The Book of Fate

33

It was easy for Nico to get the jeans and the blue button-down shirt from the dryer in the Laundromat. Same with the Baltimore Orioles baseball cap he took from a dumpster. But once he made his way into Carmel’s Irish Pub, it took a full nine minutes before an older black man, nursing whiskey and a runny nose, hobbled over to the restroom and left his faded army jacket sagging like a corpse on the seat of his bar-stool. Approaching the stool, Nico was calm. The Lord would always provide.

It was the same thought swirling through his head right now as he stood on the gravelly shoulder of I-95 and an eighteen-wheel truck ferociously blew by, kicking up a trail of tiny pebbles and chocolate-brown slush. Shielding his eyes, Nico squinted through the instant hurricane as the pull of wind sent him reeling to the right. One hand was pressed down on his head to keep his Orioles hat from blowing away, while the other gripped his cardboard sign that flapped like a kite in the truck’s backdraft. As the truck disappeared and the wind died, the sign went limp, brushing against Nico’s right leg. Calmly as ever, Nico raised his hand and put out his thumb.

He was already in Richmond, well out of the thirty-mile radius that the FBI and D.C. Police were currently combing near St. Elizabeths. The first driver took him up South Capitol Street. The second helped him navigate I-295. And the third took him down I-95, all the way to Richmond.

Without question, Nico knew he couldn’t afford to be standing out in the open for long. With the nightly news approaching, his picture would be everywhere. Still, there wasn’t much he could do. From a statistical standpoint, the odds of a fourth driver picking him up in the next few minutes were already low. Anyone else would be panicking. Not Nico. As with anything in life, statistics meant nothing if you believed in fate.

Spotting the pair of owl-eyed headlights in the distance, he calmly stepped toward the road and once again held up his handmade sign with the big block letters: Fellow Christian Looking for a Ride.

A piercing screech knifed through the night as the driver of a beat-up flatbed hit his brakes, and all ten wheels clenched and skidded along the ice on the shoulder of the road. Even now, as the semi rumbled to a stop fifty yards to his right, Nico relished the belches, shrieks, and hisses of the outside world. He’d been locked away too long.

Tucking his sign under his armpit, he strolled to the side of the main cab just as the door to the passenger side flew open, and a faint light within the cab poured outward. “God bless you for stopping,” Nico called out. In his pocket, he fingered the trigger of his gun. Just in case.

“Where you need to get at?” a man with a blond mustache and beard asked.

“Florida,” Nico replied, mentally replaying Revelation 13:1. And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast. It was all coming together. Heed the Book. Finish God’s will. Finish Wes, and in his blood, he’d find the Beast. “Palm Beach, to be exact.”

“Sick of the cold, eh? Tallahassee good enough?”

Nico didn’t say a word as he stared up at the olive wood rosary and silver cross that dangled from the man’s rearview. “That’d be perfect,” Nico said. Reaching for the grab handle, he tugged himself up into the main cab.

With a lurch and a few more belches from the transmission, the oversize flatbed grumbled back onto I-95.

“So you got family down in Florida?” the driver asked, shifting into gear.

“Naw…” Nico said, his eyes still on the wooden cross as it swayed like a child’s swing. “Just going to see an old friend.”