Chapter 53
Charlie’s mind was churning. He hadn’t seen a single other vehicle moving on the highway in either direction, but on a night like this, who in his right mind would be out? Only long-haul truckers would brave it, and that was only because they had to. The snow was coming down so fast, the windshield wipers were having trouble handling it, even at their top speed.
Glancing into the rearview mirror, he saw Harley huddled in the backseat, and if he thought he looked sickly before, it was worse now. His forehead was beaded with sweat, his eyes had a weird glaze, and his fingers kept picking at that damn wound on his leg; all Charlie knew was that he must have gotten into some mean shit on that island. Mean shit, which was probably infecting the whole car by now. He’d have to tell Rebekah and Bathsheba to scrub down and sanitize the whole van once he got back to Port Orlov.
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.
“Looks like a headlight. Maybe just a motorcycle.”
Charlie studied the tiny light, and damn if it didn’t look like it was a single headlamp after all. But who’d be trying to navigate these dangerous roads, in the middle of a blizzard, on a motorcycle? That’d be crazy. Cops would be using a heavy-duty cruiser, the National Guard guys would be in a jeep. The only thing he could tell for sure was that it was moving along at a good clip.
“Keep an eye on it,” Charlie said, turning off the cruise control and pushing the accelerator lever.
“Shit. What if it’s Eddie on a snowmobile?”
He heard the click of a safety being taken off a gun. A Glock 19, from the sound of it. Oh, Christ, Harley was not only nuts … but armed?
“Where’d you get that?” Charlie demanded, though it had undoubtedly come from his own gun cabinet. “Put it away. Now.”
But Harley was off in his own delusion again. “Fuckin’ Eddie,” he muttered, staring out the back of the van.
“Eddie’s dead. You told me so yourself.”
Harley, still staring, clucked his tongue and said, “Eddie never did know when to call it quits. I never should have let him come back with me.”
Come back? Charlie thought Eddie had fallen off a cliff on the island.
“Well, this time I’m going to cap his ass for good.”
Charlie stopped trying to make sense of Harley’s ravings. All he could do was drive … and pray he got to Nome before Harley went off in his van like a bomb.
Chapter 54