It seemed like a spontaneous revelation, but it really wasn’t, Stone knew. This stuff had been swirling around in his subconscious for a long time now. And it had finally percolated to the surface.

He grabbed his bag from the closet and quickly changed into clean clothes.

“Come on, let it be there,” he said to himself as he searched the bag some more. He remembered putting it in there.

His hands finally closed around the gun Abby had loaned him. He stuffed it in his waistband and covered the bulge with his shirt. A moment later he peered out the door. When the nurses’ station was empty he bolted down the hall. When the nurses came that night to give him his meds they would find his room vacant.

He had no way of knowing that they would find the very same thing in Danny’s room. An hour earlier, the young man had juked his guard and made his escape.

Chapter 57

CHAPTER 57

KNOX ROLLED INTO DIVINE not really knowing what to expect. It was late and it was dark and hardly a light burned on the town’s main street. He drove down the road looking to the left and right, although he doubted he’d see John Carr loitering on the corner awaiting his arrival. He passed a restaurant named Rita’s. There was a courthouse and jail, both seemingly deserted at this hour. Knox contemplated whether to wake up the local constabulary to help him in his quest, but he’d found the other town cops to be useless at best. He would try a different approach this time.

He turned off the main drag and headed east, at least according to his vehicle’s compass. Knox’s own internal direction monitor had long since given up trying to keep track of his heading after meandering through the boxy Appalachians all this time.

He slowed the truck when he saw what looked to be the remains of a trailer home. At first he thought it must have been a tornado passing through that had destroyed the place, but the trees and earth around it had not been disturbed by a twister’s route. He stopped the truck, got out and inspected the site.

The blackened and jagged remains and the diameter of the debris field told him that an explosion of some kind was the cause. That was a little unusual. Of course it didn’t mean that John Carr was in the vicinity, but it was at least something out of the ordinary.

He did a circle of the downtown area and drove back through. That’s when he spotted the little rooming house. He parked down the street from the entrance and did a slow walk up, keeping his gaze alert for any sign of Carr.

He knocked on the door and kept tapping for another five minutes until he heard the steady if unhurried footfalls heading his way.