know—and then a man in overalls and a railroad cap came along and ran the Southway door shut . . . but this time not all the way. Luke guessed there was a sticky place in the track. Another five minutes passed before the train jerked into motion again, slowly at first, clicking over points and crossings, then picking up speed.
Some guy calling himself some other guy’s brother-in-law.
Said he was always talking about hopping a freight.
They knew he was gone, and even if they found the Pokey downstream from Dennison River Bend, they hadn’t been fooled. They must have made Maureen talk. Or Avery. The thought of them torturing the information out of the Avester was too horrible to contemplate, and Luke pushed it away. If they had people watching for him to get off here, they’d have people waiting at the next stop, too, and by then it might be daylight. They might not want to cause trouble, might just observe and report, but it was possible they’d try to take him prisoner. Depending on how many people were around, of course. And how desperate they were. That, too.
I might have outsmarted myself by taking the train, Luke thought, but what else could I do? They weren’t supposed to find out so fast.
In the meantime, there was one discomfort of which he could rid himself. Holding to the seat of a riding lawnmower to keep his balance, he unscrewed the fuel cap of a John Deere rototiller, opened his fly, and pissed what felt like two gallons into the empty gas tank. Not a nice thing to do, an extremely mean trick on whoever ended up with the rototiller, but these were extraordinary circumstances. He put the gas cap back on and screwed it tight. Then he sat down on the seat of the riding lawnmower, put his hands over his empty belly, and closed his eyes.
Think about your ear, he told himself. Think about the scratches on your back, too. Think about how bad those things hurt and you’ll forget all about being hungry and thirsty.
It worked until it didn’t. What crept in were images of kids leaving their rooms and going down to the caff for breakfast a few hours from now. Luke was helpless to dispel images of pitchers filled with orange juice, and the bubbler filled with red Hawaiian Punch. He wished he was there right now. He’d drink a glass of each, then load up his plate with scrambled eggs and bacon from the steam table.
You don’t wish you were there. Wishing that would be crazy.
Nevertheless, part of him did.
He opened his eyes to get rid of the images. The one of the orange juice pitchers was stubborn, it didn’t want to go . . . and then he saw something in the empty space between the new crates and the small engine gizmos. At first he thought it was a trick of the moonlight coming through the partly opened boxcar door, or an outright hallucination, but when he blinked his eyes twice and it was still there, he got off the seat of the mower and crawled to it. To his right, moon-washed fields flashed past the boxcar door. Leaving Dennison River Bend, Luke had drunk in all that he saw with wonder and fascination, but he had no eyes for the outside world now. He could only look at what was on the floor of the boxcar: doughnut crumbs.
And one piece that was bigger than a crumb.
He picked that one up first. To get the smaller ones, he wet a thumb and picked them up that way. Afraid of losing the smallest into the cracks in the boxcar floor, he bent over, stuck out his tongue, and licked them up.
21
It was Mrs. Sigsby’s turn to catch some sleep on the couch in the inner room, and Stackhouse had closed the door so neither phone—the landline or his box phone—would disturb her. Fellowes called from the computer room at ten to three.
“9956 has left Richmond,” he said. “No sign of the boy.”
Stackhouse sighed and rubbed at his chin, feeling the rasp of stubble there. “Okay.”
“Shame we can’t just have that train pulled over on a siding and searched. Settle the question of whether or not he’s on there once and for all.”
“It’s a shame everyone in the world isn’t in a big circle, singing ‘Give Peace a Chance.’ What time does it get to Wilmington?”