Free The Edge of Sleep by David Wiltse

motorists were passing him on the inside and gesturing as they went past.
    And I haven’t even gotten the thing out the window yet, he thought. Nine times out of ten he would have swerved into the guard rail or another car if he’d made the final effort of throwing the bag onto the divider. He knew that throwing was the wrong idea. There was no way he could throw anything this heavy and unwieldy from a sitting position behind a steering wheel, never mind the demands of driving a car at the same time. It would be all he could do to push it far enough away from the car not to fall under the wheels. Becker eased into the right-hand lane, still balancing the bag on the open window, until the line of cars that had built up behind him had passed. Middle-of-the-night reduced traffic would make things somewhat easier, but not enough.
    When the road was clearer. Becker pulled into the passing lane once more. Steadying the car with his knees, he pushed the bag as hard as he could with both hands, grabbing the wheel again immediately to avoid a crash. The bag hit the guard rail and split in two. The sacks of litter hit the highway and spilled onto the pavement. He looked at the mess behind him in his rearview mirror. The first car had already reached the mess and was warily swinging wide to avoid the torn sacks and flapping plastic. Any worse push and he would have caused a traffic hazard within minutes. As it was, there would probably be a slowdown for several minutes until the wind of passing cars pulled the plastic free of the litter and sent it winging crazily away from the road. And that was the best I could do, Becker thought. He knew he was stronger than most men because of a lifetime of staying in shape. His arms were conditioned by the rigors of pulling himself up rock faces on a rope. If he had been higher and had more of an arc for the push, the bag might have cleared the rail. From the cab of a diesel semitrailer truck, for instance. But this was the Merritt Parkway and commercial vehicles were prohibited. Driving such a truck here was an open invitation for arrest by the state police. Either the man who had successfully put the Shapiro boy’s body on the divider had carried it across two lanes of traffic and dropped it there, or he was possessed of great strength. Becker wondered if he were chasing a man who was a monster in more than one sense.
     
    The Town Center was five vertical layers of shops surrounding a center well with a courtyard, a fountain, and tiers of steps for sitting. Both elevators and escalators gave access from the ground floor to the higher levels. There were exits on every floor to the parking garage, which ascended parallel to the central shopping core, as well as three ground-level pedestrian entrances from the street. Security guards sat in glass booths at the parking lot exits but, as Becker noted upon entering, they paid only intermittent attention to the flow of people. If someone tried to drive a minivan through the exit and onto the elevator, they might notice that, Becker thought. Otherwise, their value as witnesses was limited. The guards had been positioned where they were for three reasons. One, the glass offices were out of the way of the shopping flow and would not be bothering customers with unpleasant thoughts of security. Two, their position next to the exits just might give shoplifters second thoughts—although experience had shown this was a very questionable premise. And three, the nook behind the elevators was a relatively secluded spot where trouble might be expected to spring up were it not for the proximity of the security guards.
    Becker, knew, however, that the occurrence he was most concerned with had taken place somewhere else. The man known as Lamont Cranston had snatched his quarry somewhere in the body of the building. By the time he passed through an exit, he already had the boy completely under his control. Anything else would have been far too risky. The boy could