I calmed down and tried to watch where I was driving. There was no sense in panicking. Either I would catch him or I wouldn’t, and I had to be ready if I did. I took a deep breath and dialed his phone again.

  It rang. He picked up.

  “Horatio? Have you been trying to call? My phone kept ringing and—”

  “Hamilton, shut up,” I interrupted. “I need you to get out of the car.”

  “What? What are you talking about? We’re almost to the interstate.”

  For a moment, I considered telling him everything, then I realized that was a bad idea. What if he panicked? There was nothing to stop Roscoe and Gilbert from pulling off down some side road and taking care of him. I had to get Hamilton out of that car without letting his “escorts” know I was onto them.

  “You left something back at the house,” I improvised. But what was the most indispensable thing he owned? “Your iPod.”

  “No I didn’t. I packed it in my suitcase. I’m sure of it.”

  “One of the help found it on your desk when she went in to clean up. You must have forgotten.”

  “But I could swear—”

  “Hamilton, I have it right here,” I lied. “Can you find someplace to stop so I can get it back to you? You don’t want to be stuck at that clinic for weeks without tunes.”

  “Yeah. Hang on.” There was a muffled conversation, and then Hamilton was back on the line. “The guys are hungry anyway. There’s a fast-food place right across from the motel at the interstate. You know the one?”

  “Yeah, I spent the night in a ditch there once,” I told him. “Listen, Hamilton, no matter what you do, don’t let them take you anywhere else. And stay where people can see you.”

  “Horatio, man, don’t be so intense. It’s just an iPod.”

  I flipped my phone closed and spent the rest of the trip trying to figure out how exactly I was going to pry Hamilton away from two hired killers.

  The Dodge Charger was in the parking lot of the fast-food joint, which was a relief. I hated lying to Hamilton on the phone, but it was for his own good. I hoped. I parked where I could make a quick getaway if I had to and fished around in the glove compartment for my electric razor. I kept it in the car for emergency shaves when I was late to school, even though in the year I had been driving I had neither been late to school nor ever had enough stubble to shave. Maybe now I would finally get some use out of the thing.

  It was an older model, a hand-me-down from my father, with a round top that you ran along your skin so the cutters underneath could yank your hairs out. I stripped the protective metal cover off to reveal the cutting mechanism underneath and considered it. Not great, but it was all I had. I stuffed the razor in my pocket and headed inside.

  It wasn’t quite lunchtime, and Hamilton, Roscoe, and Gilbert were the only customers in the restaurant. They sat underneath a kind of glass sunroom slapped on the front of the dining area. The windows were still foggy around the edges from the morning dew. All three of them had trays with burgers, fries, and drinks, and Hamilton was just unwrapping his burger.

  Pulling out the electric razor, I slid into the chair alongside the thin one—Roscoe?—and stuck it into his side.

  “You ever been hit with a stun gun?” I asked him, just loud enough for the others at the table to hear me. “This one will pump a hundred thousand watts of juice into your muscles. In just a couple of seconds, your face will be in that burger and you’ll need a clean change of underwear. You or your friend there so much as moves, and I pull the trigger.”

  Roscoe and Gilbert froze, and from the frightened looks on their faces, I thought they might have downloaded in their pants already.

  “Horatio! What the hell—” Hamilton said, but I didn’t want to get into it.

  “Just get up from the table, Hamilton, and get into my car. I’ll explain everything when we’re gone.”

  “Have you gone nuts?” Hamilton asked.

  “Just get in the car,” I said, jamming my “Taser” into Roscoe’s side just to remind him I was there. Hamilton stood and collected his food.

  “Dude,” said Gilbert. “Does this mean we don’t get to keep the supercharger?”

  I got up and shoved Hamilton out the door and toward my car. I glanced over my shoulder, but Roscoe and Gilbert were just sitting at the table talking animatedly.

  I stuffed Hamilton into the passenger seat of my Volvo. “Hey, my stuff’s in their trunk.”

