Only now he hears the same exhaust roar coming from the other direction and sees that the Fairlane has circled back and is heading east on Old Cross.
When it gets to the golden arches near the road, the car slows to a stop, forcing cars behind to go around it.
When the driver rolls down his window, Burt sees right away that he’s pointing his finger and thumb at Burt like it’s a gun.
By instinct, Burt has started to reach for his gun as soon as he’d seen the arm coming out of the car, forgetting the to-go cup in his hand and thus spilling his coffee in the process. When the driver sees that, he laughs, turning his hand around to give Burt the finger before hitting the gas and speeding away.
Burt stands there, staring at those classic tail fins, before walking back inside to get himself more coffee. As he does, his brain suddenly goes to a line his dad used to quote from a newspaper comic strip, one whose name Burt can’t recall, maybe because there’s so much going on inside his brain.
We have met the enemy.
And he is us.
SIXTY-SEVEN
TAYLOR CALLS THE app on her phone “Find My Burt.”
He’d resisted the notion of her having it, her having the ability to track his whereabouts day or night, reasoning there might be places that would make her worry even more than she normally did when he was on the job, and doing something far more dangerous than pulling cars over for speeding.
“But I’ll worry more if I can’t reach you, and don’t know where you are,” she said.
She came out on top in the debate, as she so often did. She never thought of them as arguments. She rarely argued with this man. Even if they got anywhere close to having a real argument, he’d get that sad, little-boy look on his face and before long she’d be laughing and so would he, both of them having forgotten what the dispute had been about in the first place.
These days she’s telling herself that she needs a “Find My Silas” app even more because she is far more worried about him than she is about her husband. After all, it’s in Burt’s job description, knowing how to deal with bad men. As big and strong and fearless as Silas is, this really is a new playing field for him.
But just for fun this morning, and for no good reason, maybe just to make things feel more like normal, she checked Burt’s location a little while after he’d left the house, and discovered he was at McDonald’s, even though he kept joking that he was trying to quit.
Some men, she knew, were addicted to porn, or gambling, or drink or drugs or even other women. Not her husband. Not Burt. He was addicted to Big Macs and Egg McMuffins and whatever else they called their sandwiches. Somehow it made her love him even more. One of the two loves of her life. Silas Tucker was the other. They couldn’t be more different, she knew. But maybe that figured, because her love for these two men couldn’t be more different.
When she checks the app a half hour later, she discovers that Burt is still at McDonald’s. She has a little extra time before she has to get into her bus and start picking up camp kids, in what is their last week of summer camp. So she smiles to herself as she decides to make her first stop be at Burt’s McDonald’s.
Walk in, tell him he’s busted, she’s making a citizen’s arrest on the charge of excessive junk food.
She can be there in ten minutes, tops.
Taylor McCarter Webb is smiling to herself again as she grabs the keys to the bus off the kitchen table.
She can already see her husband’s face when she walks through the door.
Maybe she’ll call Silas and pick him up on the way if he’s not doing anything.
Long time since they rode the bus together.
SIXTY-EIGHT
IT’S FINALLY TIME for Burt to make the drive to Old Mill, the excitement inside him having gotten even bigger as he keeps checking his watch.
Maybe this is the way Silas always felt before the start of a big game.
Burt is holding his new to-go cup in his right hand, his car door having automatically unlocked, when he hears a voice call out, “Hey, Chief.”
He turns around to see that the red-and-white Ford Fairlane is back. Maybe as old as one from the 1950s, he sees now that it’s this close. It really is a beauty. Somehow idling quietly on the shoulder of the road, right before the entrance to the parking lot.
Only now it’s not an empty hand he sees coming out of the driver’s-side window.
It’s the barrel of a long gun, one Burt recognizes right away as a Rough Rider, just because he knows guns the way he knows his antique cars.
Back when he was still a football player, they always said that theproblem with Burt Webb, as hard as he tried, was that sometimes his brain moved faster than his body did.
