"Get up on the wrong side of bed this morning?"
"Not at all," Lisl muttered as they passed the kid. "They shouldn't allow mutants like that on the road."
"You're pulling my leg, aren't you? I don't know that kid, but I'm proud of him. Dressing himself, riding to work, and doing some manual labor probably taxes his abilities to their limit, yet he's out here on his bike every day, rain or shine, making it to work and back. You can't take that away from him. It's all he's got."
"Right. Until he has a spasm and gets hit by a car and his folks sue the driver for everything he's worth."
Bill reached over and felt her forehead. "You all right? Coming down with a fever?"
Lisl laughed. "I'm fine. Forget it."
Bill tried to do just that as they hit Route 40 and drove north, sailing along, talking about what they'd been doing, what they'd been reading, but in everything she said he detected subtle nuances of change. This Lisl was different from the woman he'd known for the past three years. She seemed to have calcified in the weeks since her Christmas party, as if she were building up a hard shell around herself. And all she seemed to want to talk about was Rafe Losmara.
"Any further word from the State Police on that weird telephone call?" he said, as much from a sincere desire to know as from a wish to move the conversation away from Rafe.
"No. Not a word. And I don't care. As long as I never have to hear that call again."
The way she shuddered reminded him of the old Lisl, and that was a relief.
Bill had been shaken up when Lisl had told him that the call was being investigated. And he still couldn't figure out how the North Carolina State Police had connected him with the call, or had wound up with that old photo of him. Had to be Renny Augustino's doing, especially since it sounded like the same photo the New York police had released five years ago. That one had been old even back then. Bill was now twenty pounds lighter and ten years older than the priest in that photo.
He was different in other ways too. That Christmas week in hell five years ago, plus the first year, the lost year of living on the edge in the Bahamas, had wrought their own set of changes. He'd hung out with scum during that year and had thought they were too good for him; he'd been cut and he'd had his nose mangled more than once in the drunken fights he'd started. Time had added deep furrows to his cheeks and alongside the scar on his forehead, and a bumper crop of gray to his hair. He was pulling that hair off his face now, usually tying it back, exposing the receding hairline at each temple. All that, plus the full beard, made him look more like a darker, heavier set version of Willie Nelson than the young, baby-faced Father Bill in the old photo. So he shouldn't have been surprised that Lisl hadn't recognized him. Yet he was. He wasn't used to good luck.
Traffic began to slow as the road became more crowded.
"Where's everybody going?" Lisl said.
"It's a warm sunny Saturday. Where else would everybody be going?"
Lisl sank back in the seat. "Of course. Big Country."
The giant amusement park cum African safari complex had opened a few years ago and had quickly become the biggest attraction on the eastern end of the state. The locals loved all the new jobs and the boost to the economy, but nobody liked the traffic jams.
"Want to go? We haven't been to the safari in a long time."
"No, thanks," she said with an emphatic shake of her head. "I'm not in the mood for crowds."
"No," he said, smiling, "I can see that you aren't."
Maybe she had PMS.
They finally came upon one of the contributing factors to the traffic jam—a stalled station wagon, an ancient Ford Country Squire, just like the one St. Francis used to own. The hood was up and a man in jeans and a flannel shirt was leaning over the engine. As they passed, Bill saw the stricken looks on the faces of the four kids in the back, the naked anger and resentment on the face of the overweight woman in the front passenger seat, and then he got a look at the man staring in bewilderment at the dead engine before him. Something in the fellow's eyes caught Bill in the throat. He read it all in a heartbeat—a laborer, not much dough but he'd promised to take the wife and kids to Big Country for the day. A rare treat. And now they weren't going anywhere. The tow truck and ensuing repairs would probably eat up much of his spare cash, and even if it didn't, the day would be spent by the time they got rolling again. If the man's eyes had shown plain old anger or frustration, Bill could have kept going. But what he saw in that flash was defeat. One more footprint on the back of an already struggling ego.
Bill swerved onto the shoulder in front of the wagon.
"What are you doing?" Lisl said.
"I'm going to get this guy going again."
"Bill, I don't want to sit here and—"
"Only be a minute."
He hurried over to the wagon. He knew the Country Squire engine like he knew his Breviary. If it wasn't anything major, he could fix it.
He leaned on the fender and looked across the engine at a man who was probably ten or fifteen years younger but didn't look it.
"She die on you?"
The fellow looked up at him suspiciously. Bill expected that. People tended to be leery of offers of help from bearded guys with ponytails.
"Yeah. Died while we were stopped during the jam. She cranks but she won't catch. I'm afraid I don't know much about cars."
"I do." Bill started spinning the wing nut on the air filter cover. When he'd exposed the carburetor he said, "Get in and hit the gas pedal. Once."
The fellow did as he was told and Bill noticed right away that the butterfly valve didn't move. Stuck. He smiled. This was going to be easy.
He freed the valve and held it open.
"All right," he called. "Give her a try."
The engine turned and turned but didn't catch.
"This is what it was doing before!" the driver shouted.
"Just keep going!"
And then it caught. The engine shuddered and shook and then roared to life with a huge belch of black smoke from the rear. These engines tended to do that. To the tune of children's cheers from the wagon's rear compartment, Bill ran to his own car, popped the trunk, and got some spray lubricant from his work box. He lubed the hinges on the valve, replaced the cover, and slammed the hood.
"Get that carburetor cleaned and that choke checked out as soon as you can," he told the man, "or this'll happen again."
The fellow held out a twenty to him but Bill pushed it back.
"Get those kids an extra hot dog."
"God bless you, mister," the woman said.
"Not likely," Bill said softly as they pulled away.
He returned the waves of the smiling kids hanging out the rear window, then walked up to his own car. N
"There!" he said to Lisl as he started the Impala. "That didn't take too long."
"The Good Samaritan," she said with a sad shake of her head.
"Why not? It cost me nothing but a few minutes of doing the kind of thing I like to putter around with in my spare time anyway, and it literally saved the day for six people."
Lisl reached over and touched his hand.
"You're a good man, Will. But you shouldn't let everyone who comes along take advantage of your good nature. They'll eat you alive if you do."
Bill turned off at the next exit, looped on the overpass, and got back on the' freeway heading south toward town. He was baffled by her attitude.