Текст книги "The Romanov Cross"
Автор книги: Robert Masello
сообщить о нарушении
Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 35 страниц)
That was one reason he had just shooed them all away. When this depression fell, he needed to be alone with it … and it fell upon him often in climes like these. He was carried back in time, to a throng of mourners, gathered at an impressive state funeral in Moscow, when he was just a boy. Wrapped in their heavy black coats and fur hats, they had stood impassively as the wind had battered their faces and brought tears to their eyes. Of course, given the reputation for steely rectitude of the dignitary whose funeral it was – a man whom everyone feared and no one much liked – a sharp wind was the only way any of them would have been inclined to shed a tear.
As young Vassily had looked on, the Russian Orthodox priest, in his long black cassock and purple chimney-pot hat – the kamilavka—had overseen the perebor, or tolling of the bells. First, a small bell had been struck once, and then, in succession, slightly larger bells were rung, each one symbolizing the progress of the soul from cradle to grave – or so his mother had leaned down to whisper in his ear. At the end, all the bells were struck together, signifying the end of earthly existence. The coffin, sealed with four nails in memory of the four nails that had crucified Christ, was lowered into the grave, with the head facing east to await the Resurrection. The priest poured the ashes from a censer into the open pit, and after each of the stony-faced mourners had tossed in a shovelful of dirt and drifted off down the snowy pathways of the cemetery, Vassily had found himself alone there, with only his widowed mother. He had leaned back against her and she had folded her arms over him as they watched the gravediggers, impatient to finish the job, emerge from the cover of the trees to fill up the rest of his father’s grave.
Chapter 29
“So, where did you say you got this?” Voynovich asked, while leaning back on his stool. He’d gotten even fatter, if that was possible, since Charlie Vane had last come into the Gold Mine to fence some other items.
“I already told you,” Charlie said. “It was a gift from God.”
“Yeah, right. I’ve heard your show. You and God are good buds now.”
Charlie knew that nobody believed that his conversion to Christ was the real thing, but so what? There would always be unbelievers and naysayers. Jesus himself had to deal with Doubting Thomas. But he’d driven here, all the way to Nome, because Voynovich was the only person he could think of who could give him a decent appraisal of the emerald cross – and tell him what the damn writing said on the other side.
Voynovich studied the cross under his loupe one more time. “I can’t be completely sure until I take them out,” he said, “but these stones could just be glass.”
“They’re emeralds,” Charlie said, “so don’t give me any of your bullshit.” Just because he was a man of God now, it didn’t mean he’d become a sucker. “And the cross is silver.”
“Yeah, I’ll give you that much.”
It was only four in the afternoon, but it was dark out, and in deference to the delicacy of their negotiations, Voynovich had lowered the front blinds of the pawnshop and flipped the sign to CLOSED. The place hadn’t changed much over the years – the same old moose head hung on the wall, the dusty cabinets displayed a seemingly unchanged array of Inuit scrimshaw, old mining tools, and “rare” coins in sealed plastic sleeves. The fluorescent lights still sputtered and fizzed.
“It’s definitely an old piece,” Voynovich conceded.
“How old?”
“Best guess? Judging from the condition, at least a hundred years. Of course, if I knew more about how and where you found it – it’s why I asked – I’d probably be able to tell you a whole lot more.” He shrugged his shoulders under his baggy corduroy shirt and shook a fresh cigarette out of the packet lying on the counter.
“How about the writing on the back?” Charlie asked, shifting in his wheelchair. He was still sore from his long drive from Port Orlov. “What’s it say?”
Voynovich turned it over and tried peering at it through the bottom of his gold bifocals, then gave up. “Gotta get the magnifying glass out of the back,” he said, sliding off the stool, and heading for the rear of the shop. A trail of smoke wafted into the air behind him.
The trouble with dealing with crooks, Charlie reflected, was that they never stopped being crooks. Not emeralds? What a load. Voynovich was probably hoping to buy the thing outright from him for a couple of hundred bucks, act like he was doing Charlie a favor the whole time, then turn around and sell it for thousands through his own guys down in Tacoma. Well, Charlie hadn’t come all this way for a couple hundred bucks, and he sure didn’t want to have to tell Rebekah that that was all he got. While she was supposed to be the subservient wife – that’s what the Bible decreed – she had a tongue on her that could cut like a knife.
