Nathan's Run (1996) (19 page)

There were only eight cars ahead of him now, and the cop let thiee go unnoticed. Next time, only two.

Oh, shit, I'm the third car now, he thought, feeling himself on the edge of panic. He's been stopping number threes. Oh, God, please!

To Nathan's horror, the cop stopped the very next car. Nobody got through on that round. Desperate, he tried to plan his way out if they caught him. None of them were in their cars, he thought. If they made eye contact, he'd just stomp on the gas and take his chances. It. was the only choice he had.

Once the cop was done with the car, he waved that driver on with a smile. And stopped the very next car!

"Oh, shit!" This time he said it out loud, a whisper. In the green light of the instrument panel, he could actually see his right leg shaking now as it tried to maintain even pressure on the brake pedal. He tried to swallow, but his mouth felt as if he'd been eating chalk.

The officer seemed particularly interested in the vehicle in front of Nathan, spending a long time shining the light carefully around the interior of the back seat, and then talking for a good thirty seconds with the driver. Nathan couldn't hear the words-he couldn't hear anything but the drumbeat of blood in his ears-but the conversation seemed to be heating up. The cop opened the driver's door and motioned for him to step out, motioning for his partner in the other lane to come over and help. Obediently, the driver of the car stepped out and placed his hands on the roof of the car.

As the cop reached for his handcuffs with one hand, he motioned with the other for Nathan to drive around. There was some very brief eye contact, and Nathan thought for an instant that he was busted. But whatever recognition there may have been on the part of the cop quickly evaporated when his prisoner started to struggle, and they both tumbled to the ground. Nathan watched the brawl for a moment in his sideview mirror, and nearly rear-ended the car in front of him in the process.

It took a couple of miles of driving for Nathan to realize that he'd made it. After the roadblock, the traffic thinned out, moving at posted speeds or better. Nathan cruised into the right-hand lane. A green-and-white sign announced that Route 66 was just three miles away. He felt nearly dizzy with a sense of pride and accomplishment. He'd beaten them again. With each passing hash mark on the road, Nathan sped closer to his freedom, and further away from the nightmare that his life in Brookfield had become. Before him lay his future, where his past didn't have to matter. He could start over, and somehow pretend that Uncle Mark and Ricky and judges and death itself had never entered his life and so abruptly shut down his childhood.

The windows were up, the radio was blaring, and the air conditioning was turned on high. He was free, and he planned to stay that way. As a sense of pure triumph washed over him, he threw his fist into the roof liner and shouted at the top of his voice, "Yes!"

When Monique Michaels rolled over to spoon up with her husband, she noticed he was gone, and she was instantly wide awake. The digital clock on her nightstand read 3:21, while the one on his read 3:28 and the VCR across the room flashed its perpetual 12:00.

Leaning up on her elbow, she listened for sounds, but the house was silent. She was worried about Warren. He wasn't himself tonight. Even the sex was a little off. He did his part well enough, but half his mind was somewhere else.

It was happening again, she knew. He was shutting them out. Something was chewing up her husband's insides, and rather than sharing it with her, or leaning on her for support, he was falling back into his macho, suffer-in-silence bravado.

Before she could control it, old anger bubbled up again from deep within. It had been nine months since their son, Brian, had been killed on his newspaper route, but only two since Warren had started to deal with it. In between, Monique and the girls had been stranded alone, left to deal with unspeakable grief in virtual silence.

Monique thought-she prayed-that they'd worked through it all. Through counseling that Warren had fought every step of the way, Monique was finally given the freedom to grieve openly. Freed from the shackles of the make-believe strength she showed to the girls, her emotions had flooded out of her, raw and bitter in their purity. Week after week, the anger and grief and bitterness spilled out to the therapist.

Yet, week after week, Warren just sat stoically, clearly in control and clearly concerned for his bride. He held her hand; he spoke sympathetic words; yet he never shed a single tear where she could see. God, how she'd hated him for that!

In the end, as the counseling diminished from three sessions a week to two sessions a month, her anger subsided just enough to let the love return. And Warren was still there. Still stoic. Still strong. Still kind.

But the pain remained as an open wound.

Slipping on the summer-weight robe with the big flowers-the one Warren hated so much, making it fun to wear-she swung out of bed and left to find him. On the way out, she habitually checked on the girls, who were sound asleep.

Normally, when Warren couldn't sleep, he simply went downstairs to watch TV until he faded off, but tonight he wasn't there, either. "Warren?" she asked the house softly. "Where are you?" No answer. Now she was really concerned.

Then she saw movement on the front porch, and noticed the door was ajar.

"What's wrong, honey?" she asked as she glided silently out onto the porch to join him.

Warren greeted his bride of nearly fifteen years with a smile. He was sitting in one of the wooden rockers, holding three fingers of Scotch in a glass, wearing a T-shirt and sweat pants, with his bare feet crossed on the porch rail. "Hi, babe:' he said. "Kids okay?"

Monique sat down in the rocker next to his. "They're fine," she said. "Out cold. You're the one I'm worried about."

"I'm fine," he assured her. "I've just got a lot on my mind."

He was anything but fine, and Monique could tell. "Like what?" she probed.

"Work stuff."

"What kind of work stuff?"

"Stuff stuff," he insisted, trying to blow her off. "Really. It's nothing for you to be concerned about. Why don't you go on back to bed? I just need to work through some things."

"Warren, look at you." It was the same tone she used to scold the kids. "You never sit on the front porch, and I don't remember the last time you had a drink by yourself."

"If I was by myself, you couldn't remember me having a drink. Sort of by definition."

"Don't change the subject. Tell me what's going on in there." She tapped his temple with her forefinger. "You promised you'd never shut me out again."

