Keeping Watch (35 page)

In the rearview mirror, Allen saw Rachel drop her head and turn to Pete, the farmer's powerful arms wrapping around his wife. The house receded in the back window; the road rose and dipped, and the last thing Allen saw in his mirror was the small head of a dog, stuck out from between the bright curtains of a room on the top floor, barking furiously.

Jamie did not look back.

Chapter 30

Ten miles down the road, Allen spoke for the first time. “I'm sorry, Jamie.”
Sorry you had to get a father like yours, sorry we adults weren't there sooner, sorry I can't close the door yet.
When there was no answer, Allen took his tired eyes from the road and leaned slightly forward so he could see his passenger's face. The dark lashes were lowered, the young head nodding with the movements of the car.

The boy slept for two hours, waking when Allen stopped at a busy gas station to fill the tank and use the john. At Allen's suggestion, the boy followed him into the rest room, going into one of the stalls to pee.

“You want anything to drink? Maybe a snack for later?” he asked, but Jamie just returned to the car, fastened his seat belt, and closed his eyes. Allen went into the small store to pay, picking out some cans of fruit juice and snack food for the boy, and a large coffee and packet of No-Doz for himself. He paid cash for the lot.

By one in the afternoon the car had left Montana and was in the narrow strip of northern Idaho, and its driver was beyond the resuscitating powers of No-Doz. Coeur d'Alene was enough of a tourist center to offer an anonymous motel room even at this early hour. He picked a place at random, bringing the car to a halt under some trees a distance from the office.

He rested his hands on the wheel, wanting desperately to let his forehead follow suit. “Jamie, I haven't slept much in the last few days.”
Since Tuesday,
he realized.
And Rae leaves in twenty-one hours.
“Can I trust you not to run away?”

“Where would I go?”

It was their first exchange since leaving the Johnson farm, and Allen might have wished it was something positive, or at least personal, but he was too weary to do anything more than take note of how dead the boy's voice sounded. He half fell out of the car and trudged across the sweltering parking lot to register.

He chose a room with two beds, upstairs at the back, and told the woman he'd only need one of her plastic key-cards. As he walked back through the sun, he would not have been too surprised to find the passenger seat empty, but Jamie was there, staring straight ahead. Allen moved the car around to the back of the motel, taking a space immediately next to the open-air stairway.

He turned off the engine and said, “We need to follow the same routine we did before, going in so people don't notice a man in his fifties traveling with someone your age. The room is up that flight of stairs and to the left, should be the second door along. You remember how to use one of these things?” He held out the key-card.

Jamie nodded and took the plastic strip, gathered up his backpack, and climbed the stairs. Allen watched the boy disappear around the corner. He'd put on a few pounds over the summer, and some height, but he still looked young for his age, and was still unreadable.
What was going on inside that head?
Allen asked himself.

Allen shook off his reverie, reached back to grab his carry-on and the bag of junk food from the backseat, and followed Jamie up the stairs. The second door was ajar; once inside, Allen turned the dead bolt and fixed the chain.

The boy was sitting on one of the chairs across from the television, staring down at his hands. Allen dropped both bags onto the fake-wood desk next to the phone, reached past the sitting figure to close the drapes against the afternoon sun, then lowered himself to the edge of the second chair.

“Jamie, we have a whole lot of talking to do, you and I. I don't want you to worry about it, because I'm still on your side.” As he said it, he realized that, God help him, it was nothing short of the truth. Even if he was eventually forced to turn the kid in for murdering his father, he would fight for him every step of the way. And he'd thought the Johnsons were hopeless . . . “But an awful lot has happened. Did Rachel tell you anything?”

“She said my father had disappeared and that you'd have to take me away for a while, until you figured out what happened.”

“I'm taking you to Alice. She and I will help you. Jamie, we're not going to abandon you.”
Betray you, maybe, but not abandon you.

The boy's eyes came up, and Allen was interested to see the apprehension in the slim body ease a fraction. Had he been afraid Allen might be returning him to a still-living father? Or was his relief because Allen did not appear to know what he'd done to the plane? The brown eyes gave away nothing.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“Seattle. We'll meet Alice there tomorrow. But we'll stick to the smaller highways once we get into Washington, and I need to be rested for that. I've got to get some sleep. Will you be okay? I have to ask you not to leave the room.”

