Also, he felt a little sick, after all. Not much, but he was glad he hadn’t tried a fourth sip. “I would have popped my Popov,” he said. He laughed, then uttered a ringing belch that burned coming up. Blick. He left the darts when they were and went back to the mattresses. He thought of using his magnifying glass to see if anything really small was crawling there, and decided he didn’t want to know. He thought about eating some of his Oreos, but was afraid of what they might do to his stomach. It felt, let’s face it, a little tender.
He lay down and laced his hands behind his head. He had heard that when you got really drunk, everything started spinning around. Nothing like that was happening to him, but he wouldn’t mind a little nap. Sleeping it off kind of thing.
“But not too long.”
No, not too long. That would be bad. If he wasn’t home when his folks came home, and if they couldn’t find him, he would be in trouble. Probably George would be, too, for going off without him. The question was, could he wake himself up when the St. Joseph’s chimes struck?
Pete realized, in those last few seconds of consciousness, that he’d just have to hope so. Because he was going.
He closed his eyes.
And slept in the deserted restaurant.
Outside, in the southbound travel lane of I-95, a station wagon of indeterminate make and vintage appeared. It was traveling well below the posted minimum turnpike speed. A fast-moving semi came up behind it and veered into the passing lane, blatting its air horn.
The station wagon, almost coasting now, veered into the entrance lane of the rest area, ignoring the big sign reading CLOSED NO SERVICES NEXT GAS AND FOOD 27 MI. It struck four of the orange barrels blocking the lane, sent them rolling, and came to a stop about seventy yards from the abandoned restaurant building. The driver’s side door opened, but nobody got out. There were no hey-stupid-your-door’s-open chimes. It just hung silently ajar.
If Pete Simmons had been watching instead of snoozing, he wouldn’t have been able to see the driver. The station wagon was splattered with mud, and the windshield was smeared with it. Which was strange, because there had been no rain in northern New England for over a week, and the turnpike was perfectly dry.
The car sat there a little distance up the entrance ramp, under a cloudy April sky. The barrels it had knocked over came to a stop. The driver’s door hung open like an invitation.
2. DOUG CLAYTON (‘09 Prius)
Doug Clayton was an insurance man from Bangor, bound for Portland, where he had a reservation at the Sheraton Hotel. He expected to be there by two o’clock at the latest. That would leave plenty of time for an afternoon nap (a luxury he could rarely afford) before searching out dinner on Congress Street. Tomorrow he would present himself at the Portland Conference Center bright and early, take a nametag, and join four hundred other agents in a conference called Fire, Storm, and Flood: Insuring for Disaster in the Twenty-First Century. As he passed the Mile 82 marker, Doug was closing in on his own personal disaster, but it was nothing the Portland conference would cover.
His briefcase and suitcase were in the backseat. Lying in the passenger bucket was a Bible (King James version; Doug would have no other). Doug was one of four lay preachers at the Church of the Holy Redeemer, and when it was his turn to preach, he liked to call his Bible “the ultimate insurance manual.”
Doug had taken Jesus Christ as his personal savior after ten years of drinking that spanned his late teens and most of his twenties. This decadelong spree ended with a wrecked car and thirty days in the Penobscot County Jail. He had gotten down on his knees in that smelly, coffin-sized cell on his first night there, and he’d gotten down on them every night since.
“Help me get better,” he had prayed that first time, and every time since. It was a simple prayer that had been answered first twofold, then tenfold, then a hundredfold. He thought that, in another few years, he would be up to a thousandfold. And the best thing? Heaven was waiting at the end of it all.