Jeffery Deaver - Praying for Sleep

Slowly though the pouts began to outnumber the smiles and humps. The money, which was like a lubricant between their spirits, grew sparse when he was denied a raise and the mortgage on the trailer was adjusted upward. Heck began to like Jill’s waitress friends and their husbands less and less; there was much drinking in that group and more silliness than seemed normal for people in their thirties. These were clues and he supposed he’d been aware of them all along. But when he finally understood that she really meant mental cruelty and abandonment- his mental cruelty and his abandonment-it knocked the wind clean out of him.

Exactly twenty-two months ago, at nine-forty-eight one Saturday night, Jill let slam the aluminum door of their trailer for the last time and went to live by herself in Dillon. The ultimate insult was that she moved into a mobile-home park. “Why didn’t you just stay with me ?” he blurted. “I thought you left because you wanted a house.”

“Oh, Trent,” she moaned hopelessly, “you don’t understand nothing, do you? Not… a… thing.”

“Well, you’re in a trailer park, for God’s sake!”

“ Trent!”

“What’d I say?”

So Jill left to live in a mobile home somehow better than the one that Trenton Heck could offer her and once there, he supposed, entertain men friends. Billy Mosler, Heck’s truck-driving buddy from next door, seemed relieved at the breakup. “ Trenton, she wasn’t for you. I’m not going to say anything bad about Jill because that’s not my way-”

Watch it, you prick, Heck thought, eyeing his friend belligerently.

“-but she was too dippy for you. Bad choice in a woman. Don’t look at me that way. You can do better.”

“But I loved her,” Heck said, his anger sadly tamed by a memory of Jill making him a lunch of egg salad one autumn afternoon. “Oh, damn, I’m whining, aren’t I? Damn.”

“You didn’t love her,” Billy Mosler said sagely. “You were in love with her. Or, in lust with her, more like. See the difference?”

Watch it, prick. Heck recovered enough to begin glaring once more.

The worst of the sting wore off after a few months though still he mourned. He drove past her restaurant a hundred times and would call her often to talk to her about the few things they could still talk about, which was not much. Many times he got her answering machine. What the hell does a waitress need an answering machine for, he brooded, except to take men’s phone calls? He grew despairing when the machine picked up on the second ring, which meant that someone had called before him. Heck saw his ex-wife all over the county. At Kmart, at picnics, driving in cars he didn’t recognize, in Jo-Jo’s steakhouse, in liquor-store parking lots as she hiked her skirt up to adjust her slip, rolled at the waist to compensate for her being four foot eleven.

There weren’t this many Jills in the universe but Trenton Heck saw them just the same.

Tonight, his ex-wife fading very reluctantly from his mind, Heck turned off the highway. Emil stirred with relief as the truck braked to a fast stop and the evil seat belt came off. His master then hooked up the harness and track line and together they bounded off down the road.

Emil easily picked up Hrubek’s scent and trotted down the highway, mimicking more or less the bicycle’s passage. Because they were on the asphalt with good visibility, Heck saw no need to keep the hound short-lined; Hrubek wouldn’t be setting traps on the surface of the road. They made good time, coursing past abandoned shacks and farms and lowlands and pumpkin fields. Still, after passing two intersections-and verifying that the madman was continuing west on Route 236-Heck ordered Emil back to the truck. Because of the bicycle, which Hrubek could pedal at fifteen or twenty miles an hour, Heck continued to drop-track-driving for several miles then stopping just long enough to let Emil make sure they were still on scent. For a diligent dog like Emil to follow a bicyclist was certainly possible-especially on a damp night like this-but doing so would exhaust him quickly. Then too Heck, with his damaged leg, was hardly up for a twenty-mile run after a man on wheels.

As he drove, scanning the road before him for a bicycle reflector or Hrubek’s back, Trenton Heck thought about the meeting with Richard Kohler. He recalled the doctor’s slight scowl when Heck had rejected his offer. This reinforced Heck’s fear that maybe he’d blown it bad, that he’d chosen exactly the opposite from what a smart person would’ve picked. He often had trouble choosing the sensible thing, the thing everybody else just knew was best. The thing that both Jill and his father would appraise and say, “Damn good choice, boy.”

He supposed in some ways it was crazy to turn down that money. But when he actually pictured taking the check, folding it up, going home-no, no, he just couldn’t have done it. Maybe God hadn’t made him like Emil, doling out to him a singular, remarkable knack. But Trenton Heck felt in his heart that if he had any purpose at all, it was to spend his hours tracking behind his dog through wilderness just like this. Even if he never found Hrubek tonight, even if he never caught a glimpse of him, being here had to be better than sitting in front of the tube with a quart of beer in his hand and Emil fidgeting on the back deck.

What troubled Heck more than turning down Kohler’s offer was altogether different, maybe something more dangerous. If it was really his goal to catch Hrubek before he hurt someone, then why didn’t he just call Don Haversham and tell him that Hrubek had changed direction? Heck was in Gunderson now and would be coming up on Cloverton soon. Both towns had police departments and, despite the storm, probably a few men to spare for a roadblock. Calling Haversham, he thought, was the prudent thing to do, the proper procedure. It promised the least risk to everyone.

But of course if the local police or troopers caught Hrubek, Adler would surely balk at paying Heck the ten thousand.

So, steeped in guilt and uneasiness, Heck pressed the stiff accelerator with his left foot and continued after his prey, speeding west in secret and under cover of the night-just like, he laughed grimly, Michael Hrubek himself.

He was twenty-two miles from Ridgeton when the idea of an automobile slipped into his mind and rooted there.

A car’d be so much nicer than a bicycle, so much more fashionable. Hrubek had mastered pedaling and now found the bike a frustrating way to travel. It flicked sideways when it hit rocks and there were long stretches of inclines that required him to ride so slowly that he could have walked faster. His teeth ached from the air he sucked into his lungs with the effort of low-gear pedaling. When he hit a bump the heavy animal traps bounced and jabbed him in the kidney. But more than anger at the bike, Hrubek simply felt the desire for a car. He believed he had the confidence to drive. He’d fooled the orderlies and whipped the cops and tricked all the fucker conspirators who were after him.

And now he wanted a car.

He recalled the time he’d pumped a tank of gas for Dr. Anne when she’d driven Hrubek and several other patients to a bookstore in a mall near Trevor Hill Psychiatric Hospital. Knowing-and compulsively reciting-the statistics on auto fatalities on American highways, he was terrified at the thought of the drive but reluctantly agreed to go along. The psychiatrist asked him to sit in the front seat. When they stopped at the gas station, she asked, “Michael, will you help me fill up the tank?”

“Noooo.”

“Please?”

“Not on your life. It’s not safe and it’s not fashionable.”