At all costs

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Irene stood with her hands on her hips, mouth agape, as the manager of the U-Lockit Storage Company raised the door to unit 627. “I’ll say they were prepared,” she said.

Paul Boersky was more concise: “Holy shit.”

“Look what they did to my wall!” the manager yelled. It proved to be the opening salvo of a diatribe about the trash who lived in the community and about the lack of respect his customers showed toward a poor businessman who could barely make ends meet. After thirty breathless seconds, Paul had one of the uniformed officers escort the man back to his office.

Finding this place had been a stroke of pure luck. Among the many tidbits collected from the Donovans’ trailer in Farm Meadows was a bill that had arrived that day from U-Lockit. Initially no more or less interesting than any of the other slips of paper they’d logged for follow-up, the bill gained special significance when Officer Jason Slavka mentioned in passing that the storage yard was just a few blocks from the hospital where no one had ever heard of Jake’s mother.

Even as she congratulated herself for such a valuable find, Irene realized that they were back to square one. The Celica was here, and judging from the size and the emptiness of the shelves, the Donovans had been more than able to compensate for the supplies they’d left behind in the trailer.

“You’re authorized to say you told me so,” Irene growled to Paul as they walked inside.

Unable to read his boss’s mood so early in the morning, Paul said nothing as he strolled around the storage bay, surveying the scene.

Zeroing in on the discarded license plates and identification, Irene stooped down to examine them. “Look here,” she said. “The Brightons are officially dead. And what do you bet they’re clever enough to kill off the Durflingers, too? These guys are smart, Paul. They’ve got a ton of cash, by all accounts, and they’re adept at changing identities. It’s almost like someone trained them.”

Paul sighed and arched his eyebrows. “At least we’ve still got the van,” he said hopefully.

She laughed. “Undoubtedly with new license plates. Care to guess how many white vans there are in the world?”

As the crime scene technicians arrived with their cameras and their evidence bags and their fingerprint kits, Paul and Irene did their best to stay out of the way. By rights, Irene should have left Paul here to manage the scene himself, but truth be known, she didn’t have all that much to do. In the absence of leads, an investigator’s job was pretty damned boring.

“So who do you think trained them?” Paul asked out of nowhere.

“Come again?” She hadn’t been paying attention. Her mind had been reliving Peter Frankel’s third sputtering tirade in the last twenty-four hours.

“To disappear,” Paul clarified. “Who do you think trained them?”

She scowled. “You’re smirking. If you’ve got a theory, let’s hear it.”

Suddenly self-conscious of his expression, he made the smirk go away. “I was reading the Donovans’ file last night at the hotel,” he explained. “I didn’t realize that Harry Sinclair was their uncle.”

Irene saw where he was headed and dismissed him with a shake of her head. “If you read it all, then you know that he was investigated back in ’83 and came up clean.”

“No one with that much money is ever clean,” Paul snorted. “Seems like an awfully convenient resource to have when you’re on the run.”

She considered that for a moment. “Sinclair would be crazy to get himself involved in something like this. Too much to lose.”

Paul shrugged. “Hey, family’s family. I think we ought to check it out. It’s not like we’ve got a lot to lose. From where I stand, we’ve got a ton of evidence but not a single clue.”

Irene weighed the idea. “Want to go for a phone tap?”

“Why not? God knows we’ve got probable cause.”

A slight nod served as his order to go ahead.

“Great. I’ll call the U.S. Attorney’s Office.” He moved quickly toward the overhead door, dodging the sea of evidence technicians. “Oh, by the way, Irene,” he said, just short of the exit.

She looked over, eyebrows high.

“I told you so.”

Carolyn screamed.

Jake rocketed upright in his seat, ready to do battle. His mind registered that it was light again, but he couldn’t figure out what had happened to the dark. She was sitting up now, too, still in her seat, but barely. Her eyes were wild, unfocused. Her hands were poised in front of her, fingers spread, as if frozen in the midst of pushing something away. He knew then that she’d had The Dream.

“Carolyn!” he said sharply. “Carolyn, you’re here. I’m here. Everything’s okay.” He wriggled as best he could across the center console and tried to pull her close. That’s when the crying started. That’s when the crying always started.

“Oh, God,” she gasped, finally tuning into reality. “Oh, my God.” She let herself be rocked back and forth in her seat, but she remained stiff in his arms, hugging herself instead of her husband.

