Free The Strangers of Kindness by Terry Hickman

taking care of the kids. She came along. They might think I killed her. That’d make it an even better grab for you, wouldn’t it?”
    “Hey Felix, what you doin’?” from down the line.
    “Takin’ a leak, Billie. Just a sec.” He turned back to Theo and peered at the raw-looking seam on his neck. He looked over at Jennifer whose face was striped now, tears washing through the coal-dust. “She come along voluntarily?”
    Jennifer heard, and nodded hard. Felix ruminated. Rewards and bonuses didn’t impress him; he knew who always got the glory of a spectacular bust. He wondered, thinking he knew, what this kid would be telling the cops about the young lady, if Felix did as he suggested. “Lead them a merry chase,” Felix thought, “I buried her here, no maybe it was there, all the while she clackety-clack, clackety-clack, on her way to Nevada with these kids. And in the end . . . they gonna fry ‘im anyway . . .” Dim fragments of stories his grandmother had told him about her grandmother came back to him. Something about the Underground Railroad.
    Felix smiled.
    “Car 63 okay!” he hollered down the line, and stepped down the ladder out of sight. Half an hour later the train jolted to life, to carry them west for another ten hours. Just before dawn, when they were all sleeping, a light aircraft passed over the train. It circled back once, then winged away east.
    * * *
    Manny Fishbein, an almost-full-blooded Cherokee, came by his name through an unbroken line of first-born sons started by Manny Fishbein, Rabbi, in 1930. Passing through Oklahoma on his way to San Francisco, Manny I fell helplessly in love with, and married, the beautiful Cherokee woman who served him coffee in a diner outside of Tulsa.
    Somehow Manny IV had ended up owning a gas station/convenience store just east of the Utah-Nevada border, along a road used little since the Interstate system was completed. He and his wife had eked out a living, raised their family and made their home in an add-on apartment for thirty years. Yet often he found himself pondering on how he could still feel like a wanderer in the world. He reckoned it had something to do with his double-Diaspora heritage: displaced Jews, and displaced Cherokees.
    Under a clangorously hot sun he sat resting a root beer can on his barrel belly and staring at the mirage that shimmered between his road and the train sitting on its tracks a mile south. What’s up with that train? It never stops there. Maybe I ought to load a cooler with ice and sodies, go treat the crew.
    His sharp ears picked up prickles of voices from that direction. Sounded funny. He hoisted himself out of the patio chair and got the binoculars off their nail inside the door.  
    Focusing on the train cars he patiently examined each one, looking for the people he’d heard. He expected to see crewmen working to fix a bent wheel, or oiling gears.
    What he saw instead made him grunt in surprise. People where no people should be. Two heads poking up over the top of one of the coal cars. No. Three. He adjusted the focus by micrometers. Kids! No. One adult. Male. Two kids, one with a coppery glimmer of hair. He sensed the tiny vibrations of their voices again. He saw them look west to the invisible border of Nevada.
    He was simultaneously relieved to know, then, what was going on, and newly anxious. Refugees, from the wonderful New U.S.A.  
    But, the train had stopped. And, there was no sign of any railroad employee. Manny thought he knew what that meant. He swiveled to look east up the road. He sat motionless for a long time before his guess was confirmed by a puff of dust. It drifted from beyond the shoulder of one of the low hills through which the old road wound.
    Manny stood up and those acute ears heard two things at once: The distant hum of the approaching car, and the subsonic throb of something else. He sprinted for the truck, not even taking time to call to Helen where he was going.
    He was halfway to the