From Topeka he could have gone west on Interstate 70 all the way into
Colorado. North on Federal Highway 75. South by diverse routes to
Chanute, Fredonia, Coffeyville. Southwest to Wichita. Any where.
Theoretically, minutes after he had been judged a renegade, it should
have been possible to activate the transponder in his shoe by means of a
coded microwave signal broadcast via satellite to the entire continental
United States. Then they should have been able to use a series of
geosynchronous tracking satellites to pinpoint his location, hunt him
down, and bring him home within a few hours.
But there had been problems. There were always problems. The kiss of
the iceberg.
Not until Monday afternoon had they located the transponder signal in
Oklahoma, east of the Texas border. Oslett and Clocker, on standby in
Topeka, had flown to Oklahoma City and taken a rental car west on
Interstate 40, equipped with the electronic map, which had led them to
the dead senior citizens and the pair of Rockport shoes with one heel
shaved to expose the electronics.
Now they were at the Oklahoma City airport again, rolling back and forth
like two pinballs inside the slowest game machine in the known universe.
By the time they drove into the rental agency lot to leave the car,
Oslett was ready to scream. The only reason he didn’t scream was
because there was no one to hear him except Karl Clocker. Might as well
scream at the moon.
In the terminal he found a newsstand and purchased the latest issue of
People magazine.
Clocker bought a pack of Juicy Fruit chewing gum, a lapel button that
said VE BEEN TO OKLAHOMA–NOW CAN DIE, and the paperback edition of the
gazillionth Star Trek novelization.
Outside in the promenade, where pedestrian traffic was neither as heavy
nor as interestingly bizarre as it was at either JFK or La Guardia in
New York, Oslett sat on a bench framed by sickly greenery in large
planters. He riffled through the magazine to pages sixty-six and
sixty-seven.
IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, MYSTERY NOVELIST MARTIN STILLWATER SEES DARKNESS
AND EVIL WHERE OTHERS SEE ONLY SUNSHINE.
The two-page spread that opened the three-page piece was largely
occupied by a photograph of the writer. Twilight. Ominous clouds.
Spooky trees as a backdrop. A weird angle. Stillwater was sort of
lunging at the camera, his features distorted, eyes shining with
reflected light, making like a zombie or crazed killer.
The guy was obviously a jackass, an obnoxious self-promoter who would be
happy to dress up in Agatha Christie’s old clothes if it would sell his
books. Or license his name for a breakfast cereal, Martin Stillwater’s
Mystery Puffs, made of oats and enigmatic milling by-products, a free
action figure included in each box, one in a series of eleven murder
victims, each wasted in a different fashion, all wounds detailed in
“Day-Glo” red, start your collection today and, at the same time, let
our milling by-products do your bowels a favor.
Oslett read the text on the first page, but he still didn’t see why the
article had put the New York contact’s blood pressure in the stroke-risk
zone. Reading about Stillwater, he thought the headline ought to be
“Mr. Tedium.” If the guy ever did license his name for a cereal, it
wouldn’t need high fiber content because it would be guaranteed to bore
the crap out of you.
Drew Oslett disliked books as intensely as some people disliked
dentists, and he thought that the people who wrote them especially
novelists–had been born into the wrong half of the century and ought to
get real jobs in computer design, cybernetic management, the space
sciences, or applied fiber optics, industries that had some thing to
contribute to the quality of life here on the cusp of the millennium.
As entertainment, books were so slow. Writers insisted on taking you
into the minds of characters, showing you what they were thinking. You
didn’t have to put up with that in the movies.
Movies never took you inside characters’ minds. Even if movies could
show you what the people in them were thinking, who would want to go
inside the mind of Sylvester Stallone or Eddie Murphy or Susan Sarandon,