Right now, she was out shopping with her sister. The town of Nome was small – only around ten thousand people lived in the area – but compared to Port Orlov, it was the big city. The streets were lined with bars and bingo parlors and tourist traps selling native handicrafts and souvenirs. Most of the buildings were two stories high, made of weathered wood and brick, and clung close to the wet streets, lending the place the feel of an Old West mining camp.
Voynovich lumbered back to his stool, parked his cigarette on the foil ashtray, and held the magnifying glass over the back of the cross. “My Russian’s not what it used to be,” he said, “and some of this is pretty far gone. From all the dents and scorch marks, it looks like some moron used the thing for target practice.”
“Just tell me what the hell it says.”
The pawnbroker leaned over to inspect it more closely. “It looks like it says, ‘To my … little one. No one can break the chains of holy love that bind us. Your loving father, Grigori.’ ”
Voynovich studied it for another few seconds, then sat back.
“That’s it?” Charlie asked.
“That’s it.”
Charlie didn’t know what exactly he’d been expecting, but this wasn’t it. A gift from a doting dad? Nothing there sounded like a clue to some vast buried treasure trove.
“If you want me to hang on to it and see what else I can find out, no problem,” Voynovich said, a little too readily for Charlie’s comfort. “I’ve got a big data base for Russian stuff and a few people I could talk to.”
“No.”
“Fine,” Voynovich said. “Then if you just want to sell it, we can go ahead and do that, instead. It’s probably worth more in one piece, but we can see what they think down in Tacoma. Maybe breaking it up is the way to go … especially if those are emeralds.” He started to pick the cross up off the counter, but Charlie reached up and grabbed his wrist – he hated how the damn wheelchair kept him lower than most people – and stopped him.
“I’m hanging on to it,” he said, and Voynovich looked confused.
“I thought you wanted to make some money.”
“And I will.” He wrapped the cross back up in the soft old rag he’d brought it in, then stuffed it into the inside pocket of his coat.
“If you want some kind of an advance,” the pawnbroker said, his eyes avidly following the cross into Charlie’s pocket, “I could do that. What do you say to two hundred bucks now and—”
But Charlie was already pushing his wheelchair away from the counter.
“Okay, five hundred up front, against whatever we get, plus the usual split.”
Charlie was at the door, but to his humiliation, it was the kind you had to pull inwards, and he had to wait there for Voynovich to come over and hold it open while he maneuvered his chair over the threshold.
“Make it a grand,” Charlie heard over his shoulder as he wheeled away. “An even grand.” But now, with the bid rising so fast, he knew that the thing must really be worth something, after all. Quite a bit, in fact, unless he missed his guess.
The sidewalk, like every concrete surface in Alaska, was pitted and uneven, and it was murder getting the chair down the street. But Charlie knew where he’d find Bathsheba. The Book Nook sold used paperbacks, and she’d be in there stocking up on romance novels.
Somebody leaving the store held the door open for him, and a little bell tinkled overhead. Bathsheba, no surprise, had her nose buried in some piece of trash that she hastily tried to hide when he wheeled up beside her.
“Where’s your sister?”
“Just up the street, buying yarn.”
“We’re going.”
“You’re done already? Rebekah said we could eat someplace in town.”
“Rebekah said wrong.”
“But there’s that place, the Nugget—”
“I said, we’re going.”
He whirled the chair around, and Bathsheba put the book back on the shelf and leapt to get the door open for him. Once Rebekah had been retrieved from the yarn shop, the sisters helped Charlie up into the driver’s seat of the van, and he pulled out onto the slushy street using the hand controls.
“Look,” Rebekah said, as Charlie drove by without even slowing down, “that’s the burled arch.” She was hoping to distract her disappointed sister.
“The what?” Bathsheba said, taking the bait and turning in the backseat to glance at the split spruce log raised atop two columns.
“That’s the place where the Iditarod race ends every year.”
“What’s that?”
“Remember, I told you about it last time.”
“Tell me again.”
How in God’s name did Rebekah put up with it, Charlie wondered? Always having to explain everything to her sister, even when she’d already explained it a dozen times before? They’d come to him as a package deal – wife and sister, indivisible – and since he’d needed a lot of help around the house, he thought why not. Still, there were times, like right now, when he wondered if he hadn’t acted rashly.
Then he chastised himself for the uncharitable thought. Man, staying right with Jesus was a full-time job.
“It’s in honor of something that happened many years ago,” Rebekah said, with the patience she showed to no one but her sister. “There was an epidemic of a disease, typhoid I think—”
“Diphtheria,” Charlie corrected her.