“Can I watch the TV?”

“Sure, if you keep the sound down. Or there's this.” Allen went to his carry-on and retrieved the
Rings
trilogy he'd stowed there. He tucked it into his arm, keeping it concealed until he was standing directly in front of the boy, then presented it to him, watching intently for any sign of fear or guilt. But all he saw was surprise followed by curiosity, as Jamie reached out to take the books.

“They're the ones from your room,” Allen explained, in case the boy thought they were a replacement.

Jamie looked up quickly. “You've been in my house?”

“I was looking for some indication of where your father might have gone,” Allen said, with a meaningful raised eyebrow. This, too, made no impression on the boy.

“My father wasn't home? Did Mrs. Mendez let you in?”

“I got in myself.”

“You broke in? What are you, some kind of spy or something?”

Allen laughed aloud. “Nothing like that. Just lucky.”

“But my father wasn't there.”

Allen looked at the boy's clever young face. He sat down again. “Jamie, I believe your father is dead.”

The boy's pupils darkened. “No. He can't be.”

“Jamie, it's been on the news, but I asked Rachel not to let you know. His plane went down over the sea. As far as I know, they're still looking for the wreckage.” There was some reaction to the detail of the plane going down, but hardly anything that looked like a start of guilt. Maybe now was best, to push for it. “Jamie, I found the piece of paper in the back of the third book.”

The boy looked confused for a moment, and then it hit him, what Allen's words meant, and his face flushed with enough guilt to make any prosecutor grin with joy. The expression made Allen, reluctant prosecutor that he was, feel queasy.

Still, he pressed on. “It had to do with how to make a plane crash,” he said, but he was talking to boy's bent head. “What do you know about it, Jamie?”

“I found it, in my father's office. I thought, I don't know, maybe he was going to do some kind of insurance thing. He'd been talking about it the day before, how the plane would be worth more crashed than it was on the ground. And he must've asked Howard to research it, because it was some kind of printout from the Internet, it looked like. My father . . . he really doesn't know anything about computers.” He glanced up at that, as if to see how Allen took this revelation of weakness in the All-powerful. Seeing no reaction, he ducked his head again, waiting for Allen's response.

So what did you expect, a tearful confession?
Allen rubbed at his second-day stubble and went to use the toilet. He splashed the road film from his face and drank some cold water, thinking that his mouth was going to taste monstrously foul when he woke up if he didn't brush his teeth, but the effort of digging through his carry-on was too great. He went back into the main room and tossed Jamie the remote for the TV.

“No X-rated films, you hear?” he said, dredging up a grin to make it a joke. “Your aunt Rachel would never forgive me.”

Jamie gave him an uncertain smile back, and Allen was overwhelmed with the pathos of the whole situation. Before he could think about it, he squatted down and put a hand around the back of the boy's neck, giving it a soft squeeze. “We'll get through this together, Jamie. I promise you.”

Before Allen could rise, Jamie whirled in the chair and threw his arms around Allen, hanging on for all he was worth. Allen's immediate impulse was to pull away fast—with abused kids, you had to watch out for their own assumptions about adult behavior. But he caught himself; the boy was vibrating with tension, but there was no eroticism in the contact, so Allen stayed where he was, allowing the boy to cling to him until the tremors began to fade. Only then did he stand up, slowly. He patted the boy's shoulder and walked to the bed near the door. His boots came off reluctantly, unlaced for the first time in thirty hours, and he gave his body over to the embrace of the blessedly firm mattress. Paradise.

The TV came on behind him, immediately dialed down to a whisper. Allen said into the pillow, “You can put it a little louder than that.” The sound came up one increment, and then a second. “Oh, and if you get hungry, there's some snacks in the paper bag.”

Allen's watchful brain, fading fast, did a final perimeter check of the room and the situation, making sure he'd covered everything. He thought he had; if not, he'd done his best. Now if only the kid didn't try to crawl into bed with him and send him straight through the roof. If only he could be absolutely positive that the boy's fervent embrace had not been the gesture of a clever manipulator. If only he didn't keep seeing the open, smiling brown face of a boy in a ragged Eiffel Tower T-shirt, leading his new GI friends into an ambush.

