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Cooke filled his lungs, emptied them slowly as his pulse returned to normal. He’d thought the voice was coming from the back seat, that he’d picked up a stowaway.
Then he looked down at the cockpit array of gauges, monitors, and dials, and realized he had a satellite connection. The voice was Todd Plevin’s.
“Um, so far so good.” He spoke loudly, like an idiot talking to a foreigner. Did he have to push a button or what?
Plevin chuckled. “Don’t yell. It’s Bluetooth, not a crank job. How you making out with all the bells and whistles?”
“I might have them down pat by the time I get to San Francisco.”
“Tracking okay?”
“Perfect. We’re on the freeway. She’s five cars ahead.”
“Terrific. I’m gonna make my IT guy as rich as me. Just looking in. I won’t be butting in all the time. Just say ‘Call Plevin’ if you need to report.” There was an almost inaudible click and Cooke was alone again.
They drove nonstop for thirty miles; apparently Anne had a stronger bladder than his ex-wife’s. He opened a bag of chips, more for the salt than anything else, to help retain fluid; if he hit the water bottle too often he might find out just how his plumbing stacked up against hers.
Just as he thought that, her right turn signal came on and she pulled into a rest stop. He did the same.
The building, a low cantilevered structure of steel and concrete, looked new. The asphalt lot was a rich, syrupy black with bright yellow lines separating the spaces and no cracks. He parked a few spaces away from the Lexus, made a quick trip to the men’s room, and trotted back out. She emerged minutes later in shirtsleeves. She’d shucked the blazer somewhere along the route.
Reaching for her door handle, she suddenly looked across her car roof, straight at Cooke.
He stiffened, held his breath. Had she recognized the Toyota? If she’d noticed it an hour ago sitting across the street from her house, and spotted it again during the drive, how was she to suspect it was the same one? They’d passed dozens of identical models on the road, several the same color as his. She hadn’t had a look at the rear-mounted license plate.
The sun was higher now, shining directly at his window. If the reflection was bright enough she wouldn’t be able to see his face. Then again, she might have gotten a better look at him than he’d thought back at the convenience store, and seen him in the rest stop without his knowledge.
All this went through his mind in a half-second. That’s as long as she spent looking his way. She slid behind the wheel, backed out, and headed toward the reentry lane, passing behind the Toyota. He couldn’t risk pulling out so soon after she did. The wait of a few minutes was agonizing, but the tiny green dot on the dash moved steadily in the same direction it had from the start. Finally he reentered the freeway, tapping his fingers on the wheel until he saw the yellow Lexus half a dozen cars ahead. A car behind him glided into the fast lane and passed: a brand new Toyota Corolla, same color as his. His breathing returned to normal. The camouflage was holding up.
He’d just have to make sure she didn’t see him face-to-face.
CHAPTER 6
ILLINOIS WAS A big state; he’d known that in theory, but had never traversed it in a lump. Much of it lay between Cooke, Anne, and the interchange onto I-70 West, which would be their home for most of the route.
He had the designers in Tokyo to thank for removing boredom from the equation of a long drive.
They seemed to have thought of everything: internet access, satellite and analog radio, climate control, Bluetooth (wish he’d knownthatbefore Plevin’s disembodied voice nearly put him in a ditch), a sexy-sounding female on the factory GPS (he immediately named her Lola)—and those were just the features he’d discovered. For all he knew there might be a soft ice cream dispenser and hidden robotic arms to slip him into a superhero suit. He made a mental note to take the owner’s manual with him when he checked into Anne’s hotel and study up on it.
After a hundred miles, though, he realized that these luxuries could work in the opposite direction and become monotonous. Manually operating a stereo system at least broke up the rhythm, like getting up to change channels on TV as opposed to exercising only his thumb on a remote. Being able to stream thousands of songs from all genres automatically had a soporific effect. He switched to regular AM/FM radio, bobbed his head to jazz, shouted lyrics along with Mick, made snide remarks to blowhard talk-show hosts, listened soberly to national news. In addition, he enjoyed the experience most millennials would never know: passing out of range of one frequency and into another, hearing the broadcast of a Cubs game dissolving into a Royals play-by-play, listening to it grow stronger as he neared the state line. A music station would morph into a PBS panel, country and western into salsa, a live presidential press conference into a hip-hop duet, an old-time radio drama into static.
There was a painting in that; but how to transmute an audio phenomenon into the visual?
Attaboy, Dennis: Keep thinking constructively.Daydreaming could be as bad as texting while driving or falling asleep at the wheel.
“Welcome to Missouri!”
He grinned. “Thanks, Lola.” The same greeting sprang up on a sign on the shoulder, along with a silhouette of the state as it appeared on the map. St. Louis’s Gateway Arch showed in the upper right corner of his windshield, catching the sun in Day-Glo, and directly ahead of him the dromedary span of the bridge over the Mississippi River. For the space of a few minutes, Dennis Cooke and Anne Plevin were in different states.
His tires sang on the bridge. There were boats on the great waterway, an image he’d seen only in pictures; he’d never been that far west. The sky was a scraped blue, but to the southwest a shelf of blue-black clouds threatened to cross the freeway in an hour or two.
Just for a change of pace—and curiosity—he cleared his throat and said, “Call the Hilton in Kansas City, Missouri.”
A woman’s voice confirmed his reservation, asked when he expected to arrive.
A mile marker appeared. “About three hours.”
“Your room will be ready.”