  “You can use that gold AmEx you gave me to buy a new wardrobe. Get in.”

  The Volvo lurched out of the parking lot, and I hit the on-ramp for the highway.

  “Where are we going? What’s going on? Horatio—”

  “The rehab clinic doesn’t have any record of a Hamilton Prince checking in today. Or ever.”

  Hamilton stopped in mid-bite of his hamburger.

  “Whah?”

  “I called to see when I could visit you, and they had never heard of you. It’s a trap. A fake-out. Roscoe and Gilbert weren’t hired to take you to St. Gregory’s. They were hired to kill you.”

  “Horatio, you can’t be serious. Those two can’t order fast food without looking at the pictures.”

  “You don’t have to be smart to kill somebody. Just willing.”

  I took the razor out of my pocket and tossed it in the cup holder. Hamilton picked it up and looked at it.

  “Don’t you think you might be overreacting a bit?” he asked. “I mean, what if they booked me under a false name?”

  “What, to keep it a secret from your fan club?”

  “Because they’re embarrassed for the family!”

  I shook my head. “Your uncle was up to something. When I left he was smiling like he’d won the lottery.”

  “You leaving does have that effect on people, you know.” Hamilton turned the razor over in his hands. “Wait a minute. Is this that razor you keep in the glove compartment? You rescued me with an electric razor!?” He clicked it on, but nothing happened. “It doesn’t even work!”

  “And that would have made it better somehow?” I asked. I took the razor from him and tossed it back in my glove box.

  Hamilton shook his head. “You know, I thought I was bad, Horatio, but you’re paranoid, man. You really thought Roscoe and Gilbert were going to kill me?” He put a foot on the dashboard and ate a french fry. “Not that I’m complaining about missing out on the drunk tank. So where are we going?”

  “Knoxville. My house. We’ll be safe there.”

  “Sure. If only because those two wacky killers can’t read the road signs to get there.”

  “It’s a shame,” I told him. “You know, I think I finally had those two figured out.”

  “What, you mean why they were at the house?”

  “No, which one is which.”

  “You’re crazy,” Hamilton said, and he went back to his lunch.

  Something in the rearview mirror caught my eye, and I straightened.

  “Maybe I’ll get a chance to test out their names after all,” I told him.

  “Huh?”

  I nodded back over my shoulder. The Dodge Charger was just coming over the rise in the road.

  “They’re probably just checking out that new supercharger,” Hamilton said. “God. It was all they could talk about.”

  Roscoe and Gilbert were coming up fast. I glanced at the speedometer. I was doing a shaky seventy, and they were gaining on us like we were walking. Hamilton watched over his shoulder.

  “They must be doing close to a hundred!”

  The Charger got closer, closer, closer—it looked like they were going to ram us. My hands tightened on the steering wheel, but there was nowhere to go. The car was on top of us, and then it suddenly swung into the other lane and blew past, the boys whooping and hollering and blaring their “Dixie” horn.

  Hamilton exhaled. “See? They’re just joyriding. You’re completely paranoid.”

  Ten car lengths ahead, the Dodge Charger burst into flames.

  It swerved, then plunged into the grass median and exploded, showering the road with twisted metal and rubber.

  I flattened the brake pedal and sent Hamilton’s fries to the floor. Another explosion ripped through the trunk of their car, lifting it like a skirt in the wind. The Charger was a complete fireball.

  There was no way either Roscoe or Gilbert could have survived.

  “Dude,” I said.

  For a few seconds we watched the thick, nasty clouds of smoke billowing from the car, mesmerized by the impossibility of what we were seeing.

  I handed Hamilton my cell phone.

  “Here. Dial 911,” I said, still unable to take my eyes off the charred wreckage.

  “I can’t,” Hamilton said. He showed me the phone. “We’re out of area.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The fiery demise of Roscoe and Gilbert meant Knoxville was now out of the question.

