He passed a Walmart and Food Lion with big, empty parking lots, car dealerships, a seafood restaurant, a raised rail bed where freight slow-rolled by. He saw a Sonic restaurant. It was too risky to go into a bar — if one was even open — and ask directions.
Come on… come on… It has to be here.
He was on Bankhead Street, a main drag, when he saw a red dome light racing toward him in the rearview mirror. An ambulance passed, heading for an accident, or taking victims to a hospital.
More lights came up behind him.
A police car shot past, following the ambulance.
There! He saw it, with triumph and relief!
The repair shop was wedged between a Pep Boys and a Kentucky Fried Chicken. He made a right turn into a small parking lot, beneath the BOB BENTLEY’S FOREIGN AUTO sign. His mom used to go to a shop like this for car repairs, leave her Nissan overnight, with keys above the visor. Tom did the same thing when in his late teens, before going overseas.
The layout here was classic, a lot in front, filled with domestic and foreign models to be repaired, or ready for pickup. A narrow driveway looped him out of view, behind the shop. More cars were parked here in a potholed dirt area, backed against a brick wall, in the storm.
I can’t be seen from the street here. It’s Saturday night, and this place probably won’t open until Monday morning, thirty-six hours from now.
The shop was locked. There was no way to know if there was an alarm or camera. But in the old days, in Colorado, lots of drivers left their keys in their cars. Also, he’d seen a small lockbox by the front door, chained to the brick. A sign above it said, KEYS.
I need a car. But it can’t be one that will break down two miles from here. I need one that’s been fixed already, or needs something small.
Tom backed the Subaru into a narrow space between a twenty-year-old Jeep and a new Toyota 4Runner. He stopped before his rear bumper hit the wall. The Subaru was now dwarfed, partially hidden by larger cars. Tom exited the Subaru, ignoring the rain that instantly soaked him.
He opened the trunk and toolbox and removed a large Phillips-head screwdriver and knelt in the mud by his front license plate. The first screw he tried to turn was stuck.
Shit.
Tom applied pressure. Nothing. Rain blinded him. He hit the screw to loosen rust. He tried again. The screw moved a little. He tried hard. He got the screw off.
Tom went around to the back of the Jeep and unscrewed its Mississippi license plate more easily. He affixed the plate to his Subaru. Now, if a police patrol came by, the officer would see a Mississippi plate.
Hurry. Find a car to steal.
The nearest car, a Smart car, tilted sideways due to two flat tires. Beside it was a Chevy Malibu, locked, and a blue Hyundai Sonata, locked, and then a Volkswagen Passat, locked. Forget looking for keys in the visor.
Tom went back to the Subaru, froze at a loud cr-aack, and saw, above and behind the brick wall, a tree falling in the wind. He wiped rain from his eyes, and took a pry bar from the trunk. He strode to the front of the shop. There were no headlights on the road. But that could change in a moment.
At the shop’s front door Tom listened for barking, in case there was a dog inside. He did not want to risk an alarm unless he had to. He knelt beside the lockbox. Like a lumberjack, he raised the pry bar and began slamming it into the padlock guarding the box. The back hinges of the box gave way before the padlock. He reached in. He found three sets of keys and more keys inside envelopes, along with notes from their owners.
Floyd, she keeps stopping dead at lights, said the note with the first key. Forget that one.
Floyd, it still makes that noise when I go more than 30 miles an hour. Ball bearings? said the second note.
Not that one either.
Change the oil.
That one. The key chain said HONORING VETERANS. Tom stood with rain pounding his face. He went out back and pushed a button on the key fob and heard a loud beep from his left as headlights on a Ford flicked on and off.
He needed five minutes to transfer the vectors and supplies: med kit, guns, golf bag, suitcase, from the Subaru to the Ford. Suddenly he saw twin lights stabbing into the lot. A car was coming. He crouched down between two vehicles. Had a patrolling cop spotted the smashed-in lockbox out front? Was it just a bored officer on routine patrol? Had someone seen him and called the cops?
Tom pushed against the side of a Jeep as a car crunched and squished into the back lot.
Allah, help me.
The white searchlight showed rain sheeting down as it stabbed out, car to car. It illuminated the sliding twin rear doors of the shop, and the forms of cars on hoists inside. A car door slammed. Tom heard a grunt. He heard boots splashing in puddles. He saw the reflection of the cop and flashlight in the window of the shop. The cop stood still now, listening. But the only thing to hear was wind. The parked cars sat as still as animals frozen in fear.
Tom realized that he had left the Sig Sauer in the Subaru. It would be visible, sitting on the seat, if the light stabbed that way.
The light shut off. He heard the police car roll away.
Ten minutes later he was on the road again, driving back toward the highway. The Ford’s fuel gauge indicated a full tank of gas, enough for the four-hour trip. The sky ahead lit up with an awesome display of lightning, troposphere to earth, an inverted, bare tree of electricity, electric trunk and branches, snaking down like a trident at anything living in a flash of white that left its imprint on his retinas. Frozen in the glare were swaying trees and rooftops and bouncing power lines. Tom felt chilled from the rain. He coughed suddenly and violently.
Was he getting sick?
“Just a few more hours,” Tom said to himself. Normally he would have fed the insects by now, but he wanted them hungry. He wanted them to feed when he released them tomorrow at a very specific place.
When he found an all-news station, Rush was gone from the airwaves. But Rush had, tonight, recruited a hundred million people to help him find Tom.
In Islam, Tom knew, the story of the biblical flood was regarded as real. That was the feel here, now; of punishment, of rage and revenge.
Tornado warnings… get inside, the radio said.
Trees had snapped or bent sideways, a branch tumbled across the road like a tumbleweed, a bird flew past at eye level but backward, a cardboard box sailed toward him and away as if sucked into the air by a spaceship. He hydroplaned through a lake in the road. Had there been a tornado here? He traveled inside a ghost corridor of smashed pine trees, trunks snapped like toothpicks, debris rolling in the road, a flapping metal sign, ERNIE’S BAIT & AMMO, unattached to any shop, just sitting in a tree.
And in the next flash of lightning, the accident he was about to plow into. The cypress tree lying three quarters across the road, blocking it unless he went around on the grass. The sparking power line, writhing and snapping. The silver sedan must have collided with the overturned semi. The truck lay in a V shape, cab going one way, container the other, driver’s door open, body lying half in and half out, as the dome light strobed and buzzed in the rain.
He saw smoke or steam rising from the long trailer in back. Dry ice? Liquid oxygen? Something explosive?