where Walker was living. He knew that he’d put his own ass in trouble if anyone found out that he was stalking the man. But he shook off the argument and started his car, rolled down the window and let the moist night air sweep in around him as he started east along a route and a destination he now knew by heart.
Chapter 9
Nick slowed and drove down Northwest Eighteenth Terrace, past Highsmith’s Tool & Die on the corner, past Willow Manor, the oddly located Cuban nursing home where the poorer old folks went to die. He turned off his headlights and slid down warehouse row with only his parking lights on. Under the dirty white cast of high streetlights a handful of cars, a couple of pickup trucks and some delivery trucks were parked in front of the line of corrugated steel buildings. He stopped two blocks down and then backed into a spot next to the big Dumpster in front of Flynn’s Awnings and Rain Gutters. From here he could see across the roadway to the painted green door of Archie’s Tool Sharpening Shack and still use the Dumpster as cover. He turned off the ignition and listened to the ping of cooling metal for several minutes until the silence wrapped around the car, and then he reached for the coffee. He had stopped at an all-night 7-Eleven and bought the twenty-four-ounce cup, loaded it with cream and sugar and also bagged two donuts as an afterthought. He started on the chocolate glaze and sipped at the steaming cup and checked the end of the street. If a police sector car came through on the overnight shift, he would have to explain himself. But he’d done this three times since tracing Walker’s work address and no cops had come by yet. It was probably just off their regular radar, but this week it had become the late-night center of his. He checked his watch—four fifteen—and made sure the alarm was on and then stared out at Archie’s sign and before the first donut was done, he fell asleep.
He dreamed the dream he always did, the one where he is sitting back in the third seat of the family van while his dead wife is driving. His dead child watches vigilantly out a side window, counting the lighted deer she spies among the Christmas decorations. Carly is at the other window, trying to outdo her sister. It is dark outside. “The girls,” which is what he calls all three, are out cruising through the local neighborhoods on Christmas Eve. In snowless South Florida, the garishness of the colored displays seems profoundly out of place, lights strung in palms, the white-wired deer bending their heads and munching at grass that is eternally green. The girls are laughing at some observation Carly has made about a deer that has lost the electrical current from all his bulbs but the single red one at his nose and a broken strand running down one leg. But Nick is in the back, realizing that his wife seems oblivious to the fact that she is driving in a constant loop, around and around the traffic circle near their house, going nowhere, seeing the same houses, the same deer, over and over.
Nick doesn’t see deer. He stares out of his dead daughter’s window and sees the headlights of a pickup truck cresting the hill that rises up over the interstate. He has to twist his head around and look out back as his wife continues the circle and he sees the headlights grow larger and brighter. Nick can feel the apprehension coming into his throat but cannot speak. He cannot move his legs or arms to crawl over the back seat to pull his daughters to him, to shield them from what is about to occur. He cannot shout to his wife to warn her. He cannot tell her to speed up or slow down. In the dream he can only watch the synchronization of the circular movement and the oncoming truck, a speeding straight line of light coming to match the slow orbit of his family. Nick feels the hot tears slide down his cheeks even before the impact.
Eeeep, eeeep, eeeep, eeeep.
Nick’s eyes flashed open and at first he thought the noise was the high-pitched bleating of an ambulance and then realized the sound was coming from his wrist and then reality shook his brain loose. He was in the parking lot, next to the