“You gonna tell me about it this time?” he asked after a while.

She shook her head against his jacket. “No. I can’t.”

No, you won’t, he thought bitterly. He wished he were a better man, but this game she played of keeping her past hidden away had bugged him forever. They were husband and wife, dammit. Two lives, one person. Three lives, really. They faced a whole future together, after facing down a whole past, yet she guarded her childhood horrors as if they were nuclear launch codes. Unless she was willing to be a wife, how could he ever be a husband?

He said none of this, of course, and right away he felt ashamed that he’d even thought such things. These were the times when she needed him most, weren’t they? And his job was simply to be there; to help her through the nightmare. He’d swallow his anger one more time, and a thousand times after that, probably. He kissed her hair and stroked it. She smelled horrible, a musky combination of dirt and sweat, but in some ways she was more beautiful right then than when she primped for a night out. This was Carolyn unveiled; the person she fought so hard to hide from everyone she knew.

A few minutes passed before she pulled away from him. She looked away as she mopped her eyes and her nose with a shirttail. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“So am I.” He stroked her face with the back of his hand.

Part of her still hadn’t returned to the present. Jake had seen the mood last for hours. Last time, they’d had a fight over it, prompting him to leave the house and catch a zillion-calorie breakfast at I-HOP. Nothing like a pound of pancakes in your belly to douse your fires.

After a cold night in the van, he felt miserable. Shortly after they’d crossed into West Virginia last night, the skies had opened up, making the mountain passes slick and nearly unpassable. Rather than risk an accident, and the attention it would bring, he’d pulled into the parking lot of the Rebel Yell Motel outside White Sulphur Springs at about ten o’clock and declared it their home for the night.

As a precaution, just in case the cops who stopped them at the school had finally made the connection, Jake had changed their plates, driver’s licenses, and registration one more time, transforming them into the Delaney family-James and Clarissa. Because Travis was a kid, and kids never carried ID, Jake decided to limit the boy’s trauma and keep his first name the same. For the time being, he’d just avoid using any last name at all.

Using an Army-surplus entrenching tool off one of the shelves, Jake had buried the old plates and IDs out in the woods.

He and Carolyn had discussed the possibility of checking into the motel but jointly vetoed the idea as something the police would be expecting them to do. They’d also thought about parking in a less-public place but decided in the end that a white van in a parking lot would draw far less suspicion on a rainy night than a white van pulled off into the woods.

True to form, Travis had slept soundly through the whole night, while Jake and Carolyn took turns pretending to sleep and watching for trouble. The direness of their situation still hadn’t hit either one of them fully, although, as the hours stretched on, Jake found himself becoming progressively more bitter about the whole thing. What kind of warped individual could put another human being through this kind of torment? He berated himself for not having done something about it fourteen years ago, when all the evidence trails were still fresh, and when people might actually have believed as outlandish a story as the one they had to tell.

Such thoughts were counterproductive, he knew, but at zero-dark-early, in the hills of West Virginia, when you’re sitting with a gun in your lap wondering if you’d actually have the guts to shoot someone to protect your family from harm, it was hard to keep your brain on track.

Finally, as the sun rose above the horizon, he’d had enough of waiting and decided it was time to move on. Carolyn had fallen back to sleep, though, and as he turned the key, she jumped.

“Sorry,” he said, trying not to laugh at the outrageous look on her face.

It took her a second or two to figure out what was happening, and then she relaxed, bringing her hand to her chest. “Jesus, that scared me.” She stretched and yawned noisily.

“Is Travis still asleep?” he asked, not wanting to turn all the way around to look.

She pivoted in her seat. “I think so,” she said. “His eyes are closed, anyway.”

They drove in silence for a long time after that, something clearly on Carolyn’s mind. Jake didn’t press, though. He knew she’d come out with it sooner or later. “You shouldn’t have told him everything,” she said at last. “Why get him so involved?”

“He’s got to be aware of the danger.”

“The poor boy must be scared to death.”

Ah, the guilt card, Jake thought. No one plays that one better than Carolyn. “He needs to know enough to be careful. And that the stakes are huge.”

“But you told him too much.”

Here we go. “So you want me to un tell him somehow?” God, he was sick of feeling defensive.

