Mile 81

blocking the entrance ramp to the rest area had been knocked over, and there were cars down there. Quite a few of them.

Then he saw a couple of kids — a little girl in pink pants and a little boy wearing shorts and a tee-shirt. He caught just a glimpse of them, enough to tell that they were backing away — as if something had scared them — and then they disappeared behind what looked to Pete like a horse-trailer.

Something was wrong. There had been an accident or something, although nothing down there looked like an accident. His first impulse was to get away from here in a hurry, before he got caught up in whatever had happened. He grabbed his saddlebag and started toward the kitchen and the loading dock beyond. Then he stopped. There were kids out there. Little kids. Way too little to be close to a fast road like I-95 on their own, and he hadn’t seen any adults.

Gotta be grownups, didn’t you see all those cars?

Yes, he’d seen the cars, and a truck hooked up to a horse-trailer, but no grownups.

I have to go out there. Even if I get in trouble, I have to make sure those stupid kids don’t get smeared all over the turnpike.

Pete hurried to the Burger King’s front door, found it locked, and asked himself what would have been Normie Therriault’s question: Hey afterbirth, did your mother have any kids that lived?

Pete turned and pelted for the loading dock. Running made his headache worse, but he ignored it. He placed his saddlebag at the edge of the concrete platform, lowered himself, and dropped. He landed stupid, banged his tailbone, and ignored that, too. He got up, and flashed a longing look toward the woods. He could just disappear. Doing so might save him oh so much grief down the line. The idea was miserably tempting. This wasn’t like the movies, where the good guy always made the right decision without thinking. If somebody smelled vodka on his breath —

“Jesus,” he said. “Oh, Jesus-jumped-up-Rice-Krispies-Christ.”

Why had he ever come here?

Holding Blakie firmly by the hand, Rachel walked him all the way to the end of the ramp. Just as they got there, a double-box semi blasted by at seventy-five miles an hour. The wind blew their hair back, rippled their clothes, and almost knocked Blakie over.

“Rachie, I’m scared! We’re not supposed to go in the road!”

Tell me something I don’t know, Rachel thought.

At home they weren’t supposed to go any farther than the end of the driveway, and there was hardly any traffic on Beeman Lane in Falmouth. The traffic on the turnpike was far from constant, but the cars that did come along were going superfast. Besides, where was there to go? They might be able to walk in the breakdown lane, but it would be horribly risky. And there were no exits here, only woods. They could go back to the restaurant, but they would have to walk past the bad car if they did.

A red sports car swept past, the guy behind the wheel blaring his horn in a constant WAAAAAAAA that made her want to cover her ears.

Blake was tugging her, and Rachel let herself be tugged. At one side of the ramp were guardrail posts. Blakie sat down on one of the thick cables running between them and covered his eyes with his chubby hands. Rachel sat next to him. She didn’t know what else to do.

5. JIMMY GOLDING (’11 Crown Victoria)

A child’s scream may be one of Mother Nature’s more efficient survival mechanisms, but one of mankind’s — at least when it comes to automotive traffic on roads with high speed limits — is the parked State Police cruiser, especially if the black bulb of the radar detector is facing the oncoming traffic. Drivers doing seventy ease back to sixty-five; drivers doing eighty step on the brake and begin mentally figuring out how many points they’ll lose off their licenses if the blue lights go on behind them. (It’s a salutary effect that wears off quickly; ten or fifteen miles farther up or down the line, the stampeders are once again stampeding.)

The beauty of the parked cruiser, at least in Maine State Trooper Jimmy Golding’s opinion, was that you didn’t really need to do nything. You just pulled over and let nature (human nature, in this case) take its guilty course. On this overcast April afternoon, his Simmons SpeedCheck radar gun wasn’t even on, and the traffic passing southbound on I-95 was just a background drone. All his attention was on the iPad propped against the lower arc of the steering wheel.

He was playing a Scrabble-like game called Words With Friends, his Internet connection provided by AT&T. His opponent was an old barracks-mate named Nick Avery, now with the Oklahoma State Patrol. Jimmy couldn’t imagine why anyone would trade Maine for Oklahoma, seemed like a bad decision to him, but there could be no doubt that Nick was an excellent Words With Friends player. He beat Jimmy nine games out of every ten, and was leading in this one. But Nick’s current lead was unusually small, and all the letters were out of the electronic draw-bag. If he, Jimmy, could play the four letters he had left, he would win a hard- earned victory. Currently he was fixated on FIX. The four letters he had left were A, E, S, and another F. If he could somehow modify FIX, he would not only win, he would kick his old pal’s ass. But it didn’t look hopeful.

He was examining the rest of the board, where the prospects seemed even less fruitful, when his radio gave two high-pitched tones. It was an all-units alert from 911 in Westbrook. Jimmy tossed his iPad aside and turned up the gain.

“All units, attention. Who’s close to the Mile Eighty-one rest area? Anyone?”

Jimmy pulled his mike. “Nine-one-one Dispatch, this is Seventeen. I’m currently at Mile Eighty-Five, just south of the Lisbon-Sabattus exit.”

The woman Rachel Lussier thought of as the 911 lady didn’t bother to ask if anyone else was closer; in one of the new Crown Vic cruisers, Jimmy was just three minutes away, maybe less.

“Seventeen, I got a call three minutes ago from a little girl who says her parents are dead, and since then I’ve had multiple calls from people who say there are two unaccompanied little kids at the edge of that rest area.”

He didn’t bother to ask why none of those multiple callers had stopped. He had seen it before. Sometimes it was a fear of legal entanglements. More often it was just a case of don’t-give-a-shit. There was a lot of that going around. Still. kids. Jesus.

“Nine-one-one, I’m on this. Seventeen out.”

Jimmy lit his blues, checked his rearview to make sure he had the road, and then peeled out of the gravel pass-through with its sign reading NO U-TURN, OFFICIAL VEHICLES ONLY. The Crown Vic’s V-8 surged; the digital speedometer blurred up to 92, where it hung. Trees reeled giddily past on both sides of the road. He came up on a lumbering old Buick that stubbornly refused to pull over and swept around it. When he pulled back into the travel lane, Jimmy saw the rest area. And something else. Two little kids — a boy in shorts, a girl in pink pants — sitting on the guardrail cables beside the entrance ramp. They looked like the world’s smallest vagrants, and Jimmy’s heart went out to them. He had kids of his own.

They stood up when they saw the flashing lights, and for one terrible second Jimmy thought the little boy was going to step in front of his cruiser. God bless the little girl, who grabbed him by the arm and reeled him in.

Jimmy decelerated hard enough to activate the ABS system. His citation book, logbook, and iPad went cascading off the seat onto the floor. The Vic’s front end drifted a little, but he brought it back and parked blocking the ramp, where several other cars were already parked. What was going on here?

The sun came out then, and a word completely unrelated to the current situation flashed through Trooper Jimmy Golding’s mind: AFFIXES. I can make AFFIXES, and go out clean.

The little girl was running toward the driver’s side of the cruiser, dragging her weeping, stumbling kid brother with her. Her face, white and terrified, looked years older than it should have, and there was a big wet patch on the little boy’s shorts.

Jimmy got out, being careful not to hit them with his door. He dropped on one knee to get on their level and they rushed into his arms, almost knocking him over. “Whoa, whoa, take it easy, you’re all ri—”

“The bad car ate Mommy and Daddy,” the little boy said, and pointed. “The bad car right there. It ate them all up like the big bad woof ate Riddle Red Riding Hoop. You have to get them back!”