The bag held guns, of course, and ammunition, and maybe a couple of armored vests. Probably there’d be one in there for the girl, too; there was a company in Ohio that was making them for kids now, since that thing in Minneapolis. Wolgast had caught a segment about it on the Today show. They were actually making a Zylon snapsuit for infants. What a world, he thought.

Now, Little Rock six hours behind them, he was still glad he’d declined the bag. Whatever happened, happened; part of him wanted to be stopped. Outside Little Rock, he’d actually let the speedometer drift up to eighty, only dimly aware of what he was doing—that he was daring some state trooper or even a local cop sitting behind a billboard to call the whole thing off. But then Doyle had told him to slow down—Yo, chief, shouldn’t you ease off the pedal a bit?—and his mind had snapped back into focus. He’d actually been playing out the scene in his mind: the flashing lights and a single, tart bleep of the siren; pulling the truck over to the side and placing his open hands on the wheel, lifting his eyes to the rearview to watch the officer calling in the plate number on his radio. Two grown men and a minor in a vehicle with temporary Tennessee tags: it wouldn’t take long to put the whole thing together, to connect them to the nun and the zoo. Whenever he imagined the scene, he couldn’t see beyond that moment, the cop with one hand on his mike, the other resting on the butt of his weapon. What would Sykes do? Would he say he’d ever even heard of them? No, he and Doyle would go into the shredder, just like Anthony Carter.

As for the girl: he didn’t know.