Jake possessed an arsenal of facial expressions, any one of which could launch Carolyn’s temper into the stratosphere. It was this one, though-the smug, know-it-all smirk-that propelled her into orbit. “No,” she snapped. “I want you to remember that he’s only thirteen years old. He’s just a boy.”

“Got it,” Jake said. “Thirteen years old. I’ve been wondering about that all morning. Thanks for the reminder.”

She opened her mouth for another round, but then shut it again. She’d said her piece, and he’d said his. Getting along was important now. She let it go. Or tried to, anyway.

As the terrain became steadily more vertical, the roads shrank from four lanes to two; winding ribbons of black, snaking through endless miles of switchbacks and meandering curves. Jake hadn’t been down this road in well over a year, and it was bad then. Now the worn, potholed roadbed bounced them like they were on a trampoline. Between the weight of the vehicle, its rear-wheel drive, and the hazardous road conditions, he found himself wondering if perhaps this ride wasn’t the most hazardous aspect of their entire plan. Thank God for seat belts. Otherwise, they’d have been bounced through the ceiling by now.

Miraculously, Travis slept through it all.

Soon enough, the ride went from treacherous to positively boring. They’d skimped on engine size when they purchased the van, forgoing the optional V-8 in favor of the standard V-6, and now they were paying the price. The additional weight of the family, combined with the load of supplies, completely maxed out the vehicle’s capabilities going uphill. Currently, Jake found himself trapped behind a tractor-trailer loaded with telephone poles, doing twenty miles an hour, with no hope of pulling past.

“Did you ever really think it would come to this?” Carolyn asked. Her voice carried an emotion that Jake didn’t quite recognize. Sadness maybe, but not quite.

He answered her softly, not entirely sure what she hoped to hear. “I used to,” he said. “You know, back at the beginning. In the last couple of years, though, I’d talked myself out of it. I let myself believe we’d made it. I let my guard down. I’m sorry.”

She let his answer just hang in the air for a while, not saying anything. Then she ran her fingers into her hair and made a growling sound. “I’m not doing as well as I thought I would,” she confessed.

He smiled. “I’ll let you in on a little secret, if you promise not to make a scene.”

He saw her head turn in his peripheral vision.

“Neither am I. In fact, I’m scared as hell.” As more silence filled the van, he couldn’t let pessimism prevail. “We’ll make it, though. I promise you, we’ll get out of this somehow.”

For another full minute, they each pondered worries too awful to articulate. Carolyn broke first. “So what’s next?”

He turned. “Next?”

“Yeah, next. Let’s say we make it as far as the Den…”

“Oh, we’ll make it, all right.”

She waved off his defensiveness. “Yeah, okay. When we get all the way to the Den. What happens next?”

“We sleep?”

She rolled her eyes. She hated him when he was intentionally obtuse. “Come on, Jake! What do we do tomorrow? And the next day, and the one after that?”

He shrugged. “We live.” He stated it as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. “We live, we wait, we make a life for ourselves as best we can. You know that. Then, when the time is right, we try coming out again and making the best of it. That’s the plan; that’s always been the plan. You know this.”

“And that’s what’s been gnawing at me,” she blurted. “You’re right. It’s always been the plan, but there’s no future in it. We might as well all go to jail together.”

Instantly, she realized she’d pressed the wrong button. Jake twisted his neck the way he did when he was angry, and he opened and closed his fists around the steering wheel. “I guess there’s a reason why you’re bringing this up now, after it’s too late to do anything?”

“I’m just stating my concerns…”

He cut her off. “Then keep them to yourself. I’ve invested way too much time and effort into this to have you start tearing it apart now.”

“Don’t tell me what I can’t say!” she declared. “If I have a concern, I’ll damn well let you know about it.”

“Why?” His tone was combative, but the question was real. “What do we possibly have to gain by your second-guessing now? The situation is what it is, and we are where we are. It’s truly that simple. How many times did I ask you to come here with me?”

“And do what with Travis?”

“Bring him along! He’d have loved it.”

She set her jaw angrily and turned to face out the window. “Well, Mr. Secrecy, you always were so paranoid about anybody finding out about this.”

“Paranoid?” He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “We’ve got warrants out for our arrest-for murder. We’re at the top of the Most Wanted list-at least, we were. And I’m paranoid for wanting to keep a few secrets?”

She held up her hands, as if surrendering. “Look,” she pronounced. “I’m only saying that maybe we should have more of a plan than just heading out into the middle of nowhere to wait for God knows what.”