  If Claude was willing to blow up a car with two innocent bystanders in it to get to his stepson, I wasn’t about to put Hamilton up with my family. That would be the first place Claude would look for us anyway, and I didn’t want to make things that easy.

  Hamilton opened the motel room door and I dragged my bag inside. Neither of us had said much since the “accident,” and he hadn’t given me any more grief about being paranoid. I regretted not sticking around for the police report, but we could come forward with what we knew later. For now, it didn’t hurt for the Prince family to think Hamilton had died in the flaming wreck. Forensics would tell them soon enough he wasn’t in the car with Roscoe and Gilbert, but I figured it might buy us a day or two.

  “I can’t believe it,” Hamilton muttered. He was like a CD player stuck on repeat. “I just can’t believe it.” He flopped on one of the beds and stared at the pockmarked ceiling. “He must have put a bomb in their car when he had that supercharger installed. You think?”

  None of that mattered right now. The real question was, what did we do next?

  “Stay in the room,” I told him. “Don’t make any calls.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Just outside. I need to think.”

  “You can’t think in here?”

  The door opened with that weird whoomp you get when you open a vacuum-sealed plastic container, and I stepped outside. It was the middle of the day now, and out here, a few exits down from the road to Denmark, Tennessee, the air was as fresh and clean as it got in the humid height of summer. There was a little cement picnic table under a tree on the other side of the parking lot, and I hoofed it over there to sit down.

  Tall weeds bent in the breeze the trucks made as they passed on the interstate, and a butterfly danced around a beat-up old brown trash can like she was taunting it. Along the balcony on the second floor of the motel, a Hispanic lady was pushing a laundry cart and whistling a sad tune. She got drowned out when an emergency rescue vehicle screamed by, headed for the Dodge Charger and not knowing they’d be too late for anything but a marshmallow roast.

  We were up the Copenhagen River without a paddle, that much was for sure. As soon as Claude found out Hamilton wasn’t in that car, he’d have people out looking for him—probably even the Denmark PD. That meant whatever we did, we’d have to do it fast. I pulled out my phone. Two bars. Apparently we were close enough to civilization.

  But just barely.

  When I got back to the room, I brought three pizzas and drinks. Hamilton was sitting on the floor with his back against one of the beds, watching the news. He spared me a glance as I came in.

  “Thought you might not come back.”

  “You really think that little of me?”

  He shrugged. “I wouldn’t have come back,” he said.

  “Yes, you would have.” I dropped one of the pies in his lap.

  “Three pizzas?” he asked.

  I set the other two on the little table. “Eat,” I told him.

  The TV stations already had images of the smoldering Dodge Charger. This, of course, was scintillating stuff. I will never understand why people are so interested in seeing firefighters douse a burning house or watching police draw white chalk lines. Nothing like somebody else’s horrible misfortune to make you feel better about your own miserable life, I guess.

  “What were you doing all that time?” Hamilton asked.

  “Making some calls.”

  I sat and started on one of the other pizzas. The news shifted back to the studio, where the story changed to an update on the girl who got sick on polluted river water. Olivia Mendelsohn was out of the hospital and expected to make a full recovery. Just in case we missed what happened, they showed her chugging the water and puking all over my feet again. I think they caught my good side. After that, they posted information on tomorrow night’s emergency town hall meeting to hear more of Elsinore’s excuses.

  “She must really hate me,” Hamilton said.

  “Yeah. That’s part of it.”

  “She’s right. I deserve it.”

  “Aye. There’s the rub.”

  “Will you cut it out? I’m trying to show some remorse here.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes, seriously,” he said, and he looked like he meant it. “I really screwed things up with her, and I know it. I got so mad when Mom married Claude. I felt, I don’t know. Betrayed.”

  “And if your own mother could betray you, why not every other girl in the world?” I asked. I meant it as a joke, but when Hamilton didn’t argue with me, I thought that might not actually be too far from the truth. Who needed self-help books anyway?

