The Challenger stood in solitary splendor with its air-stairs down. Tim had raised the stairs himself, secured the door, and then hammered on the closed cockpit door with the butt of the dead deputy’s Glock.
“I think we’re all tight back here. If you’ve got a green board, let’s roll.”
There was no answer from the other side of the door, but the engines began to cycle up. Two minutes later they went airborne. Now they were somewhere over West Virginia, according to the monitor on the bulkhead, and DuPray was in the rearview. Tim hadn’t expected to leave so suddenly, and certainly not under such cataclysmic circumstances.
Evans was dozing, and Luke was dead to the world. Only Mrs. Sigsby was still awake, sitting upright, her gaze fixed on Tim’s face. There was something reptilian about those wide expressionless eyes. The last of Doc Roper’s pain pills might have put her out, but she had refused in spite of what must have been fairly bad pain. She had been spared a serious gunshot wound, but even a groove hurt plenty.
“You have law enforcement experience, I believe,” she said. “It’s in the way you carry yourself, and in the way you reacted—quickly and well.”
Tim said nothing, only looked at her. He had put the Glock beside him on the seat. Firing a gun at 39,000 feet would be a very bad idea, and really, why would he, even if they’d been at a much lower altitude? He was taking this bitch exactly where she wanted to go.
“I don’t understand why you’re going along with this plan.” She nodded at Luke, who—with his dirty face and bandaged ear—looked much younger than twelve. “We both know he wants to save his friends, and I think we both know the plan is silly. Idiotic, really. Yet you agreed. Why was that, Tim?”
Tim said nothing.
“Why you’d get involved in the first place is a mystery to me. Help me understand.”
He had no intention of doing that. One of the first things his mentor officer had taught him during the four months of his rookie probationary tour was you question perps. You never allow perps to question you.
Even if he had been disposed to talk, he didn’t know what he could say that would sound even marginally sane. Could he tell her that his presence on this state-of-the-art airplane, the sort of craft only rich men and women usually saw the inside of, was an accident? That once upon a time a man bound for New York City had suddenly stood up on a much more ordinary plane, agreeing to give up his seat for a cash payment and a hotel voucher? That everything—the hitchhike north, the traffic tie-up on I-95, the walk to DuPray, the night knocker job—had followed from that single impulsive act? Or could he say that it was fate? That he had been moved to DuPray by the hand of some cosmic chess player, to save the sleeping boy from the people who had kidnapped him and wanted to use his extraordinary mind until it was used up? And if that were the case, what did it make Sheriff John, Tag Faraday, George Burkett, Frank Potter, and Bill Wicklow? Just pawns to be sacrificed in the great game? And what piece was he? It would be nice to believe himself a knight, but more likely, he was just another pawn.
“Sure you don’t want that pill?” he asked.
“You don’t intend to answer my question, do you?”
“No, ma’am, I do not.” Tim turned his head and looked out at the leagues of darkness and the few lights down there, like fireflies at the bottom of a well.
11
Midnight.
The box phone gave its hoarse cry. Stackhouse answered. The voice on the other end belonged to one of the off-duty caretakers, a man named Ron Church. The requested van was in place at the airport, Church said. Denise Allgood, an off-duty tech (although they were all supposedly on duty now), had driven behind Church in an Institute sedan. The idea was that, after leaving the vehicle on the tarmac, Ron would ride back here with Denise. But those two had a thing going on, which Stackhouse knew about. It was his business to know things, after all. He felt sure that with the boy’s ride in place, Ron and Denise would be heading for anywhere that wasn’t here. That was okay. Although the multiple desertions were sad, maybe they were for the best. It was time to draw a