names that Doyle could no longer recall, men who had murdered wantonly
but not sufficiently to gain immortality. Since a madman had to be
either clever in his methods, selective enough to choose the famous as
his targets, or ruthless enough to cut down a dozen or more people
before he was at all memorable. The videotape replay of an
assassination and the nightly broadcasting of a bloody war had dulled
American sensitivities. The single murderous impulse had become far too
common to be at all noteworthy . . . Doyle attempted to convey these
thoughts to Colin, couching them in grisly terms only when no other
terms would do.
“You think he’s crazy, then? ” the boy asked when Doyle was finished.
“Perhaps. Actually, he hadn’t done much of anything yet. But if we had
stayed on the throughway and let him follow us, given him time and
plenty of opportunity . . . Who knows what he might have done,
eventually? ”
“This all sounds para-”
“Paranoid? ”
“That’s the word,” Colin said, shaking his head approvingly. “It
sounds very paranoid.”
“These days you have to be somewhat paranoid,” Doyle said. “It’s almost
a vital requirement for survival.”
“Do you think he’ll find us again?”
“No.” Doyle blinked as the sun glimmered especially brightly against
the windshield. “He’ll stay on the Interstate, trying like hell to
catch up with us again.”
“Sooner or later he’s going to realize we got off.”
“But he won’t know where or when,” Doyle said. “And he can’t know
where, exactly, we’ll be going.”
“What if he finds someone else to pick on?” Colin asked. “If he just
started to tail us because we happened to be going west on the same road
he was using-won’t he choose some other victim when he realizes that
we’ve gotten away from him?”
“What if he does?” Doyle asked.
“Shouldn’t we let the police know about him?” the boy asked.
“You’ve got to have proof before you can accuse anyone,” Doyle said.
“Even if we had proof, incontrovertible proof, that the man in the
Chevrolet intended to hurt us, we couldn’t do anything with it. We
don’t know whom to accuse, not by name. We don’t know where he’s
headed, except westward. We don’t have a number for the van, any thing
the cops could use to trace it.” He looked at Colin, then back at the
blacktop road. “All we can do is thank our stars we got rid of him.”
“I guess so.”
“You better believe it.”
Much later Colin said, “When he was following us, pulling off the road
behind us, speeding to catch up with us-were you scared?”
Doyle hesitated only a second, wondering if he should admit to some less
unmanly reaction: uneasiness, disquiet, alarm, anxiety. But he knew
that, with Colin, honesty was always best. “of course I was scared.
just a little bit, but scared nonetheless. There was reason to be.”
“I was scared too,” the boy said without embarrassment. “But I always
thought that when you got to be an adult, you didn’t have to be
scared of anything any more.”
“You’ll outgrow some fears,” Doyle said. “For instance . . .
are you afraid of the dark at all?
“Some.”
“Well, you will outgrow that. But you don’t outgrow everything.
And you find new things to be afraid of.”
They crossed the Mississippi River at Hannibal instead of St.
Louis, missing the Gateway Arch altogether. just before the turnoff to
Hiawatlia, Kansas, they left Route 36 for a series of connecting
highways that took them south once more to Interstate 70 and, by
eight-fifteen, to the Plains Motel near Lawrence, Kansas, where they had
reservations for the night.
The Plains Motel was pretty much like the Lazy Time, except that it had
only one long wing and was built of gray stone and clapboard instead of
bricks. The signs were the same orange and green neon. The Coke
machine by the office door might have been moved, during the day, from
the Lazy Time near Indianapolis; the air around it was cool and filled
with robotic noises.
Alex wondered if the desk clerk would be a stout woman with a beehive