In the night room Page 0,79

door, honked the horn, and made the lights flash.

“Get in and duck down,” he called, and heard her footsteps coming along behind him instead of separating off to the other side of the car, as he had expected. He grasped the door handle and asked, “What the hell are you doing?” But he was asking the air, and already understood that she was going to get into the back seat. She opened her door a fraction of a second after he opened his, and as he threw the bags inside and slid behind the wheel, he heard her climb onto the back seat and close the door behind her. The ovenlike heat made him pant; his skin instantly felt sandblasted. Blurry features and a flash of blond hair swam across his rearview mirror as Willy Patrick sank out of sight.

He turned the key and hit the accelerator. After a moment’s rumination, the big car shot across the lot and into the narrow, tree-lined drive that led to the front of the hotel. On the left-hand side, the drive widened into the entry court; on its right, it continued on to the street. Tim clicked his seat belt into place, and felt Willy pulling herself up on the back of his headrest.

They came around the side of the hotel into expanding chaos. On the lawn between the edge of the forecourt and the sidewalk, a ruined silver-gray car sent up six-foot flames from its shredded rear end. Uniformed hotel staff milled around the burning Mercedes. Most of them looked like college students. Tim glimpsed a familiar-looking boy in a tight-fitting black T-shirt and black hair staring at him in inexplicable annoyance. People from the neighborhood walked or trotted toward the front of the hotel. In the middle of the street, two boys on bicycles stared at the car in shared fascination.

Roulon Davy stood alone on the sidewalk, watching a pair of police cars race toward the hotel. Roman Richard and Giles Coverley had posted themselves on the lawn between Mr. Davy and their boss’s former vehicle, keeping an eye on the hotel while they watched the conflagration. Roman Richard’s back looked stony with fury, and Coverley’s slouch expressed an elegant despair.

“Is your head down?” Tim asked.

“Just drive,” Willy said, meaning that it was not, entirely.

At the moment the Town Car zipped past the short lawn and was a second or two from shooting into the street, Coverley’s blond head snapped sideways, and his spoiled face hardened in concentration. He followed the car’s progress as it sailed over the sidewalk and raced away down the block. In his rearview mirror, Tim saw Coverley step out in front of the police cars and watch them go. Behind him, the boy in the black T-shirt walked away from the scene: he had taken two long steps before Tim realized who he was, and why Roulon Davy’s “diversion” had been so successful. His forearms prickled; his scalp tingled.

“He’s talking to the cops, all right,” Willy said, kneeling on the back seat. “He isn’t even letting them go up to the car. I wonder what good old Roulon actually did?”

Thinking of WCHWLLDN throwing off his clothes, unfurling his great wings, and leaping into the vastness of the sky, Tim turned toward the middle of Restitution. Beyond its white houses and thick green hedges lay the long, long unspooling of the highway. Quick tears filled his eyes, and he wiped them away before Willy could turn around.

“Pull over so I can get into the front seat.”

He drew up at the side of the street, and she got out of the rear door and advanced toward the side mirror and the passenger door. Just before her right hand moved out of the mirror’s range, Tim realized that from midpalm to the tips of her fingers, it was a gauzy haze outlined by the grass and sky behind it. Then the hand slipped from view, and the passenger door opened.

Willy threw herself into the seat. As she closed the door, he tilted his head to look at her right hand, which was small, intact, and solid.

“What are you looking at?”

“I’m not sure,” he said, and took a breath, remembering Mr. Davy’s double take.

25

From Timothy Underhill’s journal

Good old 224 took us across the state of Ohio. Ohio is a big state, and we saw mile after mile of farmland. I didn’t see any suspicious-looking cars following us, but neither was I watching with any real degree of care. The police