was slim and hard, and he was no longer the skinny kid, either. Still,
he was awkward with people whom he had just met-and his palms were often
damp with nervous perspiration. Deep inside, he had not forgotten what
it was like to be constantly selfconscious and never self-confident
enough. Watching Colin dry his slender hands, Alex understood why he
had taken an immediate liking to the boy and why they had seemed
comfortable with each other from the day they met eighteen months
before. Nineteen years separated them. But little else.
“He still back there?” Colin asked, breaking into Alex’s thoughts.
“Who? ”
“The van.”
Alex checked the mirror. “He’s there. He doesn’t give up easily.”
“Can I look?”
“You keep your belt on.”
“This is going to be a bad trip,” Colin said morosely.
“It will be if you don’t accept the rules at the start ” Alex agreed.
Traffic’ picked up on the other side of the expressway as the early-bird
commuters began their day and as an occasional truck whistled by on the
last lap of a long cargo haul. On the westbound lanes, their own car
and the van were the only things in sight.
The sun was behind the Thunderbird, where it could not bother them.
Ahead, the sky was marred by only two white clouds. The hills, on both
sides, were green.
When they got on the Pennsylvania turnpike at Valley Forge and went west
toward Harrisburg, Colin said, “What about our tail? ”
“Still there. Some poor FBI agent tracking the wrong prey.”
“He’ll probably lose his job,” Colin said.
“That’ll make an opening for me.”
“You want to be an FBI agent?”
“I’ve thought about it,” Colin admitted.
Alex pulled the Thunderbird into the left lane, passed a car pulling a
horse trailer. Two little girls about Colin’s age were in the back seat
of the car. They pressed against the side window and waved at Colin,
who blushed and looked sternly ahead.
“it wouldn’t be dull in the FBI,” Colin said.
“oh, I don’t know about that. it might be pretty boring when you have
to follow a crook for weeks before he does something exciting.”
“Well, it can’t be any more boring than sitting under a seatbelt all the
way to California, ” Colin said.
God, Alex thought, I walked into that one. He took the car into the
right lane again, set the automatic accelerator for an even seventy
miles per hour so that if Colin got too interesting they would still
make decent time. “When that guy following us gets us on a lonely
stretch of road and runs us into a ditch, you’ll thank me for making you
wear your belt. It’ll save your life.”
Colin turned and looked at him, his big brown eyes made even larger by
the eyeglasses. “I guess you aren’t going to give in.”
“You guessed right.”
Colin sighed. “You’re more or less my father now. Aren’t you?”
“I’m your sister’s husband. But . . . Since your sister has custody
of you, I guess you could say I have a father’s right to make rules
you’ll live by.”
Colin shook his head, brushed his long hair out of his eyes. “I don’t
know. Maybe it was better being an orphan.”
“Oh, you think so, do you?” Doyle asked, full of mock anger.
“If you hadn’t come along, I wouldn’t have gotten a plane ride to
Boston,” Colin admitted. “I wouldn’t get to go to California either.
But . . . I don’t know.”
“You’re too much,” Doyle said, ruffling the boy’s hair with one hand.
Sighing loudly, as if he needed the patience of job in order to get
along with Doyle, the boy smoothed his mussed hair with a comb he kept
in his hip pocket. He put the comb away, straightened his King Kong
T-shirt. “Well, I’ll have to think about it. I’m just not sure yet.”
The engine was silent. The tires made almost no noise on the
well-surfaced roadbed.
Five minutes slipped by without awkwardness; they were comfortable
enough with each other to endure silence. However, Colin grew restless
and began to tap wildly elaborate rhythms on his bony knees.