apartheid in which he exists. Separate. Shunned. A solitary man.
In his room he slips off the shoulder holster and puts it on the nightstand. The pistol is still in the clasp of that nylon-lined leather sleeve. He stares at the weapon for a while.
In the bathroom he takes a pair of scissors from his shaving kit, closes the lid on the toilet, sits in the harsh fluorescent glare, and meticulously destroys the two bogus credit cards that he has used thus far on the assignment. He will fly out of Kansas City in the morning, employing yet another name, and on the drive to the airport he will scatter the tiny fragments of the cards along a few miles of highway.
He returns to the nightstand.
Stares at the pistol.
After leaving the dead bodies at the job site, he should have broken the weapon down into as many pieces as possible. He should have disposed of its parts in widely separated locations: the barrel in a storm drain perhaps, half the frame in a creek, the other half in a Dumpster ... until nothing was left. That is standard procedure, and he is at a loss to understand why he disregarded it this time.
A low-grade guilt attends this deviation from routine, but he is not going to go out again and dispose of the weapon. In addition to the guilt, he feels . . . rebellious.
He undresses and lies down. He turns off the bedside lamp and stares at the layered shadows on the ceiling.
He is not sleepy. His mind is restless, and his thoughts jump from subject to subject with such unnerving rapidity that his hyperactive mental state soon translates into physical agitation. He fidgets, pulling at the sheets, readjusting blankets, pillows.
Out on the interstate highway, large trucks roll ceaselessly toward far destinations. The singing of their tires, the grumble of their engines, and the
Tonight, however, a strange thing happens. For reasons he can’t understand, this familiar mosaic of sound isn’t a lullaby but a siren song. He cannot resist it.
He gets out of bed and crosses the dark room to the only window. He has an obscure night view of a weedy hillside and above it a slab of sky—like the halves of an abstract painting. Atop the slope, separating sky and hill, the sturdy pickets of a highway guardrail are flickeringly illuminated by passing headlights.
He stares up, half in a trance, straining for glimpses of the westbound vehicles.
Usually melancholy, the highway cantata is now enticing, calling him, making a mysterious promise which he does not understand but which he feels compelled to explore.
He dresses, and packs his clothes.
Outside, the motor courtyard and walkways are deserted. Faced toward the rooms, cars wait for morning travel. In a nearby vending-machine alcove, a soft-drink dispenser clicks-clinks as if conducting repairs upon itself. The killer feels as if he is the only living creature in a world now run by—and for the benefit of—machines.
Moments later, he is on Interstate 70, heading toward Topeka, the pistol on the seat beside him but covered with a motel towel.
Something west of Kansas City calls him. He doesn’t know what it is, but he feels inexorably drawn westward in the way that iron is pulled toward a magnet.
Strange as it might be, none of this alarms him, and he accedes to this compulsion to drive west. After all, for as long as he can remember, he has gone places without knowing the purpose of his trip until he has reached his destination, and he has killed people with no clue as to why they have to die or for whom the killing is done.
He is certain, however, that this sudden departure from Kansas City is not expected of him. He is supposed to stay at the motel until morning and catch an early flight out to ... Seattle.
Perhaps in Seattle he would have received instructions from the bosses he cannot recall. But he will never know what might have happened because Seattle is now stricken from his itinerary.
He wonders how much time will pass before his superiors—whatever their names and identities—will realize that he has gone renegade. When will they start looking for him, and how will they ever find him if he is no longer operating within his program?
At two o’clock in the morning, traffic is light on Interstate 70, mostly trucks, and he speeds across Kansas in advance of some of the big rigs and in the blustery wakes of others, remembering a movie about Dorothy and her dog Toto and a tornado that plucked them out of that flat farmland and dropped them in a far stranger place.
With both Kansas City, Missouri, and Kansas City, Kansas, behind him, the killer realizes he’s muttering to himself:
This time he feels close to a revelation that will identify the precise nature of his longing.
As the suburbs and finally the dark prairie flash past on both sides, excitement builds steadily in him. He trembles on the brink of an insight that, he senses, will change his life.
At once, he understands the meaning of what he has said. By “to be someone,” he does not mean what another man might intend to say with those same three words; he does not mean that he needs to be someone famous or rich or important. Just someone. Someone with a real name. Just an ordinary Joe, as they used to say in the movies of the forties. Someone who has more substance than a ghost.
The pull of the unknown lodestar in the west grows stronger by the mile. He leans forward slightly, hunching over the steering wheel, peering intently into the night.
Beyond the horizon, in a town he can’t yet envision, a life awaits him, a place to call home. Family, friends. Somewhere there are shoes into which he can step, a past he can wear comfortably, purpose. And a future in which he can be like other people—accepted.
The car speeds westward, cleaving the night.
Half past midnight, on his way to bed, Marty Stillwater stopped by the girls’ room, eased open the door, and stepped silently across the threshold. In the butterscotch-yellow glow of the Mickey Mouse nightlight, he could see both of his daughters sleeping peacefully.
Now and then he liked to watch them for a few minutes while they slept, just to convince himself that they were real. He’d had more than his share of happiness and prosperity and love, so it followed that some of his blessings might prove transitory or even illusory; fate might intervene to balance the scales.
To the ancient Greeks, Fate was personified in the form of three sisters: Clotho, who spun the thread of life; Lachesis, who measured the length of the thread; and Atropos, smallest of the three but the most powerful, who snipped the thread at her whim.
Sometimes, to Marty, that seemed a logical way to look at things. He could imagine the faces of those white-robed women in more detail than he could recall his own Mission Viejo neighbors. Clotho had a kind face with merry eyes, reminiscent of the actress Angela Lansbury, and Lachesis was as cute as Goldie Hawn but with a saintly aura. Ridiculous, but that’s how he saw them. Atropos was a bitch, beautiful but cold—pinched mouth, anthracite-black eyes.
The trick was to remain in the good graces of the first two sisters without drawing the attention of the third.
Five years ago, in the guise of a blood disorder, Atropos had descended from her celestial home to take a whack at the thread of Charlotte’s life and, thankfully, had failed to cut it all the way through. But this goddess answered to many names besides Atropos: cancer, cerebral hemorrhage, coronary thrombosis, fire, earthquake, poison, homicide, and countless others. Now perhaps she was paying them a return visit under one of her many pseudonyms, with Marty as her target instead of Charlotte.
Frequently, the vivid imagination of a novelist was a curse.
A whirring-clicking noise suddenly arose from the shadows on Charlotte’s side of the room, startling Marty. As low and menacing as a rattlesnake’s warning. Then he realized what it was: one half of the gerbil’s big cage was occupied by an exercise wheel, and the restless rodent was running furiously in place.
“Go to sleep, Wayne,” he said softly.
