Hunkering down in front of her and the weeping boy, behind the Jeep, Stefan said, “Laura, I’ve got to get out of here, but I’ll be back soon, in just a couple of days—”
“Who are you?” she demanded angrily.
“There’s no time for that now.”
“I want to know, damn you. I have a right to know.”
“Yes, you do, and I’ll tell you in a few days. But right now we have to get your story straight, the way we did that day in the grocery store. Remember?”
“To hell with you.”
Unfazed, he said, “It’s for your own good, Laura. You can’t tell the authorities the exact truth because it won’t seem real, will it? They’ll think you’re making it all up. Especially when you see me leave . . . well, if you tell them how I went, they’ll either be sure that you’re somehow an accomplice to murder or a madwoman.” She glared at him and said nothing. He did not blame her for being angry. Perhaps she even wanted him dead, but he understood that too. The only emotions she stirred in him, however, were love and pity and a profound respect.
He said, “You’ll tell them that when you and Danny turned the curve at the bottom of the hill and started up, there were three cars in the roadway: the Jeep parked here along the embankment, the Pontiac in the wrong lane just where it is now, and another car was stopped in the northbound lane. There were . . . four men, two of them with guns, and they seemed to have forced the Jeep off the road. You just came along at the wrong time, that’s all. They pointed a submachine gun at you, made you pull off the road, made you and Danny and Chris get out of the car. At one point you heard talk about cocaine . . . somehow it involved drugs, you don’t know how, but they were arguing over drugs, and they seemed to have chased down the man in the Jeep—”
“Drug dealers out here in the middle of nowhere?” she said
scornfully.
“There could be processing labs out here—a cabin in the woods, processing PCP maybe. Listen, if the story makes at least some sense, they’ll want to buy it. The real story makes no sense at all, so you can’t rely on it. So you tell them the Robertsons came over the crest of the hill in their pickup—of course you don’t know their name—and the road was blocked by all these cars, and when he braked the pickup it started to slide—”
“You’ve got an accent,” she said angrily. “A slight one but I can hear it. Where are you from?”
“I’ll tell you all of that in a few days,” he said impatiently, looking up and down the snow-blasted road. “I really will, but now you’ve got to promise me you’ll work with this false story, embellish it as best you can, and not tell them the truth.”
“I don’t have any choice, do I?”
“No,” he said, relieved that she realized her position.
She clung to her son and said nothing.
Stefan had begun to feel the pain in his half-frozen feet again. The heat of action had dissipated, leaving him racked by shivers. He handed her the belt that he had taken off Kokoschka. “Put this inside your ski jacket. Don’t let anyone see it. When you get home, put it away somewhere.”
“What is it?”
“Later. I’ll try to return in a few hours. Only a few hours. Right now just promise me you’ll hide it. Don’t get curious, don’t put it on, and for God’s sake don’t push the yellow button on it.”
“Why not?”
“Because you don’t want to go where it’ll take you.”
She blinked at him in confusion. “Take me?”
“I’ll explain but not now.”
“Why can’t you take it with you, whatever it is?”
“Two belts, one body—it’s an anomaly, it’ll cause a disruption of some kind in the energy field, and God only knows where I might wind up or in what condition.”
“I don’t understand. What’re you talking about?”
“Later. But, Laura, if for some reason I’m unable to come back, you better take precautions.”