  “I kept wanting to explain things to her. To apologize. But every time we saw each other after the breakup, I was always so angry. Or else she was.”

  “She had a pretty good reason, I think.”

  “I know. I wanted to go see her in the hospital, but I was afraid she’d throw acid on me or something.”

  I ate my pizza.

  “You still got a thing for her, then?” I asked.

  Hamilton couldn’t take his eyes off the television as they showed Olivia leaving the hospital earlier today, and the look in his face was all the answer I needed. I got a lump in my throat as I swallowed a bite, and I tried to wash it down with root beer. It didn’t work.

  “I wish I could take it all back,” he said. “Start over. Make everything up to her somehow.”

  “You never know,” I told him, “sometimes wishes do come true.”

  He turned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  There was a knock at the door, and Hamilton freaked. I showed him my hand and went to the door to peek through the hole.

  “Here,” I said. I pulled a packet of envelopes from my back pocket and tossed them on the floor beside Hamilton. He picked them up.

  “Are these—are these my letters to Olivia? How did you—?”

  “Just call me your fairy godmother,” I told him. I pulled the door open, and there was Olivia. She looked a lot better than yesterday, which was easier without the big tube shoved down her throat. I was a heel for dragging her out here the day she got out of the hospital, but I knew she felt the same way about Hamilton as he did about her, and that deep down they still wanted to be together. She came inside, and I took her backpack and handed her the other pizza.

  Olivia and Hamilton stared at each other, waiting for the other one to say something mean. Neither one did.

  “Okay, kids,” I said. “I’ll give you a minute to make nice, and then we have to get to work.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  J udging by the parking lot in front of the Foreign Legion Hall, it looked like everybody in Denmark, Tennessee, had come to the town hall meeting. Either that or there was a pickup truck convention.

  Hamilton and Olivia and I snuck inside, but the television cameras found us. Well, they found Olivia, at least. She was a featured speaker and already had a face viewers would be familiar with, although I wondered if they would recognize her when she wasn’t ralphing.

  That was how Claude and Mrs. Prince saw us.

  “Hamilton! Oh my God!” Mrs. Prince cried, making everyone in the room shut up and watch. Dressed in all black, she sprinted down the aisle and wrapped Hamilton in an unreturned hug. “We thought you were dead!” Tears streamed down her cheeks. “Why didn’t you call!? When we saw those pictures on the news, we thought—”

  “That’s funny,” Hamilton said, “you never watch the news.”

  “Well, Claude had it on last night,” she said, confusion crossing her brow. Maybe she was beginning to wonder about the coincidence of that. If I had to guess, I’d say Claude wasn’t a regular viewer either.

  Mrs. Prince hugged her son tight again. “I’ve been worried sick. First your father, and then you—I don’t know how I would have managed.”

  It was the perfect setup for a cut-down, but Hamilton didn’t take it. Maybe he really was sorry after all. He held her away and tried to smile.

  Claude stepped up behind them. “Hamilton,” he said. “How fortunate you’re alive.” His eyes flicked to me. “I suppose we have your friend to thank.”

  “All in a day’s work,” I told him.

  Mrs. Prince hugged me too, just for old times’ sake.

  “I’ve got to get up front, Mom,” Hamilton said. “I’m taking part in the debate tonight.”

  “What? But we’ve already asked Larry to represent the plant.”

  “I’m not arguing for the plant tonight, Mom. I’m taking the other side. Olivia’s been prepping me.”

  The look on Mrs. Prince’s face said “Huh?” The look on Claude’s face said “Die.”

  “I’ve had just about enough of you and your little stunts, Hamilton. You do this, and—”

  “And what, you’ll send me off to another clinic? What will you do this time, cut the brakes? Or maybe you’ll just send me off with some professional hit men.”

  Claude’s face turned red and his neck bulged at his tight white collar. I think he might have strangled Hamilton right there if we hadn’t been surrounded by a hundred witnesses.

 

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