine under its hood, lots of horses for getaways just like this one. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? You’re gonna have to do better than that. He had a gun, Peter.” In his peripheral vision, Peter saw her glance at his pistol, which now lay in the center console. “And so do you.”

The brief glimpse he’d had of the gunman’s face before he dove out of the path of the truck had triggered a shotgun memory:
A series of rifle blasts
 
—
pop, pop, pop, pop
 
—concealed behind a wall, a closed door. The door opens and a man steps out, crouched, hollering. He wears a black ski mask and swings the gun around in a wide arc. He reaches up with a gloved hand and yanks off the mask.

It was him, the gunman. Same short-cropped dusty hair, same heavy eyelids, full lips, thick nose. Same deadness in his gray eyes. But without the scar that marked the face of the man in the Lincoln behind them.

Peter had seen the man before, even had the feeling that he knew the man, but had no idea how or why. It was like a memory transplanted from another time. Maybe another life altogether. Some lone image floating in a sea of lost memories.

“Are you gonna start talking now?” Amy said.

Peter leaned on the brake and steered the truck off the main avenue and onto a secondary road where there were fewer homes and longer stretches of asphalt. “I’m kind of busy right now.”

They were beyond the town limits now, pushing sixty-five down a narrow road that cut straight through the surrounding farmland. On either side of the truck stood acres and acres of browning cornstalks as tall as a man, their tassels waving gently in the morning breeze.

Behind them, the Lincoln gained ground. Amy turned and
looked out the rear window. “He’s getting closer. We need to do something to lose him.”

“Got any suggestions?”

Amy checked the rear window again. “Drive faster?”

“Hang on.” Peter hit the brake and pulled the wheel to the right. The truck bounced and bumped over the shallow ditch that ran parallel to the road, climbed the short incline to the field, and plowed into the corn, laying down a path of stalks four rows wide.

Amy leaned forward in the seat and put both hands on the dash. “Oh, my truck.” Cornstalks slapped at the grille like broom handles, broke, and released drying ears of corn, which slid up the hood and bounced over the windshield. “Keep going,” she said. “Make some turns, then head that way.” She pointed to the left. “We can come out on the other side of the field, and he’ll never know where we went.”

Lawrence pushed himself back in his seat and stomped on the brake. The car’s tires slid on some loose gravel; it fishtailed a bit, then came to a stop. There was no way the Lincoln could navigate the terrain through the field and follow the truck. He got out and removed his sunglasses, scanned the area carefully, and chewed on his lower lip as if it were a piece of beef jerky. The field was slightly elevated, and with the height of the corn, he couldn’t tell which way the truck had headed. He hit the trunk with his hand and cursed again.

He’d have to call and let the agency know he’d lost them. He hated the thought of it. Failure was not tolerated. If he was lucky, they’d keep him on the assignment, give him another chance to
redeem himself and right this wrong. If he was unlucky, which he had yet to be, they would take him off the case, and he knew exactly what that meant.

If it came to that, he’d go rogue; he’d drop everything and take himself off the grid. They wouldn’t take him. He wouldn’t let that happen.

Five minutes and thousands of broken and crushed cornstalks later, the truck emerged from the field and the tires found pavement again. For Peter, it had been a ride more bumpy and jolting than any amusement park’s wooden roller coaster. But there was nothing amusing about these twisted turns of events that kept finding him. As the truck hit the road, shedding the remains of the field, Peter’s white-knuckled hands gripped the steering wheel and his heart hammered in time with the pistons of the heaving monster under the hood.

Amy glanced behind them, then relaxed a little in her seat. Her face was as pale as chalk, her lips colorless. “Peter, you mind telling me what’s going on here?”

“Do you have your phone on you?” Peter said, ignoring her question.

“My what?”

“Your phone. Do you have it?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Get it out.”

She pulled the phone from the back pocket of her jeans. “You want to call for help now?”

“Take the battery out.”

“But
 
—”

“Amy, do it. Take it out. It’s a trackable device. They can use its signals to pinpoint our location.” It was crazy and some of the strangest timing he’d ever experienced, but the thought had struck him while they rumbled through the cornfield, getting battered by drying cobs.

Moving quickly, Amy popped the back off the phone and removed the battery. Peter then fished his phone from the front pocket of his pants and handed it to her. “Mine too.”

