Parallel Lies (2 page)

“Smells good,” the visitor said in a friendly enough tone, the voice low and dry. He did not sound winded by his effort.

The comment confused Alvarez slightly, lessened his anxiety. Maybe this guy was just trying to invite himself to dinner. But then again, that flashlight was oddly bright, too bright. Sure, some riders carried penlights, even flashlights. But one with fresh batteries? Never. Not once had Alvarez seen that. Discarded batteries were scrounged out of Dumpsters, the last few volts eked out of them. If a rider had two bucks in his pocket it went to booze, cigarettes, reefer, or food—usually in that order. Not batteries. The crisp brightness of that light cautioned Alvarez. Heat flooded him. Finally warm.

“You alone?” the visitor asked.

Alvarez had long since learned to keep his mouth shut, and he did so now. Most of the time people tended to fill the dead air, and in the process they revealed more about themselves than they intended.

The bright light stung his eyes. Alvarez looked away, the chili boiling at his feet.

“You Mexican?” his visitor asked. The man’s round face was now partially visible. A white man, with the nose of a boxer and the brow of a Neanderthal.

Riders beat the stuffing out of one another for the damnedest reasons. Most of the time it had little to do with reason—just the need to hit something, someone. Maybe this guy rode the rails looking for Mexicans to pummel. Again, Alvarez glanced down at the simmering chili.

“Or maybe,” the visitor suggested, “your father was Spanish, and your mother, Italian.”

As a part-time rider, Alvarez had learned to live with fear, had learned to compartmentalize it, shrink it, rid it of its power to seize control. You couldn’t be fighting fear and someone else simultaneously, so you learned to let the fear roll off your back. But what he felt now wasn’t fear, it was terror.

He knows who I am!

There was little he could do about terror. Terror, once allowed inside, owned you. There was no fighting off real terror. Survivors could harness it, redirect it, but could never be rid of it. Terror had to be dealt with quickly or it would freeze every muscle.

Alvarez bent down and launched the boiling chili into the visitor’s face. He charged, hoping to drive the man out the open door. But behind the ghoulish scream, as his face burned, the man produced a nightstick or a sap, connecting it with the side of Alvarez’s face. He felt his nose crack and he spewed blood. Alvarez faltered, regained himself, and turned, diving for the small stove. Coming to his feet, he waved it as a weapon, prepared to strike.

This would be a fight to the finish. Alvarez knew it before the next blow landed.

Alvarez awoke to the jarring sound of a garage door being hauled open, a pickup truck starting, and the sharp smell of engine exhaust. He quietly moved a garden spade and peered down through cracks in the garage loft into which he had climbed the night before, weary and soaked in another man’s blood. Dried blood, now brown, caked and cracking. If he were spotted, it would mean the police. He couldn’t allow that. Not after working at this for eighteen months.

He shook from the cold and from his memory of the night before, realizing that he had probably killed a man, whether in self-defense or not. By the time Alvarez had thrown the intruder from the freight car, his attacker had lost so much blood that under the glare of the flashlight he’d looked ghostly pale. Even the man’s lips had been white. And now …now he felt forced to question his own motives. He’d been accused of killing his own attorney, Donald Andersen—a phony accusation that had caused him to flee in the first place. The thought that he now indeed might have killed a man could add weight to that earlier accusation. With their relentless pursuit of him, they may have turned him into a killer. Now resentment and anger overrode his initial self-questioning. Northern Union Railroad would cease to exist. This, for their lies and endless atrocities.

His position up in the garage loft afforded Alvarez a view of the truck’s steering wheel and two large male hands gripping it. Alvarez lay down flat just in case the driver happened
to look up as he backed out. As a precaution, he remained still, even after the truck cleared the garage, and this paid off because the driver left the vehicle to manually pull the garage door back down. Alvarez listened to the truck pulling away, waited another half minute, and then moved the ratty blanket and canvas tarp off himself, grateful that the owners had left a hot lamp going all night for the cat. The lamp had taken the edge off the cold and had probably kept him from freezing. It was the glow from the lamp that had called him to this garage: a beacon seen through the woods.

