The road was still slick; at the left turn, my tires did a half-second spin.
Calm down. You can’t blow it all so close to the end.
I followed the Saenz & Co. truck at what would have been a safe distance in Sacramento, with a few hundred other cars on the road. On this flat horizon, against the open Midwest sky, the Explorer was way too obvious. If Robert Saenz—or could it be his brother, Jerry?—looked in his rearview mirror, he would have seen me a quarter mile behind, leaning forward in my seat as if I were about to burst through the windshield. I kept the same pace, wishing I had some kind of GPS display on the dashboard; where exactly were we headed?
The calm resignation I’d felt leaving the truck stop had disappeared. That had been the calm before the storm. Now adrenaline was rushing through my veins, masking again my exhaustion. How many hours since I’d slept? Back in Omaha, a world away, Kathleen and Olivia were barely beginning their day, one more of many days without me.
The road widened into two lanes; apparently, we’d joined up with a state highway. I couldn’t afford to wait and see. For all I knew, Saenz & Co. was heading to Canton, to Akron, to whatever was farther south. I couldn’t hang back any longer, waiting to find out. I pulled into the left lane and accelerated, trying to draw even with the truck. This wasn’t an easy task, since it was traveling at a good speed, and the Explorer, rebuilt transmission or not, felt like a rattling ton of tin at anything over seventy. I had to be patient several times, holding back so that I could pass slower-moving vehicles on the road—the occasional town car, a few semis lumbering along with heavy loads. It was a difficult task to keep one eye on the road and one on the Saenz truck, a feat better suited to a movie scene with a stuntman driving, the eye of the cameraman from the backseat making all the necessary observations. All I could make out was the back of the driver’s head, the dark rim of hair.
Robert Saenz’s head, Robert Saenz’s hair.
What was my whole life now if not a chance?
I said his name out loud, letting the words fill the Explorer’s airspace. It was strange to say the name—to have the freedom to voice my thoughts when the syllables had been inside me for so long, pounding like a heartbeat, pulsing like a deep wound.
I drew up on the left, trying to match the Explorer’s pace with his, nose to nose. The driver was looking down, then straight ahead, then—as my whole body tensed—he turned his head.
It wasn’t Robert Saenz.
This must have been Jerry, a younger version of the man from the mug shot, with a face that was thinner, healthier, a mouth that settled naturally into a smile, even as he shot me a surprised glance.
I eased back immediately, foot off the gas. Jerry Saenz turned, looking repeatedly over his left shoulder and back to the road. He tossed up an arm in an angry gesture, but I had fallen back. My grievance wasn’t with Jerry. He’d taken in his killer brother and essentially provided the weapon that had killed my son, but I didn’t want to hurt him—not directly, anyway. If I had only one shot, I was going for the killer himself.
A car honked behind me—the Buick I’d passed earlier, catching up. I slid back into the right lane, heart pounding. An older woman in the passenger seat swiveled to fix me with concerned blue eyes.
She would be another one, I thought. She would see my mug shot in the paper and ask her husband, “Wasn’t that the man who was driving so strangely? Weren’t those California plates?”
I took the first right turn I could, then swung around in a wide arc and retraced the route to Oberlin. Jerry Saenz had seen me, but he wouldn’t understand the significance until later. The encounter would mean nothing to him now, would be only a tiny odd blip in an otherwise normal day.
I was back on track. Robert Saenz would be alone now, waking up in his room above the garage. I said his name, like a chant, all the way back to town.