Warren inhaled deeply and noisily through his nose and let it go as a silent whistle. He started to answer once, but stopped and looked away. "I'm-ah-I guess I'm having some problems keeping this Nathan Bailey thing in perspective." His voice sounded weak, and a little shaky. He told her of the video and of Nathan's transient likeness to Brian.

So that was it. Monique hugged him as best she could from a different chair. "Oh, honey, I'm sorry," she soothed. "I know how much you miss him. But all kids that age look alike sometimes."

He forced a chuckle. "I guess. But it makes it tough to throw him in jail."

"But it's your job. You said yourself . . . "

"I know what I said, Monique," he barked, much more harshly than he would have wanted. "You don't know the whole story. You don't know what his life has been like. In the past two years, he's lost everything:' So have I, he didn't say.

Monique let the silence that followed linger in the humid night air. Promises aside, this was how Warren worked out his problems. He guarded his pain the way a gambler hides a losing hand. As long as no one could peek at the cards, he could bluff forever.

The moment when Jed Hackner entered the house with the news about Brian, Monique watched her husband die inside. Warren was a man of many talents and many interests, but his son was his life. They breathed the same air and thought the same thoughts. Identical in looks and personalities, they laughed at the same movies and together dreamed up the most ridiculous practical jokes, which only they thought funny. They shared a very special world, those two, one in which girls were simply not allowed.

Brian was Warren's reason to stay young. He told everyone who would listen that the girls were important to him-and they absolutely were-but that it was his son who'd fulfilled the order he placed at the baby store.

On that day in October when Brian was stolen from their lives by a drunk teenager in a crush of twisted steel and aluminum, Warren's personality changed. He went through all the motions of life, but something was gone, like a table lamp, perhaps, with a 25-watt bulb where a 60-watter belonged. At first he withdrew completely, grieving in silence while he made a great show of helping others cope.

Next came the anger. He attended both days of the teenager's trial, arriving early to sit up front where he could stare at the defendant, and be clearly visible to the jury.

When the driver was convicted as an adult of voluntary manslaughter and sent to the state prison in Richmond, it was as though the anger had been exorcised from Warren's soul. A spring returned to his walk, and he began to show an interest again in the family. He told Monique one night that justice had been done, and now he could begin to put this all behind him.

But he'd never be the same, and they both knew it.

The look in Warren's eyes and his posture in the chair reminded Monique so much of the bad days following Brian's death. She didn't know how much more of this he could hold in until he just came apart. It would happen one day, she was sure, just as it had happened to her time and again in the therapist's office. She wouldn't force it. But she prayed she'd be there for him the day it happened.

"It's just not fair," he said after a very long time.

Together as a couple, yet alone with their thoughts, they sat in silence on the front porch for more than an hour, listening to the shrill chirping of a million night creatures as they screamed their battle cries and sang their love songs in the darkness. They had been through a lot together, most of it wonderful, some of it horrifying. But on balance, they'd grown closer through it all. In the deflected glow of the stars and the streetlight, Monique held Warren's hand and secretly watched as tears balanced themselves on the edge of his eyelids and rolled down his stubbly cheeks. He said nothing, and he made no move to wipe them away.

As a knot formed in her own throat, Monique realized that she loved her clumsy, intolerant, macho, sexist husband more at that moment than she had on the day he proposed.

Chapter
17

By 4:15, Nathan was somewhere between Harrisburg and WilkesBarre, Pennsylvania, and looking for his next rest stop. In six hours of driving, he hadn't gone nearly as far as he'd hoped. Distances on the map just looked shorter. The Beemer's gas gauge was nudging empty when he pulled off the highway and headed toward what appeared to be a residential area.

This driving stuff had turned out to be less exciting than he'd expected. Once past the roadblock near his ex-home, he'd blasted straight through Virginia and Maryland without incident. His biggest problem turned out to be cramping in his right leg from keeping his toe pointed all the time to reach the gas pedal. Sitting in one spot for so long, without the option of moving his butt more than a half-inch at a time, had begun to take its toll on him as well. He was hungry. And thirsty. And he had to piss so bad he thought he'd explode.

The exit ramp off of Route 81 dumped him out onto another four-lane strip, this one criss-crossed with traffic lights all blinking yellow in perfect unison. He was in a low-rent business district, surrounded by darkened grocery and hardware stores, fast food places and a dollar movie theatre showing year-old movies for a third of what you could rent them for at the video store. Directly across the street was a competing marquee advertising triple-X-rated movies twenty-four hours a day. Sure enough, there were a dozen cars in the parking lot.

Though the Beemer's need for gas and Nathan's need for relief were becoming critical at the same time, he decided to press on further down the road. Maybe he'd become spoiled the night before, but this wasn't the kind of neighborhood he wanted to move into-even as a burglar. A sign on a telephone pole told him that Little Rocky Creek was selling single-family homes from the low $180s just eight miles down the road.

"Little Rocky Creek it is," he announced to the car.

It was a new housing development, still largely under construction. The house designs appeared similar to the neighborhood where he grew up, but they were much smaller, and so close together that from a distance some looked like they were actually touching their next-door neighbor. The main drag through the development, predictably enough, was Little Rocky Trail, which fed ten cul-de-sacs, around which most of the houses were situated. He began his tour of the neighborhood by cruising each of these side streets.

Everyone in the whole damned neighborhood received a morning paper, many of them two. How was he going to pick out the house on vacation if every driveway had newspapers on it? It was just one more thing he hadn't planned for. He was scared to think about how many other things could go wrong that he hadn't even considered. And whoever heard of a paper boy who had his route taken care of before five? When he was a paper boy a hundred years ago, he was lucky to get the Washington Post on his customers' doorsteps before six, and even then it was because his father had wrestled him out of bed.