Page 9 of Fire
Gordon swallowed again. “Not much more. You might travel with him, maybe even hunt with him? But there’s got to be more to it, I can’t imagine you?—”
“You’ve got no idea what I would or wouldn’t do,” Jake said quietly.
He stared at Jake, then grabbed the camera around his neck, fiddling with the buttons. “Look, I just got this tip, okay? And it’s my job to follow up, to see if there’s a story. I think there is one, if you’re ready to tell it. I mean, there’s something between you two, I could see it at a hundred yards—” He thrust the back of the camera toward Jake.
A tiny screen displayed a photo of Jake and Toby standing by the Eldorado outside their current motel. Another shot of them looking at each other, their faces in shadow. Then Gordon flipped through the next few: Jake and Toby hauling duffels and plastic bags from the nearby grocery outlet; Toby throwing his head back in a rare laugh, his face sun-illuminated and beautiful; a view of their backs as they walked to the motel room door, Jake’s hand touching the small of Toby’s back.
His blood rushed cold and his heart sped up again, and not just in simple shock. It felt like a winter mountain river running through his veins, fast and fierce and cold enough to kill.
“Am I wrong?” the dead man walking asked.
Jake took the camera from him. He yanked the strap over Gordon’s head, ignoring the reporter’s indignant “Hey!” as he stood up and walked away, heading for the narrow alley beside the cafe.
Gordon raced after him, even tried to grab his shoulder. Jake ignored him until they reached the other side of the dumpster. Then he smashed the camera against the wall, following it up a second later with Gordon’s face as he drove him into the bricks.
The man howled as blood poured out his nose. Beneath the rush of rage and adrenaline, Jake knew this wouldn’t stay private for much longer. He smashed the camera twice more under his boot.
“Jake!”
Toby was running up, darting between the curious bystanders at the alley’s entrance. “Jake, enough!”
He held up his palm toward Toby, who stopped short. Then he knelt by Gordon, who was holding his bleeding face. “It’s still your lucky day,” he told him. “I’m taking this camera as a souvenir. If you got any backups of these photos, delete them. You ever come within a hundred miles of us again, you won’t survive it. That’s a Hawthorne guarantee.”
He stood up and walked out of the alley, broken camera in hand, ignoring everyone except Toby as he left the alley.
“He wanted a special on America’s lost boy,” Jake told him as they reached the Eldorado. “And it’s time for us to go.”
Toby nodded and held off on questions as they packed up at the motel, until they were back inside the car. “What direction?”
“Doesn’t matter. North. Hit the interstate for a couple hundred miles.”
As Toby drove, Jake picked apart the broken camera until he found the memory card, which he broke in half with a satisfying snap.
It should probably worry him, how much anger he still felt thrumming through his veins. He drew slow, even breaths, in through his nose and exhaling between his lips. Toby was hypersensitive to currents of anger, and Jake would not make Toby suffer for one second because of Gordon’s invasive bullshit.
But he still had to talk about it.
Close to the one-hour mark of heading north, Jake asked Toby to pull over at an upcoming rest stop. “It’s okay,” he added at Toby’s worried look. “We’re okay. You just always give me the stink eye for distracting you when you’re driving, so let’s get off the road.”
“I do not give you the stink eye,” Toby said, even as he switched on the turn signal.
At the rest stop, he pulled into a space at the far end away from any other cars, then turned to face Jake expectantly, an apprehensive furrow between his eyebrows.
Jake spoke slowly. “That jackass had been following us. He took pictures of us getting out of the Eldorado the other day.”
Toby didn’t move a muscle, but his stare intensified.
Jake expelled his breath and sat back. “Fuck. What a shitty fucking week.”
They sat together in silence for a long time. Toby passed a hand over his forehead, then said quietly, “Can we get off the grid for a while?”
“Yeah. Best idea I’ve heard all year. Let’s get five hundred miles away from Dodge.”
* * *
That night,near the border between Nebraska and Iowa, they pulled into the dirt driveway before a cabin in a small state park that was the closest to nowhere they could reasonably get without camping. Jake wouldn’t even consider tent camping unless absolutely forced by a pack of Dixons on their heels. Shit was bad, but it wasn’t that bad.
They’d eaten their dinner from a drive-thru a couple hours ago, and all they had to do now was lug their duffel bags inside and drop onto their bed, which was an unexpectedly decent size for a state park cabin.
