Chapter Eleven

Out in Alton’s rambling suburbs, the snow didn’t get plowed as thoroughly or as often as the real city. An inches-thick mantle of tight-packed powder covered virtually every bit of road, of sidewalk, of yard. In some places, people had taken it upon themselves to shift the snow, and off-white walks and frost-green yards and night-black roads showed through.

Behind one neat row of stamped-out houses, I hunkered down under some trees. A street light cast its orangey glow onto me, and the snow looked like crystallized amber, and it looked like me and the world had been trapped in it. With the snow not falling and the streets empty and the wind quiet, the illusion was complete.

I gulped water, and my stomach rumbled. When I raised the bottle again, it was empty, so I tossed it aside. I unzipped the bag—still had a half dozen plastic water bottles in there—and took out extra ammunition for the Glocks. Once I’d topped off the magazines again, I took out the little address book and flipped to the back.

So . . . 2 Beckson Way had been nothing useful. I rethought that after a moment—wouldn’t have to chase Reno there, because he wouldn’t go somewhere I knew about.

LODGE 828-9163.

1800 MOBLIN ROAD BASIN CITY.

It would be easiest to check where this lodge was, rather than heading off to some other city and Reno not being there. If the lodge turned out to be a dead end, I could always go to Basin City.

No address, but I had a phone number, so I needed a phone book. I looked around.

Houses had phone books.

Picking at random, I turned down a street that had a sign reading Sharmon Palms Drive, though it had no palm trees growing anywhere on it. It wasn’t really scenic or beautiful in any way, really, like the name seemed to imply. It was . . . a street.

At the first house, there were lights on. Across the street, next door, across the street again—all showed signs of people being home and awake. I wondered what time it was—early enough for work or too early for bed? The obscuring clouds didn’t let me see the sun, but I thought it was still night, not early morning. Truthfully, my body was no longer as finely-tuned a clock as it had once been, but I didn’t think it was that far gone.

The last house on the street was dark and had no car out front. It looked like whoever lived there was out—graveyard shift at some job, maybe?—so I stopped. The lack of lights immediately near any of the houses was helpful, and that house’s outside lamp was off. I moved quickly up the front walk, tried the knob.

Locked.

I moved left, to a bank of windows just beside the door. My feet crunched over loose-ish snow in a sort of garden area as I tried to force them up. I had no luck, so I backed off, went between the house and an adjoining one, and took a look at the back.

Each house had a covered porch, but there were no fenced off backyards like I’d expected to see. Instead, each porch sat directly on a broad swath of lightly-treed ground. It was a common yard, or something, and it made my work a lot easier.

I snuck directly to the back of the house, stepped up the one step onto the porch. A glass door—the kind that slides to one side instead of opening—played centerpiece to flanking lawn chairs. Everything was lightly dusted with snow and a little frosty, from when the storms had been coupled with intense wind that blew everything sideways.

I tried the handle on the sliding door.

Locked. Damn.

I stepped to the edge of the porch, looked around. There were still lights in some places, but some had gone off in the brief time it had taken me to choose a house. I didn’t see anyone sitting outside, didn’t see anyone walking around, which was pretty much what I’d expected in such inhospitable weather.

Back at the door, I slammed one leather-coated elbow into the glass, and the glass fractured to form a spider web at the point of impact. I hit it three more times—each blow added to the web’s circumference and complexity—and then the glass broke. It fragmented more like the windshield in a car than like I thought it would; little bits of gummy safety glass scattered all over the floor, which was carpeted, meaning that the glass wouldn’t rattle around and make footing treacherous.

I shook my head slightly—wasn’t likely to find an adversary in this place, so footing probably wouldn’t matter.

I stepped inside and listened for a second. I closed my eyes and tried to remain perfectly still, ignoring that swaying-even-when-you’re-not-swaying feeling I sometimes get when I do that.

Nothing for a few seconds, then a long creak, then nothing, then a pop. The house was probably compressing from the sudden influx of cold air.

I glanced around myself, looking for a phone book but not expecting to see one right away. The room I was in seemed to be some kind of living room. There was a TV directly to my left, just past the end of the now-glassless door, and a couple chairs across from that. Curtains hung over part of the door, but they hadn’t been pulled across the part that actually moved. Straight ahead, past the furniture, I could see what looked like a little dining room. Past the TV, there was a short hall that dead-ended at a windowed wall, but I could make out an alcove to the left of the window.

For just a few seconds, the layout of this house bewildered me. Dining room at the front, living room at the back? Why would an architect design something like that? Abruptly, it occurred to me that the tenants could very easily have modified the inner workings of the house to accommodate any kind of layout they wanted. I waited a few seconds longer, putting the odd structuring together in my mind.

I went straight first, operating under the assumption that the alcove near the window was a staircase. I always preferred to check an entire area before going to another.

The room beyond the furniture was partly a dining room, partly a kitchen. There was a stove, a refrigerator, lots of cupboards, appliances, and everything else that went with the latter in one part of the room, and a square wooden table with only three chairs around it—a dirty plate still sat in front of one—in the other half.

On the wall, behind the table and next to a long window, I saw a phone. I guessed that the phone book would be somewhere close by, so I checked the room and found it in a drawer built into the table.

