North on Interstate 15 to Barstow, into the true desert of sand and eons-old rock and Joshua trees like spiny totems of some ancient humanoid race long extinct, and then east on Interstate 40, coastal clouds feathering away to blue sky, air so clear that the Saturday sun blazed white instead of yellow…
Iron Furnace, Kentucky, was a long drive away, but facial-recognition software matched to airport-terminal and train-station cameras made quicker travel dangerous. Having cut her own hair short, she now wore long auburn hair, contact lenses tinting her blue eyes green, and makeup she didn’t need. Facial-recognition scanning, however, would see through those superficial changes and ID her by the unique measurements, shapes, and relationships of her features. In the air or on the rails, she was vulnerable to capture on arrival, having been identified in the minutes after departure if not even before.
Jessica had packed her off with a thermos of black coffee as well as power bars sweetened with fruit and honey, so that she could meet the empty miles on a caffeine-and-sugar high. A radar detector and laser foiler ensured a legal velocity through the speed traps.
Determined to reach Flagstaff, Arizona, in nine hours, she navigated the California Mojave, past Pisgah Crater, through the Bullion Mountains, through a hundred fifty miles of wasteland to the Colorado River. She came into Arizona, past far buttes and nearer slickrock, through a landscape of sage and agave, guided by a map and experience, stopping for fuel and a bathroom break in Kingman.
She traveled by the grace of music. To keep her spirits up: Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and the little-known Teddy Wilson, the best pianist of the big-band period. The farther her son receded in her wake, the less effect dance music had on her mood. The arid empty land, bespeaking ten thousand years of rock-splitting weather, born of cataclysmic forces both volcanic and tectonic, called for Bob Dylan, early to mid-career.
At 4:05 in the afternoon, having gained an hour transiting from Pacific Time to Mountain Time, she arrived in Flagstaff on schedule.
Nine hours counted as a hard haul, but any cross-country drive was better begun with a first-day marathon, when the driver had not yet been numbed by the vastness of the undertaking. She planned to make it to Albuquerque, another 325 miles, before stopping for the night—or, failing that, at least 187 miles to Gallup.
They said that man proposes, God disposes; but what happened next to delay her was not the work of God.
Although she had drunk the coffee in the thermos as well as more that she bought in Kingman, she’d eaten only one of the power bars. She wasn’t much for sugar, but she was a lioness for protein.
She left the interstate for a truck stop bigger than some towns and topped off the gas tank and parked and went into the restaurant for an early dinner.
People whose work was the highway did not eat all to the same schedule, but 4:15 was early for dinner even among those who timed their day by miles rather than by minutes. Because there were maybe thirty customers in a space able to accommodate at least six times that many, Jane didn’t take a stool at the counter but settled in a booth by a window with a clear view of the parking lot beyond which eighteen-wheelers passed on their way to islands of pumps.
The waitress brought a menu and a cheerful attitude. She took an order for milk, with which Jane intended to wash down a maximum-strength acid reducer, and turned away with the assurance that she would be “back in a jiff.”
Aware of being watched by three guys at a table near the center of the room, Jane scanned the menu, looking over the top of it from time to time to assess what it was that interested them.
They were drinking beer, Coronas with lime slices, sharing nachos and french fries topped with cheese. In their late twenties. Cowboy boots and engineer boots. Stonewashed black denim on one, blue jeans for the other two. One with a shaved head and an earring. One with shaved sides and hair on top, a postage-stamp beard between lower lip and chin. The third looked fresh-scrubbed and sported a hairstyle more common on ’50s television than in the world of now, as if at times he found it advantageous to pass for a church boy.
What they said to one another didn’t travel. But they were quick to laugh, and the laughter had a caustic edge, a snicker of contempt, which was especially the case when they were focused on Jane. She could relax. They made no connection between her and the most-wanted stories on TV. Their interest was sexual, and nothing would come of that but the disappointment with which they must be profoundly familiar.
They were most likely just three dudes starting early on their Saturday night, hoping for action of some kind, which would end up being video games.
When the waitress brought the milk, Jane ordered two dinners: an eight-ounce steak and roast chicken on the same plate, hold the potatoes, double the veggies.
“You don’t look like the kind of girl could put away all that,” the waitress said.
“Just watch me.”
After she took an acid reducer with a long swallow of milk and set the glass on the table, she discreetly regarded the three men. The one with the shaved head was on a cellphone, staring at her intently. When he realized she might be looking at him, he at once shifted his attention to the beer in front of him. He spoke into the phone for half a minute more and terminated the call and drank from the bottle.
Maybe the call he’d made had been about her. Probably not. She didn’t look enough like herself to be identified so easily. Paranoia could be a tool for survival. It could also be an engine of unreason and lethal panic. He was just a guy on a phone.
The waitress brought her dinner. “Bet you was raised on a farm like me.”
“Many have said so.”
These days, she wielded knife and fork with machine efficiency, eating like someone condemned, determined not to run out of time before she ran out of food.
As she ate, she watched the three men surreptitiously. She was not their sole interest. They were scoping out a couple at another table, or rather the well-built brunette who was half of the couple.
At yet another table sat two women and two girls. The older of the women appeared to be about fifty, the younger one thirty, both attractive and enough alike to be mother and daughter. The sisters looked nine and eleven, a lively but well-behaved pair.
Perhaps the laughter of the men seemed softer and more guarded, nervous and with a darker snicker, when their attention was on the family of four. They leaned over the table to share their comments in voices lowered even further than when they seemed to be talking about Jane.
Other than such small and perhaps meaningless suggestions of bad intentions, she could not say what inspired a trilling from her lowest vertebra to highest. This brief tinnitus in the spinal fluid was the way that, in certain situations, her intuition spoke to her: You’re the law, pay attention to this, the very signature of evil in the world.