“Okay. Diphtheria. And the children of Nome – the native children – had no immunity to it.”
“It was in 1925,” Charlie said, unable to restrain himself. “And it used to be called ‘The Great Race of Mercy.’ ”
Rebekah waited a second, scowling, then went on. “The only medicine for it—”
“The serum.”
“Was in Anchorage.” She lay in wait for another correction, and when it didn’t come, she continued. “So teams of dogsleds had to be organized in relays, and the serum was carried hundreds and hundreds of miles, through terrible storms and ice and snow, to get to the children of Nome before the disease did.”
“And did it?”
“It did – in only five or six days. And there was a famous dog who was the first one to run right up this street, pulling the sled across the finish line.”
“Balto,” Charlie said, “his name was Balto. But the real hero was a different dog, one named Togo. Togo and his musher were the ones who took the serum through the hardest and the longest part of the route.” There wasn’t a kid in Alaska who didn’t know the story behind the present-day Iditarod, named after the trail so much of it took place on. But it had always bugged Charlie that the credit didn’t go where it really belonged. Once, many years ago, before the Merchant Marine had drummed him out, he’d had a shore leave in New York City and seen a statue there, in Central Park, of Balto. He’d wanted to scrawl Togo on it instead.
“Can we watch the race sometime?” Bathsheba asked.
Rebekah looked over at Charlie. “When is it, anyway?”
“March,” he said. “I’ll be sure to get us front-row seats.” He wondered why it still bothered him, about Togo. Maybe, he thought, it was because he hated stories where the ones who should be recognized for their greatness were somehow overlooked, and somebody else was able to swoop in at the end and get all the glory.
At the corner of Main Street, they passed the famous signpost with a dozen different placards showing the distances from there to everywhere else. Los Angeles was 2,871 miles away, the Arctic Circle a mere 141 miles. A couple of tourists were posing for pictures underneath it. Bathsheba craned her neck to get a better look.
“Get me Harley on the horn,” he said, as the van pulled out of the town proper. The lights of Nome hadn’t been much, but the night enveloped them the moment they left. Rebekah called up his brother on the car’s speakerphone, and Charlie heard the ring tone just before he got a burst of static, followed by dead air. Same as he’d been getting for the past couple of days.
“Goddammit!” he said, slapping his palm against the steering wheel.
“It’s an island in the middle of nowhere,” Rebekah said, hanging up. “I don’t know why you ever expected to get any reception.”
“I’m hungry,” Bathsheba said from the backseat.
“We should have eaten in town,” Rebekah said to Charlie. “Now you’ll have to pull over at that roadhouse we passed on the Sound.”
Charlie was about to protest, but he realized that he was hungry, too – it was just in his nature to be contrary – and it was going to be a long drive back. The road between Nome and Port Orlov, if that’s what you could call it, ranged from asphalt to gravel to hardpan – a compacted layer of dirt just beneath the topsoil – and most of it could be bumpy and rutted and washed out even in summer.
And this was sure as hell not summer.
In the snowy wastes around them, it was hard to see much, but mired in the moonlit fields there were old, abandoned gold dredges squatting like mastodons. Occasionally, you could come across one of these that was still in operation – growling like thunder as it devoured rocks and brush and muck in a never-ending quest for the gold that might be mixed up in it. Even more eerily, railroad engines were stranded in the frozen tundra – left to rust on sunken tracks that had lost their purpose the moment the gold ran out. Their smokestacks, red with age, were the tallest things in the treeless fields.
“There it is,” Rebekah said, pointing to the parking-lot lights of the roadhouse – a prefab structure on pylons – perched beside the Nome seawall. The granite wall, erected in the early fifties by the Army Corps of Engineers, was over three thousand feet long and sixty-five feet wide at the base, and it stood above what had once been known as Gold Beach, a place where the prospectors and miners of 1899 had discovered an almost miraculous supply of gold literally lying on the sands, just waiting to be collected.
“You coming in?” Rebekah asked, but they both knew Charlie wouldn’t want to have to climb in and out of the van again. Pulling up onto the gravel, he parked and said, “Bring me a sandwich and get the thermos filled with tea. Peppermint if they’ve got it. And don’t take forever.”
