isn’t sure what he has to do, but that’s not the hardest thing. The hardest thing is being this close to his son without showing himself, even when he most wants to speak to him. With no idea what he would say if they did talk, because they are strangers and he’s afraid to find out what said son, the baby he, OK, the child he walked out on, would have to say to him.
Or maybe he’s sitting out here in plain sight because he is flat-out exhausted.
Unless it’s the function of geography.
At night on Coral Shores it’s harder to follow a man without his picking up on it. Bright moonlight defies him. This is, furthermore, a tight community where solid citizens hunker down at home after dark, particularly on Sunday nights when the nesting instinct strikes. All partied out after the weekend, they hole up in front of the electronic fire, snug and sanctimoniously self-satisfied.
There’s nobody on the streets but Walker Pike and the man he is following.
Inevitably, the kid will pick up Walker’s headlights in his rear view mirror; he’ll notice that when he turns, Walker turns. They’ve already come close; that rented tin can almost nicked him back there on the circle. He had to lay back and run with his lights off for several blocks, until the driver was done stopping to see if Walker would pass him, and fed up with screeching around corners to trick the driver keeping pace with him. Out on the barren peninsula road even a blind monkey would know that he was being followed.
Better get there first, Pike, if you hope to control what goes down out there when the kid comes charging in to storm Kalen’s house.
Walker will wait for him outside Orville Kalen’s dream house. It’s easy enough for Walker to find – not because he’s local, but because this is not the first time he’s been here, parked outside. Never mind when that was, or what Walker Pike considered when he stopped in front of the gleaming modern house one night not that long ago, riveted and trembling with suppressed rage. Shattered, he hit the gas and scratched off while the enemy he most wanted dead was still alive. Correction. Still safe.
Unlike the northerner from the real world, who will keep cross-hatching Coral Shores until he hits the right road, Walker goes like an arrow to the end of the peninsula. Out here, planting is sparse. Scrub pines and travelers’ palms cling to sandy dirt that blows across the city’s poshest piece of real estate same as it did in the white trash neighborhood on Pierce Point back in the day, when Walker and Wade lived with Pop in four rooms above the garage.
In denser neighborhoods on Coral Shores where Walker Pike never comes and certainly would never be invited, homeowners have trees and topsoil, tons of sphagnum moss and fertilizer delivered by the truckload. Gardeners roll out sod richer than Persian carpeting and set down plants like bric-a-brac, whereas Pierce Point families cemented over front yards to get rid of sandspurs, or battled nature with rye grass and supermarket shrubs doomed by the sandy soil before they patted dirt over the roots. Like the others in his part of town, Orville Kalen had all the right things trucked out to garnish his expansive Sixties modern house at the nether end of Coral Shores, but without constant attention nothing lives long, not even a man with all the money in the world.
When you die, they die.
There are days when Walker wishes that he could.
Kalen is home, right where Chaplin dumped him yesterday – yes, Walker knows. Over the years, he kept track. All that money made Kalen lazy and self-indulgent. Careless about how he got what he wanted. At this hour he’ll be staggering from bed to the fridge and back to bed with an overloaded plate, unless he’s sprawled on those greasy sheets with a freshly opened fifth, stupefied. First prize, he has choked to death on his own vomit, but that kind never dies. The rangy kid from New London will find the place; it is inevitable. He’ll bang on the door and something terrible will come down.
What Walker is most afraid of: fire.
He has to stop the kid before he gets close enough to knock. Until then, he waits. He cuts the motor and glides in next to the house. Yes he’s exposed, but his son won’t see Walker parked in the shadows with