She repeated the process with his phone, then stuck them both in the glove box.

Peter massaged the steering wheel as if he could milk hope from it. He stole a glance at Amy. “I’m sorry, Amy. Really.”

“You know, for someone who vowed to never talk to me again, you sure have a weird way of keeping your promises.”

“I never meant for this to happen. I needed help, and you were the only one I could think of.” He turned left at the next stop sign and drove past a large white farmhouse. The house was old, at least a hundred years or so, and appeared in need of updating and repairs. Clothes hung on a wash line outside, and a girl
 
—no more than seven or eight, Lilly’s age
 
—wearing jeans and a purple sweatshirt played with a kitten.

Amy craned her neck to look at the family. “That’s the Bruces’ home, and that’s Jenny. Theirs is the field we just destroyed.”

“Do you know them?”

“Yes. Sort of. His wife works part-time at the Food Lion. We talk. She’s a very kind and soft-spoken woman.”

Peter sighed. “Give them my apologies?”

“Apologies won’t bring their corn back. That’s their livelihood.”

“We had to.”

“I know. I’ll pay him back for his loss.”

“I’ll pay. I drove.”

“It’s my truck covered with his corn. We’ll split it.”

They drove in silence for a minute or so, Peter pushing the truck just beyond the road’s posted speed limit.

Finally Amy said, “Where are we going, anyway?”

Peter shrugged, checked the mirrors. “I don’t know. I just want to get away and think. I need to think.” There was so much to process, so much to sort out. His mind reeled with questions and possible answers and scenarios that made absolutely no sense and others that made partial sense but only under extraordinary circumstances. But he had yet to come upon an explanation that made perfect sense. It was there; he was certain of it. But he needed time and quiet to sort through all the weeds and find it.

“Peter, that man had a gun. He was there to kill one of us or both of us. Who was he? How did he know you’d be there?”

“I don’t know.”

“That was two questions.”

“I don’t know on both accounts.” He forked his fingers through his hair. “I need to think.”

“You said you needed help. What kind of help? And why me?”

Peter checked the mirrors again, glanced out the side window, scanned the dash’s instrument panel. She had so many questions.
It was time to start giving her some answers. “Karen and Lilly are alive.”

“Yeah, you said that already. What does that mean?”

“Exactly what it sounds like: they’re still alive.”

“But the accident. The funeral.”

He shook his head, rubbed his temples with one hand. “It must have been staged. Faked. I don’t know. All I know is that the funeral wasn’t real and they’re alive.” More memories of the funeral materialized and peppered his mind with splintered images and fragments of running video. There were so many people there, people he didn’t even know. Friends of Karen, parents of Lilly’s schoolmates. The preacher went on and on. He was a good man, Pastor Morsey, but he didn’t know when to quit talking. Not that Peter wanted to hurry the service up; he didn’t. He just wanted to be left alone to grieve. He wanted some time without well-wishers and condolences and all the tears. Eventually the clouds released their rain and Morsey was forced to wrap things up. When everyone had gone, Peter asked the caretaker if he could have a few minutes at the graves before they put the caskets in the ground. The man, an older gent with a weathered face and tired eyes, nodded and backed away. And that’s when Peter let the tears come. Rain ran off his head and mixed with the tears. He was angry, hurt, lonely. How could God abandon him like this? Take what was most precious to him? How cruel was that?

But this morning changed all that. How he’d forgotten, he didn’t know. It was as if someone had gained access to his mind as he slept, hacked into his internal hard drive, and erased file after file. His mind, scrambling to repair the damage, had then reverted back to the last configuration that made sense, that it knew to be true: Karen and Lilly were indeed alive. Again he wondered how much
he could believe what his mind was telling him. But he wasn’t imagining the gunmen. Or the note in Lilly’s handwriting. None of the pieces seemed to form the right picture.

Amy held her head with both hands. “Staged the funeral? Okay, so let’s say they are alive somewhere. Who would want to do such a thing? And how do you know? Didn’t you see the bodies after the accident?”

They’d told Peter the car had been so engulfed in flames that there were no remains to identify. “No. They told me there was nothing left. And I have no idea who’s behind this.”

