of the Road King.
Taking the pistol, he gets out of the car and walks quickly to the
motorhome, watching the side windows in case Frannie or Jack parts the
curtains and peers out at this most inopportune moment.
He glances toward the restrooms. No one in sight.
Perfect.
He grips the cold chrome door handle. The lock isn’t engaged.
He scrambles inside, up the steps, and looks over the driver’s seat.
The kitchen is immediately behind the open cab, a dining nook beyond the
kitchen, then the living room. Frannie and Jack are in the nook,
eating, the woman with her back toward the killer.
Jack sees him first, starts simultaneously to rise and slide out of the
narrow booth, and Frannie looks back over her shoulder, more curious
than alarmed. The first two rounds take Jack in the chest and throat.
He collapses over the table. Spattered with blood, Frannie opens her
mouth to scream, but the third hollow-point round drastically reshapes
her skull.
The silencer is attached to the muzzle, but it isn’t effective any more.
The baffles have been compressed. The sound accompanying each shot is
only slightly quieter than regular gunfire.
The killer pulls the driver’s door shut behind him. He looks out at the
sidewalk, the rainswept picnic area, the restrooms. No one in sight.
He climbs over the gear-shift console, into the passenger’s seat, and
peers out the front window on that side. Only four other vehicles share
the parking lot. The nearest is a Mack truck, and the driver must be in
the men’s room because no one is in the cab.
It’s unlikely that anyone could have heard the shots. The roar of the
rain provides ideal cover.
He swivels the command chair around, gets up, and walks back through the
motorhome. He stops at the dead couple, touches Jack’s back . .
then Frannie’s left hand, which lies on the table in a puddle of blood
beside her lunch plate.
“Goodbye,” he says softly, wishing he could take more time to share this
special moment with them.
Having come this far, however, he is nearly frantic to exchange his
clothes for those of Frannie’s husband and get on the road again.
He has convinced himself that a transmitter is, indeed, concealed in the
rubber heels of his Rockport shoes, and that its signal is even now
leading dangerous people to him.
Beyond the living room is a bathroom, a large closet crammed with
Frannie’s clothes, and a bedroom with a smaller closet filled with
Jack’s wardrobe. In less than three minutes he strips naked and dresses
in new underwear, white athletic socks, jeans, a red-and brown-checkered
shirt, a pair of battered sneakers, and a brown leather jacket to
replace his black one. The inseam of the pants is just right, the waist
is two inches too big, but he cinches it in with a belt.
The shoes are slightly loose though wearable, and the shirt and jacket
fit perfectly.
He carries the Rockport shoes into the kitchen. To confirm his
suspicion, he takes a serrated bread knife from a drawer and saws off
several thin layers of the rubber heel on one shoe until he discovers a
shallow cavity packed tightly with electronics. A miniaturized
transmitter is connected to a series of watch batteries that seems to
extend all the way around the heel and perhaps the sole as well.
Not paranoid after all.
They’re coming.
Abandoning the shoes in a litter of rubber shavings on the kitchen
counter, he urgently searches Jack’s body and takes the money out of the
old man’s wallet. Sixty-two bucks. He searches for Frannie’s purse,
finds it in the bedroom. Forty-nine dollars.
When he leaves the motorhome, the mottled gray-black sky is convex, bent
low with the weight of the thunderheads. Rain by the megaton batters
the earth.
Coils of fog serpentine among the trunks of the pine trees and seem to
be reaching for him as he splashes to the Honda.
On the interstate again, speeding through the perpetual twilight beneath
the storm, he turns the car heater to its highest setting and soon
crosses the state line into Texas, where the flat land becomes