He thumped the steering wheel with his palm. “And what would you have us do, Carolyn? Get on an airplane? A bus? A boat maybe? Perhaps we could go back to the Rebel Yell and check in for the year. Hell, with the cash we’ve got in the bag there, we could stay at the Plaza for a month! But you know what? There’s people there, Carolyn. There’s not a single plane, train, bus, or boat that we could get on without being spotted in a heartbeat.”

She took a breath to argue, but he cut her off again. “No, wait. Listen to me. We’ve been planning this day for fourteen years, okay? You’ve got to believe that we’ve worked most of the bugs out. The place is ready for us, and we have to be ready for it. If you start losing confidence now, Travis is going to come unglued.”

“What about Travis?” Carolyn shot. “We talked about schooling him ourselves, but I don’t know what eighth graders are supposed to learn. Suppose we screw it up?”

Jake sighed. His planning had always centered around escape and a decent hiding place. The rest was just too unpredictable; and because it was so unpredictable, it was irrelevant. Now, in the heat of it all, she wanted a specific plan for every conceivable contingency. Why couldn’t she see that this was a time for flexibility? Ever since this whole thing started yesterday, she’d focused on nothing but the negatives, and he was sick of it.

What difference did it make if something went wrong at this point? They’d either recover or they wouldn’t. It was that simple. Worrying about it only made everything seem more complicated.

“Carolyn,” Jake said, making his voice suddenly much softer. “If we screw it up, we screw it up. Then we move on. Our hand is dealt, honey. It’s too late to worry about a stacked deck.”

She bowed her head toward her chest, and her voice got very small. “This is just all so unfair to Travis,” she said.

“Carolyn, look. Family first, remember? Everything else second. If we do our jobs right, Travis will grow up remembering this as one huge adventure.”

She breathed through her mouth to rein in her emotions. It didn’t take long. “God help us,” she whispered.

Travis awoke fifteen minutes later, as Jake slowed the van at the top of Falls Ridge to make the left-hand turn onto a dirt road that would ultimately take them to Donovan’s Den. “Where are we?” he asked groggily.

“Almost there.”

“Where’s ‘there’?”

The answer became apparent soon enough. “There” was about two miles east of nowhere. The dirt road, such as it was, ended abruptly about a hundred feet in from the highway. From there it was grass and gravel; paradoxically smoother than most of the paved roads they’d traveled that morning. The aqua and white trailer-the Den-sat in the middle of an overgrown field, looking like a giant striped mushroom against the spatter-colored backdrop of the forest. Field grasses obscured the wheels entirely, reaching nearly all the way to the bottom of the high windows.

It had been too long. Carolyn remembered the place as being primitive, but no way was she prepared for this. Travis spoke her thoughts for her: “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Be it ever so humble,” Jake announced, trying his best to conceal his own horror at the condition of the place, “there’s no place like home.”

“No way,” Travis said emphatically. “No friggin’ way!”

As the van came to a stop, the boy helped himself to the back doors and climbed out. His mouth agape, he led the family through the weeds toward the front door. If he used his imagination, he could swear that he saw a path leading right to it.

“What is it?” Travis asked.

“It’s our home,” Jake replied, his voice leaden with a threatening undertone. He’d already been through this discussion with Carolyn. He didn’t relish a second round with his son. “Here, let me get the key.”

“No need,” Travis said, pushing the door open with a fingertip. “It’s already open.”

Jake drew his Glock from under his jacket and took over the lead, entering the door carefully, with the pistol stretched out in front of him and Travis close behind. “Anybody in here?” he called. The only response was the taunting buzz of a cicada.

Inside, the Den smelled like an old sponge, wet and dirty. Up front, in the kitchenette-which looked for all the world like a camp stove with a counter-the jalousie windows were opened just enough to let the rain enter and soak the Early American cannons-and-drums foam rubber seat cushions. The linoleum on the floor had peeled up around the base of the cabinets, exposing two parallel lines of yellow glue, which ran the length of the short hallway leading to the single bedroom at the other end from the kitchen. The total length of the place was maybe twenty-five feet.

“Looks like we’ve had some visitors,” Jake said, holstering his weapon. A look from side to side constituted a complete search.

