Free Centralia by Mike Dellosso Page A

the line of sycamores ended and the fields gave way to a more populated stretch. Small homes, mostly ranches and mobiles, lined the road now. Each sat on a nice-size lot with a paved driveway and trees for shade. In them lived families who shared memories and played games together, maybe watched movies at night, ate popcorn. Families that hadn’t been destroyed by lies and hunted like criminals. A mile or so down the road, they’d enter the town of Five Forks. Peter massaged the wheelagain. “Because one of the intruders   —one of the men who would have shot me in cold blood   —was a cop.”
    Amy didn’t say anything to that. She stared out the side window for a long time before asking again, “How did you get away?” She seemed surprised that a lab researcher, a man who spent most of his academic life in a white coat, a man who would rank at least in the upper tenth percentile when it came to nerdiness, could escape the clutches of three trained killers.
    Peter glanced at his hands. He had once again clenched his hands until his knuckles lost their color. “That’s enough for now, okay?”

They rode in silence for the next thirty minutes, across oceans of open farmland striped with rows of corn and blanketed with fields of golden wheat, and through the towns of Five Forks and Crossroads. Peter kept glancing in his mirrors but never saw the black Lincoln or any other vehicle following them. Though satisfied that he’d temporarily shaken his murderous shadow, he didn’t believe for one moment that he’d lost his pursuers but had merely stalled them. They seemed to have resources beyond his ability to truly hide. He only needed to lie low long enough to collect his thoughts, formulate a plan, and figure out what to do with Amy. He certainly didn’t want to endanger her any more than he already had but knew that she was part of it now   —she was involved   —and whoever was after him wouldn’t stop until they had both of them.
    When they arrived in Bentleysville, Peter said, “We need gas, and I need to get some answers.”
    Amy said, “I need answers too.”
    “You’ll get them. As much as I know.” She deserved to know what he knew, which wasn’t much. During the drive following their cornfield escape, his mind had sprouted a whole new crop of questions. All without answers. He’d spare Amy the finer nuances of his tortuous soliloquizing and share only the facts he’d learned or deduced.
    After filling the truck at a small local station on the fringe of town, he found a coffee shop on one of the secondary streets and parked behind it in the employee parking area.
    “Why not go to the library?” Amy asked.
    “Cameras,” Peter said. “Libraries have security cameras, even in small towns.”
    “Yeah, these little towns are real hotbeds for book thieves. You wouldn’t imagine what the street value is for the latest Dan Brown novel.”
    “We need to stay off the grid, out of view. No cameras, no credit cards, no phone calls.”
    Amy sighed, ran her hand through her hair. “You think they can tap into some country library’s closed-circuit system?”
    “I’m not sure what they’re capable of right now. They tracked me to your house. How did they do that? My car? My phone? It could be anything. It’s like they know my next move before I do. They’re resourceful, and until I figure out how they operate, we need to be as invisible as possible.”
    “And who exactly are they?”
    Peter pulled the key from the ignition and opened the truck’s door. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

    It took Lawrence Habit a full twenty minutes to make his way around the cornfield and find the road that Patrick and the woman had taken. It was obvious civil engineers had tractors, not assassins, in mind when designing the grid for rural roads. Oversize, tread-heavy tires could go where luxury sedans could not. Lawrence primarily made his living maneuvering through city streets with stop signs