A train whistle sounded, reminding Alvarez again of last night’s horror and that he had to keep moving. They might not find the body for weeks—or perhaps as soon as that same day—but whatever the timing, he needed to put as many miles as possible between himself and southern Illinois, and fast. The man in the boxcar had known his birth heritage—had teased him by saying “Mexican” first, then waiting and identifying Alvarez’s Spanish father and Italian mother. It meant that Northern Union Security was closer to capturing him than they’d ever been. He’d obviously screwed up—had allowed himself to be seen or recognized, or worse, he’d become predictable. Had they known which train he was on, or had it been random chance, a lucky guess? Had they determined his next target? Did they know he’d sabotaged the bearings? Had they finally made this connection between the various derailments?

He climbed down from the loft, all his joints aching, cold to the bone, passing a small bicycle hung on the wall and catching a glimpse of his own face in the bike’s tiny rearview mirror. His wife had claimed he looked more Italian than Latino, citing his olive skin, thin face, and sharp features, but he saw his father’s face in the mirror, not his mother’s. He gingerly touched his nose. Bruised, but not broken as he’d originally thought. Like the rest of him, his face was crusted in blood and dirt. He needed a shower, or at least a facecloth.
He had a small tear in the skin above his slightly swollen left eye, the cut clotted shut. It would clean up and eventually recede beneath his thick black eyebrows. His dark skin would go a long way toward hiding the discoloration. Now he needed to get back on schedule: he had a plane to catch. But he couldn’t even walk out in public looking like this, much less hitchhike. He glanced around the dimly lit garage, the morning sun just burning the edge of the horizon and sparkling off the fallen snow. Panic struck him: snow. Footprints. A trail to follow.
Them
—right behind him.

For eighteen months he’d been running, and though in a way he was accustomed to it, he still broke out in a sweat at the thought of capture. He clung to his purpose, confident that God would protect him.

Ultimately he blamed William Goheen, CEO of Northern Union, for killing his family. But his revenge was no longer focused solely on Goheen. Not only did one life not equal three, but Goheen had not acted alone. The institution, the corporation, had killed his wife and children, intentionally or not. There was no halfway in this.

A change of clothes—and fast!
he thought, still looking out at the carpet of fresh snow. Time seemed always to be working against him.

He edged up carefully to the frosted window behind the cat’s bed and peered out at the two-story farmhouse not twenty yards away. Gray smoke spiraled from a brick chimney. Icicles hung from the gutters. A yellowish light glowed from the downstairs windows.

The kid’s bike hanging on the wall suggested a family, not a single guy gone off to work in his truck. It meant there were others inside: a wife, at least one child old enough to ride a bike. Maybe others, too—perhaps a mother-in-law, more children, houseguests. But he needed a closer look. He wouldn’t get anywhere in his bloody clothes. He could only hope that school might take the mother and child away to
catch a school bus, or that the wife was still asleep, a heavy sleeper. He watched the house carefully for ten long minutes, evaluating his chances of crossing the open space unseen. If there was movement inside, he couldn’t detect it: he decided to make his move.

He elected not to crouch or sneak. He would run openly. If confronted, he would act as if he were in shock. He would claim there had been a horrible traffic accident, that he couldn’t remember where, or even how he’d gotten there, but that he needed a telephone quickly. He needed help. He would play on do-gooding Midwestern values. From there, he’d see.

He opened the garage’s side door and started running. All kinds of thoughts went through his head. How had he come to this point? He didn’t belong here. Eighteen months ago he would have laughed at the notion that he would be running across a yard of freshly fallen snow in bloody clothes, with the intention of stealing fresh clothing from complete strangers. He’d been a schoolteacher—eighth grade science and computer science; he’d loved his job, his wife, the twins. To have told him then that the threat on his life would be so high just a few years later; he would never have believed it. And yet here he was.

He reached the house unnoticed. Perhaps he would not need any elaborate story. He crept up the back porch. A forgotten withered black pumpkin frowned monstrously at him, its jaw frozen, wearing a crown of ice.