Travis slipped past his father, wedging belly-to-belly in the narrow galley. He said nothing; but the look of disgust on his face spoke volumes.

“I’d forgotten there’s no electricity,” Carolyn grumbled, eyeing the gas jets on the stove and the cotton mantles on the wall sconces.

“Oh, gross!” Travis exclaimed, ducking back out of the bedroom. “There’s used rubbers all over the place!”

Carolyn gasped, momentarily curious about how Travis would recognize such a thing, and walked with Jake the eight paces to take a look. Sure enough, used condoms littered the mattress and the floor-seven of them, at first glance-looking like so many miniature crashed zeppelins.

“That’s disgusting!” Travis declared again, making his way back toward the front.

“That it is,” Jake mumbled. His words drew a look from his wife. “At least we know why our visitors were here.”

Travis seemed headed for the door when he stopped short. “Wait!” he said, suddenly very agitated. “Where’s the bathroom?”

His parents shared another glance. “Out back,” Jake said simply. “I dug it myself.”

Travis glared, his face a mask of disbelief. “No way,” he said. “In the woods?”

Jake shrugged, suddenly ill at ease. “More in the field than in the woods, actually. It’s got a shed around it.”

“No way,” Travis said again. He looked close to tears. “No fucking way!”

“Travis!” Carolyn gasped.

“No fucking way am I gonna shit in the fucking woods like some fucking animal!” He threw the door out of his way, catching it with his elbow as it rebounded off the cabinets, and stormed out of the trailer toward the woods.

“Oh, God-Jake, where’s he going?”

Jake took a deep breath and let it out. “I’ll go get him,” he said.

“I’ll go with you.” She hurried to get ahead.

He grabbed her by the arm. “No,” he said gently. “This one’s for me, okay? He’ll be all right.”

Travis recognized the sound of his father’s gait. He didn’t even look up.

The reason he left the trailer in the first place was so no one would see him cry. Now they were coming to watch, anyway. As he swiped at his face, a stab of pain reminded him of Terry Lampier’s gift from just two days before. As much as he thought his life sucked then, nothing compared to this level of hell.

When his dad sat down next to him on the deadfall that served as his bench, Travis ignored him. He hated this man-this liar. He hated them both. When his dad tried to touch his arm, Travis shook himself free and rose to his feet again.

“You knew this was going to happen one day, didn’t you?” The boy made no attempt to disguise the accusation.

When Jake answered, his voice was just a whisper. “I guess I did.”

Travis turned and finally made eye contact. The anger and the hatred were right there, burning red streaks into the blue eyes. “All these years, everything you told me-a lie. Was that story about the massacre a lie, too? Did you kill those people?”

“No.”

Travis took a step closer, daring his father to fight. “I don’t believe you,” he spat. “You’re a liar and a murderer, and I hope you get killed and go to hell!” He saw his father recoil under the impact of his words. Good, Travis thought, I hope it hurts bad!

Who was this man anyway? The father he’d known these thirteen years never would have tolerated this kind of verbal assault-he’d have smacked his kid into next month. That his dad tolerated it now pissed Travis off even more. He wanted a fight, dammit-a knock-down, drag-out brawl where he’d get to take his best shot.

The enormity of it all was beyond his comprehension.

“You know, they taught it to us in school,” Travis said at last, his voice becoming unsteady. “They call it the Newark Incident. The worst chemical disaster in history.” He winced suddenly as his voice cracked, and he pressed his hands against the sides of his head as if to keep it from exploding. “Jesus, Dad! I mean, this is like the Holocaust or the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre! I mean… God, it’s got a name!”

Jake stood, too, and grasped his son’s shoulders. Travis shook himself free and backed further away. “I told you the story yesterday,” Jake said as reasonably as he knew how, “and every word I said was true. All your mom and I did was run.”

“But you lied!”

“Look at me, Trav,” Jake said softly.

Travis didn’t want eye contact. That’s how his dad always won their fights. Still, the pull of his old man’s gaze drew Travis’s eyes right where Jake wanted them.

“You’re right, son. I did lie. I lied to anyone and everyone I’ve met in the past fourteen years. Including you. There’s no excuse for doing what I’ve done, but even if I had it all to do over again, I still can’t think of how I would have done things differently. I’m sorry.” He cupped his son’s chin in the palm of his hand and smiled. No matter how hard an exterior the boy showed to his friends and his classmates, Jake had always been able to look straight through to his soul. “But you must believe that I’m not lying now.”