Allen lay, motionless and beyond the reach of any dreams, for four hours. The room was dim when his eyes came open. He lay for a minute, to be certain that nothing nearby had caused him to wake, but his ears held no fading memory of a disturbance; merely his internal clock telling him that it was time to be on their way.

He turned over in the bed, obscurely pleased by the awareness that despite his mind's doubts, his jungle reflexes had trusted Jamie enough to turn his back on him while he slept. Jamie heard his motion and looked across the room, a chocolate smear in one corner of his mouth and a half-empty bottle of apple juice in his hand.

Allen sat up, scrubbed at the remnants of his Harrison Ford haircut, and asked the boy what he was watching.

“A Jackie Chan movie. I've seen it before.”

“You hungry?”

“Yeah. I ate the chips and most of the cookies.”

“That's fine. I saw a burger place coming in, I'll go and get us dinner. What kind of burgers you like?”

“The big ones. With bacon?”

“Fries? Milk shake?”

“Can I have a Coke?” He made it sound like a rare treat.

“Sure.”

Allen shaved and showered and put on a clean shirt, then his jacket, since it seemed to be cooling off. At the door he told Jamie, “Lock the door and do up the chain behind me, and don't let anyone in.”

He waited until he heard both locks slide shut, and went to buy their dinner. In the end, he bought enough for four, including the dinner salad and iced tea that a woman might order.

He knocked on the room door, and saw with approval the peephole go dark before the locks opened. They ate most of the food watching the end of the Jackie Chan movie, and Allen packed away the remaining burger in case one of them got hungry later. The iced tea went down the toilet, the salad he emptied into one of the bags to leave in the next garbage can he happened across. The ghostly family of four packed their bags and left Coeur d'Alene. By nightfall, they had crossed into Washington State.

As a native of western Washington, Allen had never really felt that the dry, flat farmland east of the mountains was part of the same state. Still, it was comforting to see the familiar colors of the highway signs, and to know that by morning, he would be closing in on home ground.

Not that he intended to be home. Twenty-six years of painfully constructed habit died hard, and he could no more have pointed the car's nose straight west along I90 than he could have strolled into the Coeur d'Alene police station with Jamie and asked one of the cops if the kid looked familiar. He had no reason to think anyone was looking for them; on the other hand, he'd not reached his current ripe old age with no felonies tacked to his name by flirting with carelessness. That was one of the reasons he'd bought the Honda back in Helena, because here its Washington State plates would blend in. And why he would now follow the roads less traveled, not only as the less obvious way from there to here, but because any pursuing car would have a harder time to hide, to say nothing of avoiding the risk of looking up to find a bored Highway Patrol car riding his back bumper. The southern routes were longer and more tiring, which made it unlikely they would reach Seattle that day, but the back of his scalp was happier if he didn't zero in on the target.

Besides, it would give him more time to talk with Jamie. If the kid ever woke up.

The curly dark head was resting against the passenger window, using one of Allen's sweatshirts as a pillow. From time to time, when oncoming headlights lit up the front seat, Allen would glance over at his companion, wondering. It was such a straightforward job, the one he'd done all these years—complicated in its details, sure, but basically it had boiled down to taking endangered innocents from a threat and hiding them until the threat could be rendered null, either by distance or steel bars.

He'd never before faced the question of whether or not he was helping an actual innocent. Sure, some of the mothers had taken out their own pain on their children, but once the main tormenter had been removed from the picture and counseling begun, they had generally settled down to a guilt-ridden but affectionate maternal role.

As he'd thought back in May: If Jamie was even a year older, Allen might have been more willing to consider the boy lost, already formed into his adult role as a perpetuator of abuse. A year younger, and he'd have been more confident of the child's malleability, more secure in the knowledge that surrounding the boy with Rachel's family would wither the root cause of violent behavior. Violent adults are created, and the chief element in their makeup is shame: shame at being pushed around, shame at being too weak to protect themselves (and often their mothers and siblings) from Dad's fists, shame at passing on the only form of self-respect they had ever learned—beating up someone smaller. A childhood of humiliation rides up on the tumult of adolescence: It was at Jamie's age that kids joined gangs, that kids shot up schools full of tormentors. That kids hauled off and brutally kicked the dog that loved them.