So Cold the River

“You were going to die sometime today,” he said. “A shame it has to be so early.”

The Orange County dispatcher had patched Anne through directly to the police officer who’d sighted Josiah Bradford’s truck, a state cop named Roger Brewer. He wanted to confirm that it was the right vehicle and understand the situation from her as best he could, he said.

She listened as he described the truck and said, “Yes, yes, that’s it,” and then began to warn him, as she’d warned the dispatcher, about the dynamite. She hadn’t gotten ten words out when he cut in and said, “Shit, something’s happening,” and there was a half-second pause before he said “Shit!” again and then Anne heard the scream of tires searching for traction, followed by the muffled sound of impact and a shattering of metal and glass.

“What happened? What happened?”

“He threw something out onto the road,” the officer said. “Dispatch, we’re going to need more cars. He just threw… I think he threw a body out into the road.”

60

THE DEAD MAN’S CAR started on the third try, groaning to life on the spark of a nearly exhausted battery. Eric, dropping the gearshift into drive, had the sudden, stupid thought: It’s the Fargo car. White Cutlass Ciera. You saw that movie with Claire and predicted it would be nominated for a bunch of Oscars…

He had to back up to get around the body. He made a wide pass to stay clear of it, and he did not look down. The splash of blood across the white hood trembled against the engine’s vibrations.

Trees bordered the gravel lane on each side, and only when he came out to the road did he have a clear look at the sky. The black clouds seemed to be drifting away from the center in all directions, isolating a pale circle. The wind that had blown so violently as he’d run through the field just minutes ago had died off completely, and ahead of him the fields looked strangely peaceful.

It can’t happen again, he thought, staring up at the separating clouds. You can’t have two of them in the same place.

He swung out into the road, turned left, in the direction Josiah Bradford’s truck had gone, and hit the gas. If another tornado actually did form, it was good that Kellen was still down in the gulf. The gulf had already saved them once.

He had the car up to fifty and was fumbling for the windshield wipers, wanting the crimson smear of drying blood off the glass, when another vehicle appeared down the road. He didn’t take his foot off the gas right away, but then the distance closed to the point that he could see it clearly: a white Ford Ranger with dents in the hood and a snarl of fence wire mashed into the front grille and dragging along under the car.

Josiah.

He was coming back.

Stop him, he thought, you have to stop him. But the Ranger was flying along, had to be doing seventy at least, and Claire was inside. If Eric swung the car across the road to block the truck and took the impact broadside, they’d probably all be killed. And that was discounting the potential explosion.

Indecision froze him. He slowed the car down to twenty, then ten, hands tight on the wheel, a hundred potential maneuvers floating through his head, all of them dismissed as too risky. The truck was in motion, and the only way to stop an object that wanted to stay in motion was with impact. Simple rules of physics that would be simple rules of disaster today.

And so he sat there helplessly, impotently, as the Ranger roared up and then passed him. Eric was staring inside the cab, trying to catch a glimpse of Claire, but what he saw when the truck shot by him made him give a low shout of fear and slam on the brake pedal, bringing the Oldsmobile to a stop in the center of the road.

Campbell Bradford was driving the truck. Not Josiah, but Campbell, hunched over the wheel in his dark brown suit and bowler hat, his mouth twisted into a grin in the quarter second when Eric had met his eyes.

Josiah saw the Oldsmobile pull out onto the road and he was so stunned, so momentarily hopeful, that he almost hit the brakes. Danny? But then he got it, understood what must have happened, and tightened his hands on the steering wheel, laid his foot heavier on the gas pedal.

He ain’t stopping us, boy, Campbell whispered. We’re going home, and that son of a bitch is not strong enough to stop us. He doesn’t have the will for it.

Indeed, he did not. Josiah kept the speed up and the wheel held dead-on center and clenched his teeth, ready for a collision, but Shaw stayed in his own lane and let the Ranger thunder right by him. Didn’t even try to do anything, just sat there behind the wheel of Danny’s Olds and watched Josiah pass by.

Told you, boy. Told you. He doesn’t have the will, and neither does anyone else. You think those police can stop us right now? Not a chance. They ain’t strong enough. Ain’t nobody in this valley strong enough.

There surely was not. Josiah was flying now, open road ahead, the world yielding to him in the way he’d always known it would.

Dumping the woman in the road had freed him from the first pursuit car, and he’d avoid those that would attempt to join the chase. He’d drive west and take the back roads, a no-brainer as there would be more police near Orleans, and if he drove toward them, he’d make it easier for them. Drive away from them and they’d have to give chase.

He was back on the road to the gulf now, Wesley Chapel a white speck beneath black sky in the distance. Down to the chapel, then bang another left, and keep pushing west at as fast a speed as he could manage. That was all he had to do.

Lightning flashed again, and around him the fields shone with the deep, lush green you could only ever see beneath a storm. He couldn’t believe just how green everything looked. Above him, something seemed to be opening in the dark clouds. The storm breaking up, maybe. Yes, even the wind had died off. Everything around him was still. That expected furious storm wasn’t going to come to life after all.

But something was happening in the sky. He had only a sense of it at first, some swirl of light, and then he blinked and looked up and to the left and saw that something strange was happening in that clear circle that had formed in the center of the clouds. Something was… lowering. Yes, a cloud of pure white was dropping down from the center of the dark swirling ring above it.

A thin white rope descended almost all the way to the field ahead, then held. Hesitated. The top end of it whipped around a little and the bottom rose with it, and Josiah was sure the thing was about to retreat when it dropped with sudden strength and a spray of brown soil shot into the air. The windows on the truck were vibrating now, and the trees alongside the road were bending with the force of the wind once again. Only they were bending the wrong way, he realized, they were leaning in toward the cloud instead of away from it.

For a moment he let off the gas. He was beside Wesley Chapel now, where Danny had pulled in and watched a tornado go by, and now Josiah was staring down another one. He’d heard plenty about such storms—they weren’t uncommon in southern Indiana—but he’d never seen one himself. The thing looked nothing like the funnel shape you always heard of. No, it was just a rope. A white rope connecting earth to sky, and moving forward. Moving east. Moving toward him.

He raised his eyes to the rearview mirror and saw Danny’s car coming on down the road. Shaw had turned around and started in pursuit of him. What in the hell did he think he could do?

Still, he was catching up. The tornado sat no more than a half mile away now to the west, the direction Josiah needed to go. It was moving but without great speed. Seemed relaxed, almost. Low-key about the way it was tearing through the land. He watched it come up on one lone tree, saw the treetop bend toward it, and then the cloud was over it and the tree disappeared from sight. An instant later it had cleared the tree, and the trunk remained, but almost all of the branches that had made up the top were gone. The cloud chewed back into the farmland.