Travis shook himself away. “Then why don’t you just go to the police? Right now. Just tell them what you told me, and we’ll get it all fixed.” He was crying openly now, and as soon as he realized it, he turned quickly away, to face the woods.

Jake tried to hug him one more time but with no success. “It’s just not that simple, Trav. It’s been too long now. Whoever organized all of this had a plan. And it was a very good one. By surviving, your mother and I set ourselves up to take the fall. The person who did this, he wanted us to look guilty, and by running away, we ended up doing our very best to help him out.”

“Why us? What did we do?”

Jake sighed and stepped closer. God, it hurt him to say this. “It’s not about all of us. It’s about your mom and me. You’re part of it only because you’re a part of us.”

Travis sat heavily at the base of a healthy oak, his back turned. He hugged his shins and buried his face against his knees as he fought to regain control. It was like someone had put a time bomb in the middle of his life, and now the alarm was ringing. Somehow he’d always believed that as he got older, he’d stop being just a trailer park kid; that life would somehow become fair. Now, as he fought back tears, he realized that fairness wasn’t part of life’s package.

Jake’s heart withered under the strain of his son’s sadness. His feelings of utter helplessness. He’d visited that place in his own soul many, many times.

Back in the early days, while they were learning to become invisible, Jake had dedicated hundreds of hours to mentally re-creating the events of that August afternoon in Newark. He knew, firsthand, that the “why me” puzzle could drive a person over the edge if dwelled on too long.

Whoever the architect of the “Newark Incident” was, and whatever his reasons, he could have killed the Enviro-Kleen workers anywhere, just as he could have blown up the magazine and its contents anytime. For some reason, the killings and the explosion had to happen together, of that Jake was sure. And it had to happen in such a way that somebody would get punished.

Inevitably, his thoughts always came around to the body that Adam Pomeroy had found just before the shooting started. That had to be it. The way Jake figured it, the asshole who put all of this together did it as part of an elaborate plan to hide a corpse. After all, what better place to put it than among a bunch of other corpses? Maybe the guy even knew that the fires and contamination would force the government to seal everything off and entomb the evidence forever.

Fourteen years ago Jake had tormented himself trying to solve the riddle of why Mr. X didn’t just move the damn body and bury it elsewhere, but Carolyn eventually came up with a plausible theory: The EPA shutdown had caught Mr. X by surprise. Once the site was discovered and shut down, it was too late to go back in without being detected.

Over time, Jake and Carolyn had spun countless twists on every possible detail, but they always came back to that body. They’d even fantasized once about sneaking back inside and collecting the evidence that would prove their innocence, but the risks of getting caught or being poisoned by residual chemicals always seemed to outweigh the slim chance of finding the exculpatory evidence they sought. At best, it would have been a shot in the dark. And a dangerous one at that.

Now, as he watched his son fight off panic, the details of that long-forgotten pipe dream began to leak back into his consciousness.

You’re crazy, he told himself. A thousand things have changed since then.

But a million others hadn’t. If he’d read the newspaper articles correctly, and if the media reported the facts accurately, nothing in that magazine had changed since the day they’d escaped with their lives. Everything should have remained untouched.

It can work…

He shook his head, trying to knock the craziness out of his brain, but the flame of hope burned brighter the more he thought about it. Sure, there were risks. And they’d have to step into the open for a while, but by God, it could work!

And what did they have to lose? This was no life! What had he been thinking? The tragic flaw of their escape plan, he saw now, had always been that it stopped with the escape. The rest had been too unpredictable. What kind of future was there for them, huddled in some shithole of a trailer, living in fear of the moment when the lovebirds might return with more condoms? Once recognized, what would the Donovan family do then? How would they keep the lovebirds quiet? Kill them? Not hardly.

At least this new plan offered a glimmer of salvation. And if he and Carolyn died in the process, then at least their son would grow old knowing his parents had done their best to redeem themselves.

Sometimes honor lay more in the fight itself than in the outcome.

Even as he recognized the absurdity of the notion, Jake felt strangely energized, as if, in the space of a few seconds, years had dropped from his age. This could work!

“So is this it?” Travis asked, his back still turned. His voice sounded cloudy. “We just run forever?”

Jake took a seat on the ground next to his son. “Funny you should ask…”