The sisters got out of the car, buried under their long coats, and scurried up the ramp. Since he’d had no luck reaching Harley’s cell phone, he tried calling Eddie’s number, then Russell’s, but they weren’t working, either. What was happening on St. Peter’s Island? Had they found a safe harbor for the Kodiak, and a secluded cave to hide out in? More important, had they started digging and found anything yet? Charlie had high hopes, but not a lot of confidence; he hadn’t exactly dispatched the A-Team and he knew it.
Waves were crashing on the breakwater out beyond the roadhouse. After the gold had been discovered on the beach – in such quantities that 2 million dollars’ worth was gathered in the summer of 1899 alone – steamships from San Francisco and Seattle had carried so many eager prospectors to Nome that a tent city had soon stretched thirty miles along the shore, all the way to Cape Rodney. Charlie had seen pictures of it hanging on the walls of the Nugget Inn in town. Mile after mile of canvas and stretched hides, shacks and lean-tos, all packed with desperate men and women struggling to make their fortunes. He felt the weight of the cross in his pocket and wondered how much had really changed since then? Alaska was still the Wild West in many ways – probably the last of it that was left – where loners and free spirits, people down on their luck or looking to find it in the first place, could come and make a fresh start.
While he waited in the warm car, he kneaded the tops of his dead legs. He couldn’t feel anything below the groin, but he knew that it was a good idea to keep the circulation going and the muscles from atrophying. Everything happened for a reason, that’s what he’d had to keep telling himself every day since the accident, and if this was God’s way of bringing him back into the fold, then so be it.
The sisters, coming out of the roadhouse, with their white faces and wisps of black hair blowing free from the buns at the back of their heads, reminded him of a couple of strutting crows. Bathsheba was carrying the thermos and Rebekah had the sandwich in a paper bag. Salmon salad on whole wheat toast, as it turned out. At least she got that sort of thing right. He ate it while playing a CD of a biblical sermon – sometimes he got ideas for his own broadcasts this way – and then backed the car out of the lot.
They could have spent the night in Nome, but Charlie hated to waste money, and besides, he liked to be back in his own place, with the ramps and everything else he needed to be comfortable. Not to mention the fact that the chances of hearing any news out of nearby St. Pete’s were going to be better there than in distant Nome. This first part of the road was blissfully asphalt, with a white line down the center and shoulders on either side, but he knew the rest of the way back wasn’t going to be that smooth. At least the van was equipped for it, with two spare cans of gas (a necessity when traveling in the wilderness regions of Alaska), plastic headlight covers to ward off the flying gravel, and, in case he collided with anything big, a wire mesh screen in front to protect the radiator and the paint job. If you hit a moose head-on, it could be curtains for more than the moose.
He hadn’t gone twenty miles before he glanced in the rearview mirror and saw that Bathsheba had slumped over in the backseat, fast asleep. Rebekah noticed it, too, and in a low voice, said, “So, how much did you get from Voynovich?”
“Nothing.”
“What are you talking about?” She glanced into the backseat again to make sure her sister was out. Some things they kept from her, for fear she could blurt out a piece of news she wasn’t supposed to know.
“I hung on to it,” he said, patting his breast pocket.
Rebekah folded her arms across her breast and, barely containing herself, said, “You want to tell me why?”
“Because he offered me a grand up front.”
Now she really looked puzzled.
“And if it was worth that much to him just to keep me from walking out of the store with it, it must be worth a helluva lot more. If Harley and his idiot friends manage to find any more stuff like it on the island, I’m going to go on down to Tacoma and fence it all myself.”
In a mollified tone, she asked, “Did he at least tell you what it said on the back?”
“Yeah, but it’s just an endearment. Nothing that says Romanov about it.” Or at least so far as he knew. When he got home, and wasn’t online ministering to Vane’s Holy Writ flock, he planned to be doing whatever research he could. Dollars to donuts, Voynovich was already doing exactly the same thing.
He drove on into the night, sipping the tea, and watching as, first, the center white line disappeared, then as the breakdown lane evaporated; the road became a narrow, serpentine trail, wending its way through snowy hills and along frozen streambeds. There were old wooden bridges, reinforced and supported on cement blocks, stretching across frozen gullies, and highway signs warning of wildlife crossings. Moose, bear, elk, caribou, fox, Dall sheep. At the right times of year, if you had a mind to, you could survive off the roadkill alone in these parts.
Rebekah, too, soon fell asleep, her head leaning against her doorjamb, and Charlie tried to stay awake by paying attention to the biblical sermon on the CD. The preacher was an old man called the Right Reverend Abercrombie, and he spoke in a lulling, monotonous tone.
