family. They were nowhere to be seen. “Dammit.”
Reaching down between her knees with her left hand, Carolyn pulled the lever she found and clumsily adjusted her seat behind the wheel. Her first try was too close, then the second slid back too far. Two or three oscillations later, the seat was about right. She stepped on the brake, reached for the gearshift lever with her right hand, then stopped.
Somehow the shiny little. 380 from the bank had materialized in her palm.
“Two days in a row,” Travis grumbled as he shrugged into his jacket and stuffed his books into his backpack. He slammed his locker shut. “This is getting to be a regular friggin’ habit.” This time he didn’t even know what he’d done, yet obviously it was expulsion time. Why else would he have to bring all his books?
Should have kissed Menefee’s fat ass when I saw him in the hall this morning, he thought. Well, no great loss. He hated this school, anyway.
How the hell was he going to break this news to his dad? Yes indeedy, there was going to be some serious shouting in Farm Meadows tonight. He wondered absently if his mom would hold him while his dad screamed him to death, or if Dad would just handle the dirty deed on his own.
As he turned the corner from G-Hall into the administrative wing, he searched his brain for what he might have done wrong today. Surely, they wouldn’t expel him for letting Eric Lampier’s brother stomp the shit out of him after school. Then again, maybe they would. If he had to tell the story about his eye one more time to one more stone-faced teacher, he was going to barf. Mrs. Benoli, the guidance counselor, must have asked him a dozen times whether his mother or father had hit him. Almost seemed like she wanted him to say one of them had.
He didn’t, of course. He said he couldn’t remember the last time his dad had hit him. Not exactly the truth, but a spanking for biting Tommy Mution in kindergarten hardly equated to the kind of abuse the old crone was fishing for.
Travis nearly dumped in his drawers as he swung the last corner and saw his old man waiting for him in the office. Yep, some serious shit was going down.
“Hi, Dad,” he said sheepishly as he pushed open the door to the office. “Hi, Mr. Menefee.” Ordinarily, Travis wasn’t much of a suckup, but right now it didn’t seem like a bad idea.
“Hi, Trav,” Jake said, forcing a smile. Something was going on in there-Travis could almost taste the tension in the air. “Have you got your stuff?”
Travis shrugged. “Yeah. Where are we going?”
Jake put his arm around his son’s shoulder but continued to look at Menefee. “On a little trip,” he said.
“Don’t get him involved, Brighton,” Menefee urged again, daring to rise from his chair. Travis recognized the threat in his voice.
“Stay out of it, Menefee,” Jake warned. He brought his finger to bear one more time.
Travis watched the exchange like a tennis match, moving his head from one man to the other. Mrs. Harris looked like she might cry. “What’s going on?” he asked. “Is Mom okay?”
Jake glanced quickly down at his son. “She’s fine,” he said, way short of sounding convincing. “Menefee, you do what’s good for you, hear? Just stay out of this.”
“You won’t get twenty miles,” Menefee persisted.
“That’s enough out of you now,” Jake repeated, backing out the door. Then, to Travis, “Come on, son, let’s go.”
Travis looked terribly ill at ease. “What’s he talking about, we won’t get twenty miles?”
Jake hurried the boy along. “Let’s just get going.”
Once free of the office, Travis followed his dad’s lead and walked quickly but cautiously toward the main entrance, just as a police car slid into the spot reserved for buses. “Whoa!” Travis exclaimed. “They’re in a hurry.”
Jake whirled to face the main doors, in time to see the blue and white cruiser slide into place. “Shit!”
“What’s wrong?”
Jake grabbed the boy by his denim jacket and made a hard left, heading down A-Hall toward the door at the other end. “C’mon, Trav, quickly now.” He drew the Glock.
“Holy shit, Dad! What are-”
“Hush,” Jake snapped, pulling harder on the jacket.
Instinctively, Travis wriggled out of Jake’s grasp. “What’s the gun for?”
“Move!”
The desperate tone and frantic look were new to Travis. He’d never seen his father so distraught. Whatever was happening, it was far more serious than anything that had ever happened to them before. Terrified, he found himself running down the hallway, distantly aware of the fact that running was against the rules.
His dad had a gun! And he looked ready to use it. He looked anxious to use it. What the hell is going on?
As they charged together down the glossy, linoleum-tiled hallway, Travis had to take two strides for every one of Jake’s. They reached the end and exploded out into the sunlight, taking a hard left and sprinting toward the hill which led to the street.
“Are we running from the police?” Travis gasped as he struggled alongside Jake to climb the grassy slope.
If only you knew, Jake thought. “I’ll explain in the car.”
Jake scaled the steep slope with long strides, his feet slipping on the damp grass. He fell hard, face-first, but lost only a second or two before he was back scrambling up the hill. Two steps forward, one step back.
Travis slowed after two falls, but Jake grabbed a fistful of his backpack and yanked hard. “Run, goddammit!” he hissed.
As they cleared the top of the hill, Jake nearly cheered when he saw the van, still running, still where he left it, still on an empty street.
Back on flat ground, Travis continued to run, but Jake yanked him to a stop. “No, walk now. And get in the van.”
“Whose car is this?”
“It’s ours. Now get inside.” Jake quick-walked his son to the rear double doors and pulled them open.
“Where do I sit?” It was a cargo van, for crying out loud! No chairs, no windows, just two lines of parallel shelving running down each side in the back. All the way to the front, Travis could see his mom behind the wheel, looking even more terrified than his dad.
“Just pick a spot and get in,” Jake told him, pulling him forward by his arm.
Again, Travis wriggled free. “No,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.” None of this was right. These people weren’t his parents. They looked the same, but these were not his parents. He felt as if he were living some science fiction movie, where alien invaders take the form of other people. Fear gripped his insides, and he refused to move. Not until someone told him what the hell was going on.
“Travis, there’s no time for this. Now get in.”
“You’re scaring me!” Travis shouted, loud enough to draw attention if anyone was listening.
“Get in the goddamn van!” Jake grabbed his son in a bear hug.
“Put me down!”
Carolyn was ready to panic, her eyes never moving from the spot at the head of the street where the cops would rematerialize any minute. “Oh, God, Travis,” she pleaded. “Don’t yell!”
In a flash, Jake realized the futility of the struggle, and he let the boy go. “Listen to me, Travis,” he explained urgently. “I know this scares you, and that none of it makes sense, but you have got to get into the van, and we have got to get moving. The police think we’ve done something that we’ve never done, and they are just a block away from us right now.”
“Jake, hurry!” Carolyn was coming unglued.
He ignored her. “I promise I’ll explain it all as soon as we’re down the road a bit. But right now you’ve just got to trust me. If you don’t get in the van right now, your mom and I will be killed. It’s that simple.”
Travis’s mind reeled. Whatever happened to detention slips and lectures from Mr. Menefee? Those were problems he could comprehend. Whatever happened to just getting the shit kicked out of you by Terry Lampier?
“Please, Travis!” his mom begged. She was frantic.
This was wrong. He should just run away-toward the cops, not away from them. His brain screamed these
