Day Zero. Chris Jayne
teenager in holey jeans and a coffee-stained sweatshirt with the poised, immaculate professional the news channels and tabloids were showing to the public.
She paused a final second, realizing something else. Her face was noticeably thinner, even to her own eyes. It was no wonder: she’d hardly done more than pick at food for the last week. Previously there was never enough time to go to the gym, and she’d despaired for years about the last ten pounds she’d put on when she was pregnant with Brandon. Maybe she could get a new celebrity diet book out of this: “Lose Weight While Running For Your Life.” Yeah, there was a plan.
Swallowing hard, Lori pulled the glasses off, reached for a paper towel to wipe away the hot tears that had suddenly welled in her eyes as she asked the question for the millionth time: what the hell was she doing here? Then, stop, she told herself ruthlessly. Just stop. The questions had no answers. Bad things happened to good people.
Lori finished blotting her eyes, then rinsed the scratchy towel in the warm water, and wiped the parking lot grit off of her skin, telling herself that this was almost over, that she could do this. They had a hundred and thirty miles to go, just a little more than two hours, though she spared just a second for a cynical thought. For a week, all she had wanted to do was get “to Montana,” and when they crossed the state line this morning, the cruel joke hit her: they still had almost 250 miles to go.
A toilet flushed. Out of the stall farther down the long row, a young woman, perhaps thirty, emerged. She walked to the sink, next to where Lori stood, and washed her hands. Lori gave her a brief smile as their eyes met in the mirror. Lori’s eyes widened just a bit: the woman had quite the nasty bruise on one of her cheeks. Not wanting to stare, Lori dropped her gaze, but even as she did, she saw the woman return her smile.
Lori watched her idly in the mirror as she walked towards the door. She didn’t seem like the type who would put up with getting popped around by a man, but Lori reflected, you never knew. Hell, maybe she did kickboxing. In her tailored gray suit, carrying a simple, but obviously expensive black leather bag, this sharp professional definitely looked out of place in the Interstate rest stop which was populated mostly by folks who looked like Lori now did: jeans, sweats, T-shirts and a lot of hair that looked like it hadn’t seen a comb in days. Women who looked like this woman generally flew to where they were going, as, Lori reflected, she had, at least up until now.
As she moved away, Lori was distracted by the woman’s hair. Very long, it was tied back in a neat ponytail that bounced when she walked, and Lori couldn’t stop herself from thinking, for just a second, about her own long hair that she’d cut, about how Brandon had burst into tears when she’d come out of the seedy motel bathroom with short black spikes. She took a final glance into the mirror. Yup, the only thing missing were neon blue highlights.
Enough, Lori sighed. Focus on the next task. Focus on getting your kids to Roger and Lou’s, because one thing was certain: Your hair’s not going to grow if you’re dead.
Even as she looked at herself, though, she acknowledged that there was another reason she was hesitating this morning: her brother-in-law, Roger Hale. For most of the trip, she hadn’t allowed herself to think about the reason she had had a falling out with her sister six years ago, but she could avoid it no longer. There were a couple reasons, but high on the list was the fact that Lori thought her sister’s husband was an arrogant misogynistic asshole who had forced his wife - her sister - to move to some Love-Honor-Obey commune. Good looking, really good looking to be sure, (if you were allowed to have thoughts like that about your sister’s husband) but a jerk as far as Lori was concerned. No point in being polite about it, and that wasn’t going to change when she walked through the door.
Of course, there also was another reason she’d been avoiding Roger as well.
Stop it, Lori again told herself ruthlessly. She couldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. The reality was that it was his door she was going to be walking through in about three hours. A niggling voice that sounded suspiciously like her father’s rang in her ears: “My house, my rules.” When she’d called Lou, without hesitation her sister had said to come to Montana. In spite of Lori’s falling out with her sister, Lou and Roger were there for her, and personal considerations took a back seat when your children’s lives were on the line.
She stuffed the cheap plastic sunglasses back on her face, she took one final second to ruffle the punk cut back up into spikes. They’d have their lunch, and then drive straight through and be to Lou’s by three. And maybe tonight, in a house with her gun-toting brother-in-law, she would be able to sleep more than a couple of hours without waking in terror. She paused a final moment, wiped a stray hair back from her forehead.
As she exited the rest room she started running a mental inventory of what was left in the cooler. The kids were hoping she’d light up the camp stove and make grilled cheese or hot dogs.
A man was walking away from the men’s restroom, not five feet in front of her. For one instant, she barely noticed him: just another stranger. And then it hit her. She froze, gasped as if she had been punched, a frisson of fear slamming through her body, painful down to her fingertips.
It was Raoul Saldata.
This was the corpulent body that had haunted her dreams for the last week; she’d recognize him anywhere. The last time she’d seen him, he was wearing a bloodstained buttoned down dress shirt and chasing her with a knife. That shirt, of course, was gone, but it had been replaced with another that looked exactly the same except for the blood.
Even though she could only see him from behind, there was no doubt. It was him.
Involuntarily, she shrank back towards the door of the woman’s restroom. Had he heard her gasp? Should she run? But where to?
Frozen with indecision, all she could do was watch, not breathing, but within an instant she saw he’d made no movement to alter his gait. Nothing indicated that he’d heard the small sound behind him. If she hadn’t taken the additional second to check out her hair one last time, they would have walked from the respective restrooms simultaneously. Would he have recognized her with the short hair and sunglasses? It wouldn’t have mattered, because she would have recognized him. She would not have been able to hide an instant and terrified reaction, and he certainly would have noticed that.
Snack and drink machines hummed in the foyer between the restrooms. A middle-aged woman standing at a soda machine had heard her sharp draw of breath and turned to look at her curiously. “You okay?” she asked. Just as the woman asked the question, Saldata pushed opened the glass door and left the building.
Lori watched him walk, astounded. He had left. He was not going to turn around. He really had not seen her. “Honey?” the woman persisted. “You look like you seen a ghost.”
Her mind spinning, she glanced over at the woman who was regarding her with a look of concern. “My… uhhh… ex-husband,” she babbled, saying the first thing that came into her head. “What a coincidence! Out here in the middle of nowhere.” Lori gave a nervous laugh and quickly tried to minimize the situation. “Crazy!”
The woman gave her a skeptical look, then, shaking her head, went back to the candy bar choices. Lori slowly floated just a bit closer to the glass doors and watched intently as Saldata walked across a small courtyard, towards the parking lot fronting the restroom building. The cars parked in two long rows, one facing the building and the other facing away, looking out towards the interstate.
For a moment Lori knew more blind panic: Where were Brandon and Grace? When they’d pulled into the rest area, Simone, her au pair, had brought them to the restroom while Lori had taken her German Shepherd Sasha on a quick initial trip to the fenced dog run. They had no reason to come back up to the restroom building, but they could have begged Simone for sodas or candy. Would Saldata know her children, if he saw them? She had to assume he would; all of their pictures had been on the news, and even if Brandon was nothing more than a typical six-year-old boy, Grace, with her long black hair and lovely half-Korean features was very distinctive.
What did this mean? Lori’s head spun sickly with frantic questions. Somehow, Saldata had