“And when we read, in Exodus 7–12, about the ten plagues that descended upon the Egyptians, what are we to make of them?” the reverend said. “What was God’s purpose?”
To kick Egyptian ass, Charlie thought, and to kick it hard.
“The purpose of the Lord was twofold,” the reverend continued. “Of course he wanted to persuade the Pharaoh to free the Israelites. But he also had a second reason – and that was to show just how strong the God of Israel was in comparison to the gods of Egypt. It was a point he wanted to make not only to the Egyptians, but to the Israelites themselves.”
While the Reverend Abercrombie went through his analysis of the ten plagues, one by one, and expounded on what each of them meant, Charlie kept his eyes peeled for trouble up ahead, looking out for the little red flags that were commonly posted along the roadside wherever there were loose gravel breaks, or where the pavement had cracked from frost heaval.
“ ‘If you do not let my people go,’ ” Abercrombie recited from the Old Testament, “ ‘I will send swarms of flies on you and your officials, on your people and into your houses.’ ”
What had always troubled Charlie about the ten plagues was that Yahweh seemed so willing to go another round all the time, whether it was with flies, or gnats, or frogs, or pestilence. For the Lord God Almighty, He didn’t know how to lower the boom, once and for all. No wonder Pharaoh kept agreeing to set the Israelites free before going back on his word every time.
An oil tanker, horn blaring as it came round a bend, barreled past him in the opposite direction, the wind from its passage buffeting the van.
But both of the sisters slept on.
“Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Stretch out your hand toward the sky so that darkness will spread over Egypt – darkness that can be felt,’ ” the reverend quoted.
Darkness that can be felt. The first time Charlie had read that, he remembered thinking that it was as if the book were describing Alaska. The darkness in the woods at night, or on a lonely road, when a storm was concealing the moon and stars, could be as thick and palpable as a beaver pelt. He had known men to die, frozen to death, on their own land, unable to see or find their way to their houses. And soon, as winter continued to descend, the night would fasten its grip even more tightly, extinguishing the sun altogether.
In his headlights, the only signs of human activity he could see, for mile after mile after mile, were the junk heaps abandoned on the sides of the road. Broken-down old trucks half-buried in the snow, motorcycle frames riddled with bullet holes, a decrepit Winnebago resting on its axles. In Alaska, it was easy to abandon things, but nothing went unscavenged. All of these wrecks had been carefully stripped of any useful parts, like an animal stripped of its fur, its meat, its antlers.
As he approached the wide turn that he knew led to the Heron River Bridge, the road began to washboard, huge ripples in the asphalt making the van buck and swerve. Miraculously, Rebekah only moved her head away from the door and let her chin slump in the other direction, while Bathsheba slept on in the backseat. Behind her, in the rear of the van, he could hear the gas sloshing in the cans.
The ground gradually rose through snow-covered hills, with battered and dented signs along the road warning of oncoming traffic, avalanche dangers, animal crossings, possible strong wind conditions, icy road hazards, you name it. Using the hand levers, Charlie slowed down. Fortunately, he had no one behind him, and nothing, so far, approaching from the other direction. The bridge – a two-lane, steel span – was one of the biggest in the region, even though the Heron River itself didn’t amount to much. It lay far below, at the bottom of a granite canyon, and half the time it was frozen solid. At other times, however, when the snowpack melted in the spring, or the rains came, it could become a raging torrent overnight.
Charlie shifted in his seat, and as he switched gears, the silver cross nudged him again in the ribs. It was kind of uncomfortable keeping it there. With Bathsheba asleep anyway, he saw no harm in taking it out and laying it flat, still concealed in the rag, on the console beside the thermos. The road had turned to compacted gravel here to offer better traction, and as he steered past a pair of icy boulders, each one slick with ice and the size of a house, he slowed down again.
“And when the tenth and final plague came, the Lord said, ‘About midnight I will go throughout Egypt. Every firstborn son in Egypt will die, from the firstborn son of Pharaoh, who sits on the throne, to the firstborn son of the slave girl, who is at her hand mill …’ ”
There was the sound of something stirring in the back of the van, and then he heard the leather of the backseat creaking. Damn, why couldn’t Bathsheba have stayed asleep for just another couple of hours? He did not need to deal with her blather.
“ ‘… and all the firstborn of the cattle as well. There will be loud wailing throughout Egypt – worse than ever has been or ever will be again.’ ”
Rebekah was still snoring, but her sister must be awake.