He saw someone inside. An attractive woman in her early thirties, she wore green flannel pajamas, the top unbuttoned enough that she wouldn’t want a strange man gaping at her. Short, but not skinny. Hearty Midwestern stock. Dull hair that hadn’t yet been brushed out. She left the kitchen and returned a minute later cradling a pile of sheets. Alvarez ducked under the window and moved in tandem with her to the far end of the small back porch where another window
looked in on a pantry, a laundry room. An ironing board stood on all fours next to the window.

The woman bent over to remove a load of clothes from the dryer, exposing her breasts to him, and he thought how there had been a time when that might have had an effect on him. Now he felt no stirring, no interest whatsoever. He thought of his wife, the crushed car. It strengthened his resolve. He focused on a pair of men’s jeans strung over a clothesline rack in the far corner. The woman lifted a pile of darks to the top of the dryer. He spotted a flannel shirt, some heavy socks. Alvarez leaned back from the window as the woman unloaded the clothes. He sensed that she was about to look out, that she had felt his presence.

She moved some clothes from the washer to the dryer and then stuffed the sheets into the washer. He glanced around, making sure he wasn’t being watched. He briefly considered entering the kitchen right then—he felt certain the back door would be unlocked—surprising the wife, perhaps tying her up, and stealing some food and clothing. But any such encounter would put him at greater risk. Cops would be called in—his trail would be easier to follow. He began to feel impatient, but the cold in his bones was gone, replaced by hot adrenaline.

She reentered the kitchen. Alvarez moved cautiously to another window and took a position nearer the porch stairs but still with a view inside. The woman measured out water into a pot and turned on the stove. She pulled down a box of Cream of Wheat and set it on the counter. Morning rituals. He recalled them with longing.

Then she hurried out, disappearing into another room.

He was guessing three to five minutes for the water to boil. How accurately did she have such things timed in her head? His wife would have known
exactly.
Three minutes would be plenty for him to get in, grab the clothes, and get back out. He made his move, pulling his hand into the sweatshirt’s
sleeve so as not to leave fingerprints on the doorknob as he turned it.

The door opened. He stepped inside.

The kitchen smelled like a home. God, he missed that smell. For a moment it owned him, the poignant feeling carrying him away, and then the distant sound of shower water caught his attention. It was warm in here, the first warmth he’d felt in days. Was she just warming up the shower, or getting in? Each option offered a different scenario. He crossed toward the laundry room. He wanted to stay here; he wanted to move in. He pulled the jeans into his arms, stepped to his left and reached for the flannel shirt in the pile of dry clothes.

The buttons plunked against the surface of the dryer. He stiffened, though he thought the noise from the washing machine would conceal this much tinier sound. But in rising up abruptly he bumped the ironing board and now watched as the iron, just out of reach, began to rock, first this way, then that, teetering back and forth. At that moment, the wife, her flannel pajama top now fully unbuttoned, pants off and left back in the bedroom or bath, crossed the kitchen to where, had she looked to her right, she would have seen a panicked stranger reaching out to stabilize her iron, which was about to crash to the floor.

The iron started to fall.

Alvarez caught it, reaching out just in time. He then remained absolutely still, aware that the iron might have just presented itself as a weapon, if needed. Could he bring himself to use it that way? he wondered.

He couldn’t hear her over the noise of the appliances. He pictured her measuring the Cream of Wheat and carefully stirring it into the boiling water. That was when he realized she had used hot tap water, not cold, which had shortened the time it took to boil. He moved a bit in order to remain hidden, all the while keeping one eye on the kitchen.

The woman’s pale bare bottom shifted hip to hip as she left the room.

Alvarez returned the iron to the ironing board, grabbed a few more pieces of clothing—a T-shirt, several mismatched socks—and made for the kitchen. Here, he heard the shower water still running. This woman had her morning routine all planned out.

He took two steps toward the back door and changed his mind. He returned to the pantry, deciding to take some canned food while he had the chance. A clock ran inside his head; he had maybe another minute or two.

“Mommy?” a tiny voice called from behind him.