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A solid six hundred yards beyond me, the car’s brake lights beamed. The reverse lights came on, and the car came swerving back my way. A truck went by, blew its horn, and veered into the passing lane, but the GTO kept coming.
The muscle car stopped beside me, rumbling and vibrating. The passenger window rolled down and I peered inside and saw a good old boy in his thirties with a blond buzz cut, wearing a white V-neck T-shirt over a tattooed and steroidal body.
A woman’s frail voice said, “You look like you’re having a bad day, pilgrim.”
I noticed her then, sitting in the backseat, a tiny, older woman huddled under a blanket and wearing sunglasses. Her face was horribly scarred from some long ago trauma.
“You want us to call an ambulance? The cops?” the driver asked.
“I am a cop,” I said. “My name is Alex Cross, I’m a detective with the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police, and I have to get to New Orleans. It’s a matter of life and death.”
“See, Lester?” the woman said. “I told you.”
“I don’t care about your notions right now, Ma,” Lester replied, looking over his shoulder. “He’s not getting in here with all that mud on him. We’ll call someone.”
“Nonsense,” she snapped. “Life and death.”
“It’s gonna take me a week to clean my Goat.” Lester groaned.
“Then it takes a week,” she said. “Here, have him sit on this.”
She handed him the blanket. Lester scowled but spread it over the leather bucket seat. Apologizing and trying not to smear mud on anything, I climbed in, held out my hand, and said, “My family is at stake. I can’t thank you enough for stopping.”
Lester looked at the blood and dirt on my hand and sniffed. “That was Ma’s notion, not mine. I barely saw you.”
I shut the door and was trying to put on the seat belt when he punched the gas. The Goat bellowed out the mouth of its chrome blower. The back end of the muscle car sank, and the front rose almost like a boat’s does when it’s accelerating.
But this was no ordinary boat. Lester’s car was “souped up to the max,” as he put it. More than four hundred horsepower pinned me to the seat as he banged through gears and took us up to ninety miles an hour.
The suspension wasn’t like what you’d find in a modern sports car. There was play in it, and we seemed to drift slightly left and then right down the interstate, with Lester lightly counter-steering back and forth. The swaying increased when he took us up past a hundred miles an hour.
“You’re gonna get pulled over or flip this car,” I said.
“Nah,” Lester said. “We do this all the time. Three to four a.m. is the last hour of the shift for the state police; hardly any troopers on the road. And the scanner says most of them are at some murder scene north of Jennings. Far as me flipping us? The Goat and I are one, pilgrim. We’ve never once come close to a wreck.”
“Lester is gifted behind the wheel, Detective,” his mother said. “What’s your name again?”
Though a part of me was desperate to keep looking out the windshield as we hurtled toward New Orleans, I twisted in my seat to see the shadow of Lester’s disfigured mother. It was only then that I saw the white cane across her lap and realized she was blind.
I told her my name, and got hers. Minerva Frost and her son were from Galveston. Lester was taking her to work.
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Before I could ask what kind of work she did, she asked about my family, and I saw no reason to withhold any of it. I gave her a thumbnail sketch of what had happened and where I was going and why.
Lester seemed impressed. “I heard something about this on the news the other night. Lord Almighty, that’s tough.”
I suppose I expected some kind of sympathetic response from Minerva Frost, but she stayed silent.
Her son, however, was glancing over at me, and then in the rearview mirror, getting agitated. Lester finally said, “Ma, you have to work today, you know. You promised.”
Minerva Frost stayed silent.
“Ma, there are people with appointments. People counting on you.”
Still, his mother remained silent, and I couldn’t figure out what was going on.
“Ma,” Lester said. “Did you hear what I—”