“Exodus, 11, 4–6.”
As the tires rumbled onto the corrugated lanes of the steel bridge, Charlie caught, out of the corner of one eye, a hand reaching over and into the front seat. At first, he figured she was reaching for the thermos, but then he thought, Bathsheba hates peppermint tea.
“Even so, the Lord had provided for his chosen people,” Abercrombie commented, “instructing them to mark their doorposts with the blood of the lamb.”
Maybe she thought it was root beer, her favorite.
“It’s peppermint tea,” he said. “You won’t like it.”
Taking his eye off the slippery road for an instant, he saw that her wrist was surprisingly bony and white, even for Bathsheba, and something wet and stringy touched his cheek. Christ, why hadn’t she dried her hair before she got back in the car?
And then she really pissed him off. She went right past the thermos and reached for the rag holding the cross.
“Leave that alone,” he barked, reluctant to take a hand off the wheel on the icy bridge.
But she went ahead anyway and picked it up.
Shit. He took one hand off the wheel and grabbed her wrist – it was cold and slick as an icicle – but when he glanced up at the rearview mirror, he saw not Bathsheba’s sullen features, but two hollow eye sockets, sunken in the long face of a dead man in a black sealskin coat.
When he turned his head, a thatch of matted dark hair, knotted and rank as seaweed, swept his face. He’d have screamed, but he was struck dumb. The car swerved, scraping the guardrail so hard a shower of blue sparks erupted.
“What?” Rebekah said, startled awake. “What’s happening?”
Charlie dropped hold of the bony wrist and wrestled with the wheel. The tires skidded on a thin coat of ice.
Bathsheba was sitting bolt upright, muttering “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want …”
The car banged the rails again, the hatchback springing open and the alarm bell dinging.
An oncoming truck pumped its horn, switching its headlight beams to bright and sweeping the interior of the van.
“What’s going on?” Bathsheba said. Icy cold air was flooding the car from the open hatch.
“And the Lord said to the Israelites, ‘I will not suffer the destroyer to come into your houses …’ ”
“Watch it!” Rebekah shouted, as he barely managed to get control before they veered into the other lane.
In the rearview mirror, the dead man was gone, as if extinguished by the gush of light and air. All Charlie saw was Bathsheba, and through the gaping hatch the empty roadway disappearing behind him.
The truck rattled by, its driver thrusting his middle finger out the window at Charlie.
“Did you fall asleep?” Rebekah accused him. The cross, free of its rag, was lying on the floor of the van.
“Ew,” Bathsheba said, squirming in her seat.
“And the angel of death spared them, as the Lord had promised.”
“Double ew,” Bathsheba said again. “It stinks back here.”
“What are you talking about?” Rebekah snapped, turning around. “And close that hatch before we lose half the gear!”
The van eased off the other end of the Heron River Bridge, and Charlie, steering it onto the shoulder, took his first full breath in what felt like forever. His hands were shaking, and he was still too scared even to turn in his seat.
“And it’s all wet back here,” Bathsheba complained, settling back into her own seat after securing the hatch.
Rebekah took a look around the rear, and said, “You should have stomped the snow off your boots before you got back in the van.”
“I did,” Bathsheba insisted.
“Then what did you step in?” she said, rolling down her window. “It does smell like something died back there.”
“Forget about the smell,” Charlie muttered to Rebekah. Gesturing at the cross on the floor, he said, “Pick that up.”
She did, wrapping it back in the rag.
“Put it in the glove compartment.”
She stuck it in the compartment and slammed the little door shut. “And you,” she said, glaring at him, “watch your damn driving from now on.”
“ ‘And it came to pass that the Lord did bring the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt …’ ”
Charlie flicked off the CD and punched the radio dial to a country-western station.
“I was listening to that,” Rebekah complained.
“You were sleeping,” he said, as Garth Brooks came on, mournfully wailing about lightning strikes and rolling thunder. “Listen to this instead.”
With his eyes fastened on the road, his hands clenching the wheel, and his heartbeat gradually returning to normal, he steered the van out into the darkness of the surrounding land– darkness that could be felt—and pondered the cross they had looted from a Russian grave.
Was the apparition he had just seen in the backseat its rightful owner?
A wolf – a big dark one – was momentarily caught in the headlights, loping along the side of the road, as if keeping pace with the van. But then, with a turn of its head and a silver flash of its eyes, it vanished into the night.
