David Baldacci: Memory Man

That was just the way it had to be.

For a lot of reasons.

The bus took him to Crewe, three towns over from Burlington. The snow was picking up and the lights on the interstate illuminated a fat, wet precipitation that would add tonnage to this part of the country until it finally stopped falling. And then the highway department would spend days cleaning it up, only to see Mother Nature do it all over again.

He looked out the window of the bus, his phone in his hand. They hadn’t told him how the next communication would come, but he wanted to be ready.

He alighted at Crewe along with only three others. Their possessions were nearly as meager as his, although one woman had a full suitcase and a pillow, and a small, sleepy child in tow.

He looked up and down the snowy underhang of the bus station platform. There were few people out and about, and all of them clearly of limited resources.

A man approached him. He was black, in his sixties, with a big belly, snow-caked boots, and a coat with rips down both sides. A flapped hat hung low over his head. His glasses were fogged. He stopped in front of Decker and said, “Amos?”

Decker looked at him and nodded. “Who are you?”

“I’m nobody. But somebody gave me a hundred dollars to give you this, and so I am.” He handed Decker a slip of paper.

“Who was it?”

“Didn’t see ’em.”

“How’d you know to look for me?”

“They said a really tall, fat, scary-lookin’ white dude with a beard. You it.”

The man lumbered off and Decker looked down at the instructions on the note.

He went in and bought another bus ticket. He had two hours to kill. He bought a coffee from the machine in the station. It was more warm than hot, but he didn’t care. He spent his time looking at everyone in the waiting room. It was more crowded than he would have thought. Then he realized something.

Thanksgiving was nearly here. These folks were probably heading out to see family and carve up a big turkey.

He and Cassie had never celebrated Thanksgiving together, chiefly because one or the other had always been working the holiday shift. Decker had spent more than one turkey day chowing down at a diner or a fast-food place. Cassie had spent her share in the hospital dining hall. Whoever had Molly in a given year would eat out. They had enjoyed it and had never felt like they were missing much.

But looking around at these folks, Decker concluded that he had missed more than he had thought.

The next bus dropped him off at the Indiana border.

There was a compact car waiting in the station parking lot, its engine running. The note had said to walk toward it and tap on the driver’s window. He knew this was also a test.

He went to the car and rapped on the window.

The woman inside rolled down the window and said, “Get in the back.”

He did so. If the FBI had been tailing him, now would be the time to surround the vehicle. They didn’t. Because they weren’t tailing him.

He got in the back. The car was small so his knees were wedged behind the seat.

“You know my friends?” he asked.

“I don’t have friends,” she replied. Her hair was stringy and gray, her body odor strong and unpleasant, especially in the hot car — she had the heater on max and her craggy voice and the hazy cigarette smoke that hung in the air foretold a painful death from lung cancer.

“That’s too bad,” he said.

“Not from where I’m sitting.”

“How much did they pay you to do this?”

“Enough.”

“You meet them?”

“Nope.”

“You know what this is about?”

“This is about six hundred bucks to yours truly. That’s all I need to know.”

She put the stick in gear and they sped off. They drove for so long that Decker found himself dozing off. That was remarkable when he woke and thought about it, since he was traveling to his death.

Or, more accurately, my murder .

They crossed over Interstate 74, reached nearly to Seymour, and then got onto Interstate 65 heading north toward Indianapolis. But they exited well before then. They sped west, passing Nashville, Indiana. Decker saw a sign for Bloomington to the south, but they didn’t take it. He was thinking they might be driving all the way to Terre Haute near the Illinois border when the woman pulled off onto the shoulder at an exit a few miles before Interstate 70, running east to west, could be picked up.

She said, “Walk up this exit ramp. There’s a rest stop. There’ll be somebody there.”

As Decker exited the car he thought again that all of this had been arranged well before he had contacted them through the website. They had clearly expected him to do this. Or at least hoped that he would.

And he had. Which meant they had read him right.

He hoped to have done the same for them.

He trudged through the snow to the rest stop with his bag slung over his shoulder. The snowfall had slowed but his feet were soaked through. His belly was rumbling and his nose was running.

The white panel van was backed into the first parking space. The headlights blinked twice as Decker approached. The driver’s window came down. It was another woman, with hollowed-out cheekbones. She looked like a druggie slipping in and out of withdrawal.

“You want me to drive?” said Decker, running his gaze up and down her skinny frame. “I want to get there in one piece.”

She shook her head and jerked her thumb toward the back of the van.

“You sure you’re good to go?”

In answer she put the van in drive and stared out the windshield.

Decker clambered into the back and slid the side door closed.

The woman drove off as Decker settled into the seat.

The gun placed against his right temple didn’t unduly surprise him. After all, how many people could they engage to get him to this point? He had figured two max, and he’d been right.

His bag was taken from him and thrown out the back door. He was searched and he could tell the searcher was surprised that Decker was not armed. His phone was taken from him and hurled out the back as well.

The man tugged on his sleeve and tossed an orange jumper over the seat and into Decker’s lap. He held it up. “It looks a little small.”

Neither of them spoke.

“Do you go by Billy now, Belinda?” Decker said to the driver. “Or was that just for the 7-Eleven gig?”

He watched as the wig came off. The eyes that flashed at him in the rearview were the same ones he’d seen at the convenience store. But they were very different from the eyes that he had remembered seeing at the institute, the pair that had belonged to the devastated teenage girl named Belinda Wyatt. She apparently was gone for good.

He said, “The disguise was good, but I have your hands memorized. Hard to change them unless you wear gloves.”

She just kept staring at him, and in those eyes Decker could see the cumulative hatred of twenty years that was about to be unleashed.

On me.

Decker held up the jumper. “A little privacy, please?”

The eyes looked away.

He started undressing, which was difficult in the confined space for someone so large. The person with the gun took his clothes and shoes and threw them out the back. Decker struggled into the jumper but could not zip it up in front because of his large gut.

He slumped back in the seat and turned to the man holding the gun and squatting in the back of the van.

“Hello, Sebastian.”

He eyed the gun. It was an S&W .45 caliber. The .45. The weapon used to kill his wife and half the people at Mansfield. This gun had been the last thing his wife had seen before her life ended. Maybe it had been used to kill Giles Evers too, he didn’t know for sure. Maybe a quick bullet wasn’t in the cards for the cop turned rapist. But then again, he didn’t give a damn about Giles Evers.