Amy’s hand went to her mouth. “I’m sorry. And I’m sorry I didn’t come to the funeral. Didn’t call or write or anything. I thought . . .”

“I understand, Amy. Really. When I think about it, I can’t really blame you.” Peter reached into his pocket and retrieved the note he’d found in the toilet tank. “Look, I’m not going nuts, okay? I thought I was at first, but I’m not.” He paused to consider all that he had told her so far and put himself in her shoes, on the receiving end of such outlandish and improbable theories. “Okay, maybe I’m a little nuts.”

“What are you talking about?”

He handed her the piece of paper.

She unfolded it and stared at it. “Centralia. What’s that?”

“That’s why I needed your computer.”

“But why couldn’t you use your own computer?”

Peter checked the mirrors. No black Lincoln followed. He slowed the truck and turned right onto Long Acre Lane. The road was lined with mature sycamores, their branches sprawling overhead, forming a canopy thirty, forty feet above the ground. Beyond the trees were acres of field that had lain fallow. Grass,
shin-high and brown, swayed slowly, pushed about by the air’s gentle currents. He didn’t want to tell Amy about the gunmen. He’d trusted her at one time, trusted her with his career until she’d betrayed him and nearly cost him his job and reputation. But when he needed someone he trusted, hers had still been the first name
 
—really the only one
 
—he could think of. Regardless of what had happened between them, he knew where he stood with her. “Can I trust you?”

If the question startled Amy or took her by surprise, she didn’t show it. “After what just happened? I think I should be asking you that.”

He said it again. “Can I trust you, Amy?”

She studied the note for a long moment, then turned her head toward the window and watched the trees whiz by. “Yes. Yes, Peter, you can trust me.”

“Do you think I’m nuts?”

Her hesitation didn’t bother him. Anyone sane would deduce that he was playing on the edge of lucidity, walking that very fine line that separated sanity from utter madness. After checking the note again, she said, “No. I think you’re confused, I think you still haven’t made sense of any of this yet, I think you’re a total jerk for pulling me into this, but I don’t think you’re crazy.” She paused, glanced at him, and smiled. “Well, maybe a little nuts.”

He couldn’t argue with any of that. “Fine. I think I was being tracked or bugged or monitored or something.”

“Big Brother?”

“Worse.”

“What do you mean, worse? And why?”

He paused, swallowed. A light sweat had broken out on his brow and upper lip. If he wanted her help, he’d have to tell her.
She was the only one who would listen to him and take him seriously without writing him off as a mourning husband and father who’d misplaced his last piece of sanity somewhere in the land of paranoid psychosis. “Big Brother with guns and an intent to kill.”

“Is that who that was back there? Big Brother?”

“I really don’t know. I think he was sent to clean up Big Brother’s mess. Three men broke into my home shortly after I found that note. They had guns. Silencers. They weren’t there to play nice.”

“They were professionals?”

“Apparently.”

“And they knew the moment you found this note?”

Unbidden, tears came again, pressing behind his eyes and oozing out the corners. He dashed them away. “It looks that way, yes. I was being monitored.”

“What happened? How did you get away?”

He glanced at her but didn’t answer.

“We need to call the police,” she said.

Peter shook his head. “No way. I have to stick with people I can trust. People I know.”

“And you can’t trust the cops?”

“Not anymore.”

“Why ever not?”

Outside the truck, the line of sycamores ended and the fields gave way to a more populated stretch. Small homes, mostly ranches and mobiles, lined the road now. Each sat on a nice-size lot with a paved driveway and trees for shade. In them lived families who shared memories and played games together, maybe watched movies at night, ate popcorn. Families that hadn’t been destroyed by lies and hunted like criminals. A mile or so down the road, they’d enter the town of Five Forks. Peter massaged the wheel
again. “Because one of the intruders
 
—one of the men who would have shot me in cold blood
 
—was a cop.”

Amy didn’t say anything to that. She stared out the side window for a long time before asking again, “How did you get away?” She seemed surprised that a lab researcher, a man who spent most of his academic life in a white coat, a man who would rank at least in the upper tenth percentile when it came to nerdiness, could escape the clutches of three trained killers.

Peter glanced at his hands. He had once again clenched his hands until his knuckles lost their color. “That’s enough for now, okay?”