The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [127]
Wait. Water.
What had that newspaper said? Trucks and trainloads of bottled water were being diverted from all over the country to Chicago.
Wayne crawled under the water truck and came out on the other side. More bottled water. He ducked under that truck to the next one. More water.
These trucks could be headed toward Nada.
He walked to the back and pulled the lever. Padlocked. So was the next one and the next and the next. The fifth truck in line, however, had a lock that had been left undone.
It was better than no plan at all.
Wayne pulled the lever and started to lift the heavy door, when he was struck hard between the shoulder blades. He fell four feet and crumpled to the ground. His eyes were filled with red glare and every one of his recent wounds and bites and burns caught fire at once, and for a second he was almost glad to be caught.
“Motherfucker!” said a voice. “Motherfucking water is only a mother-fucking dollar! Just pay for it, you cheap shit, instead of stealing it out my truck!”
Wayne rolled onto his back and crossed his arms over his chest. The driver kicked him in the side. More pain, this time like needles all across his stomach. He tasted blood.
“Get up!”
Wayne tried, but he wasn’t fast enough, and the trucker pulled him to his feet. Wayne’s vision started to return. The man was probably in his late forties. He had a beard with some gray and unwashed hair under a union hat. He was strong but not that big, maybe two-thirds the size of Wayne.
“Holy shit,” the man said, glancing at the logo on Wayne’s shirt, and Wayne knew what he was thinking. He’d recognized Wayne. From the posters. From the newspaper. Wayne Kenneth Jennings.
Wayne felt like crying. He never used his middle name. His friends, good friends like Peter, wouldn’t even know what it was. Now to the world he was a three-name killer, like John Wayne Gacy. They even had one name in common.
He had fractions of a second to decide what to do next. Or not even so much what to do, he realized quickly, as what to be. He could choose to be himself, the innocent man, the man who just wanted to explain. The man who, in spite of everything, still hadn’t broken any laws, not even a misdemeanor, honest. The man who hadn’t even stolen that sweatshirt in the store.
Or he could choose to be someone else. In those fractions of a second, he could become a person he had never met, the person they thought he was, the “dangerous” person described in that poster, instead of the innocent man pictured on it. He could choose to be that person. To act not as a desperate innocent would do, but as a desperate killer.
He pushed his fist into the driver’s face, exploding it in a shrapnel of blood, broken capillaries and nose bone flattening against his knuckles. Wayne scooped up the heavy padlock the driver had used to strike him and let it hang menacingly from his right hand. He grabbed the driver by the collar, halting his slow stumble backward. Both the man’s hands covered his bloodied face, trying to staunch the flow.
The driver was crying as Wayne told him what he would need to do to stay alive.
46
TUESDAY, AUGUST 3
NADA WOKE UP GROGGY, daylight punching between the blinds and dragging white daggers across the carpet. She didn’t know what time she had gone to bed or how long she had been curled under the heavy sheet, eyes closed and dreamless. Eight hours? A whole day? Normally, her spider had kept time like a stopwatch, but the deep, opaque sleep had dulled her everywhere. She remembered her mother coming in with water and pills, and she’d taken them without asking what they were, taken them because she had wanted to escape the bad news, and now, as she remembered the evening in reverse, as she remembered herself crying, then denying, and then the words out of Reggie Vallentine’s mouth, shocking her a second time, jolting her, wounding her, the denying and the crying started all over again.
She was anxious and