So . . . how do I find something like this? A lodge—no name written in for it, so the white pages would be useless unless I happened to open right to that particular number. I flipped to the yellow pages, thought for a moment—what would a lodge, like a hunting lodge or something like that, fall under?—then started flipping through sections of the book.

The word VACATION, printed in the upper-right hand corner of a page, caught my eye; a hunting lodge would count as a vacation home, right? I scanned through it, then the next page, the next, before I found the number.

BY-THE-BROOK RETREAT828-9163

19 BROOKSIDE DRIVE

Good. I had the address, and now all I needed was a map. The house probably had one, but where would they keep a map?

I tried thinking of where me and Veronica had kept them, but my head throbbed in pain when I tried to remember, so I stopped trying. I so wanted to think about her, sometimes, but it literally hurt too much to do it—a deep, pulsing, pounding, throbbing pain, thick through my skull, just under the surface and ready to burst if I just thought for one more second, if I just focused on her, wanted it enough, it could happen, and then I could—

I pulled back. My vision was spotted with pain, the white flickers somehow blacking things behind them out. How could white make things go black?

I shook my head, pulled further away from that dark brink. I didn’t want to go there, not now, anyway. Oblivion could wait.

I stood up, only then realizing that I had fallen over. Suddenly, cold sweat stung down my ravaged flesh, and I wondered if I had fallen hard and heavy, if anyone was home—a kid maybe, someone who didn’t have a car but might still be capable of calling the police. Would they have heard?

My head pained me whenever I thought like that. I shivered, my fingers hooking like talons, and a low, strangled sound escaped my throat—something half-groan, half-moan, like if I had a really bad stomachache or something. The hurt felt higher, though.

Map. The word popped into my head, and I latched to it as it floated up and up, into the reality of the—where was I?

The kitchen, that house on Sharmon Palms—right.

I needed a map, for . . .

Reno. I needed to find 19 Brookside Drive. I needed a map.

Where would they keep a map? I checked back in the drawer where I’d found the phone book since it seemed like a fairly obvious place to put stuff like that, and I was in luck. A flopped, well-worn book of maps detailing Alton and the surrounding area had been underneath the phone book

I thought about Brookside Drive for a minute, then decided I didn’t know where it was. I passed over the full map of Alton, and looked through the four that quartered it into manageable chunks; when I didn’t find it on the first pass, I checked again, then saw a little street beetling out of the city, the winding words BROOKSIDE DRIVE printed on it.

Excellent. It would be quite a walk, but I knew where I was going.

Driving had kept my once-shocking sense of direction from decaying too much; I was still more than capable of navigating my way across a city without checking a map more than once. One look at Alton from that bird’s-eye view, the roads all labeled, and I knew exactly how to get to Brookside Drive. It might take most of the day to get there, but what did that matter?

This was what I was doing. I had nothing else.

I twisted through the city, turning when I needed to but trying to keep on a straight path as much as possible—used alleys, side streets, stuff like that. It would cut down on time, something that I didn’t understand my reasons for. If Reno was there, he was there; it was unlikely that an hour or so either way would change that.

Now, if I hadn’t found the lodge for a couple more days, he might’ve left . . .

Once during the walk, it struck me that I was putting a lot on the idea that Reno really was at the hunting lodge. Somehow, then, it never occurred to me to ask, “What if I have to go to another city?” The question was probably there, but my single-mindedness, the narrowed focus of the mission that had overcome me in the old days was back. My next objective was set; all I had to do was what was laid out, forget everything else, just do it . . .

No more snow fell that day. I found that odd; the storm had been so fierce, dropping possibly-literal tons of half-frozen water onto the city, covering it in a clean, white blanket to hide what lay underneath. I was grateful for that, though, because my going was easier in the plowed streets and the packed-down snow on the sidewalks; more than that, though, the cold had set so deep into my bones that I didn’t think it would ever come out, and more snow whipping around in the wind wouldn’t help. Movement did, but thinking too much, drawing in on myself to escape it like I used to do a long time ago did nothing.

The thinking caused a different kind of cold, something that pushed its way into my chest, just above where my ribs ended. It stayed there, and it clutched my heart and my lungs, and breathing seemed hard—living seemed hard.

The only thinking I did was about what I would do when I got to 19 Brookside Drive. I figured that that wasn’t Reno’s exact address, that it was probably the address of an office that would rent the homes to people. From there, however, I could probably find who the tenants were, where they were staying, how to get there. They wouldn’t put the houses too far away from the office, would they?

The possibility of a days-long delay—this one spent walking to the office, and maybe another spent tracking down Reno’s getaway—started to look more likely.

Clouds had masked the sky for the last few days, but that day was clearer. The sun cannonballed through the heavens, almost seeming to move too fast. As I stood, finishing off one of the bottles of water, I glanced up at that closest of stars.

It was balanced on the steeple of a towering skyscraper, looking a little bit like the New Year’s ball that dropped at the beginning of every year. Beyond that, a new bank of clouds—steely blue, cold, dangerous—surged with nearly no motion whatsoever. Snow might’ve been falling from them, but I couldn’t tell at that distance.

I tossed the bottle and moved on, and I reached Brookside Drive around the time the sun must’ve dropped off the steeple and fallen behind the building.