The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

quarter-inch stack of tens and twenties. He took them all, then returned to his bedroom and eased the window screen from its frame.
    The car was a 1971 Impala, shit brown and already rusting around the wheel wells. Travis had actually driven it lots of times—as late as 1984 it’d been pretty reliable. It was parked on the street; there was no garage. He slipped in and racked the seat forward and got his foot on the gas without a problem.
    He hit Kmart and bought everything he needed. Bread, chips, cookies, crackers, peanut butter, a twelve-pack of Pepsi. It all looked absurd in its ancient packaging. He got a coil of clear plastic tubing from the hardware department, and a five-gallon drum with a pouring spout. The last two things he bought were a wire coat hanger and a slotted-head screwdriver.
    The checkout girl gave him a look when he walked up alone.
    He nodded toward the parking lot. “Mom’s feet are killing her.”
    The girl shrugged and started keying the prices by hand.
    He found what he wanted in the fourth nightclub parking lot he searched: a Chevelle, maybe five years old, lime green with a white racing stripe down the middle.
    And heavily tinted windows—including the windshield.
    It took thirty seconds to defeat the door lock with the coat hanger, and another thirty with the screwdriver to break open the ignition and hotwire it. Ten minutes later he was heading east on I–94, the needle dead on 55 and the night air rushing in through the windows.

Chapter Fifteen
    The Grand Canyon, cutting off the whole width of the street, just like Bethany had said. The hole was three stories deep and stretched from one foundation wall to the other: the hospital on the south side, a seamless row of academic and research buildings on the north. There were sectional concrete barriers along each side of the chasm, plastered with orange warning signs for those who didn’t grasp the concept of gravity.
    Traffic on Monument had been blocked at the cross streets—Broadway to the west and Wolfe to the east. There was a sporadic stream of pedestrians going in and out of the hospital and the academic buildings, but otherwise the street was bare.
    Which was going to make it hard to stand around without drawing attention, especially for a ten-year-old. Especially as the night drew on.
    It was six o’clock Sunday evening. The air was chilly and the long sunlight filtered through trees on the sidewalk. Travis was sitting on a bench near Monument and Broadway, far west of the construction zone. He could see the hospital’s nearer two exits, but not the other pair. He’d have to be two hundred feet closer to the gap for that, and standing—there were no benches farther along than this one.
    As it was he’d already begun drawing looks, just sitting with a comic book in his lap, though he’d only been here for ten minutes.
    Drawing looks had been the story of his weekend. Within the first hour of daylight on Saturday he’d realized the Chevelle’s tinted windows weren’t giving him perfect cover. For one thing, they naturally drew the focus of passengers in other cars. People saw tinting and instinctively wanted to see past it. And in glaring sunlight, maybe they could. They were seeing something, it seemed, if only his silhouette. Whatever the case, in the span of ten minutes two different cars going by in the passing lane had braked and run parallel to him for over a mile, then dropped back and veered hard for the first available exit, each no doubt bound for a pay phone to dial 911. Travis responded by ditching the freeway and taking to the back roads, crawling east on county two-lanes from Chicago to Cleveland before deciding he’d had enough. He hit another Kmart, bought a blanket to conceal himself in the backseat, and slept until nightfall.
    Everything was easier in the dark. Even siphoning gas. All you needed was a big parking lot with a few cars clustered out near the edge. Duck out of sight among them, and the rest was simple.
    He’d rolled into Baltimore this morning, half an hour past dawn, left the car at a meter three blocks west of the hospital—the closest space he could find—and set out on foot.
    For much of the day he’d avoided attention easily enough. The trick was to move with purpose. If he stood still anywhere for even a minute, people stared. They saw him, looked around for a nearby parent, and failing to spot one approached him to ask if he was lost. But moving around had been easy,