The Long Way Home by Andrew Klavan Read Free Book Online

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    Then I was around the corner. The motorcycle straightened underneath me. It gathered speed and rocketed down the smaller street. The lights of the shopping mall dropped away behind me. The shadows closed over me.
    I glanced back over my shoulder. I saw the cop car still in the intersection, blocking the way. The other cruisers were rushing toward it. Their brakes were screeching now too as they tried to avoid a collision. They didn’t quite make it. The first car to reach the corner clipped the tail of the cruiser that blocked the way. The car behind that one managed to swerve and avoid a rear-end crash. But the next one hit, shattering the taillight just as it got hit in turn by the car behind.
    It wasn’t a dangerous pileup, just a bunch of fender benders. But for a few seconds it brought all five police cars to a stop. They sat tangled together in the intersection, their flashers whirling uselessly, their sirens howling like frustrated hounds who’d lost the scent of their prey.
    And I rushed on into the night.

CHAPTER TEN
Gunfire
    I was in a residential section now, moving past houses and under a canopy of trees. The naked late-autumn branches interlaced above me. Through them, I could see the last light fading from the deepening blue of the sky. Fallen leaves looped up from the gutter into the air as my bike swept past them. With the sirens growing dim as they fell away behind me, it was almost quiet here for a second or two.
    I slowed to take another corner. I came down another dark street of houses and turned a corner again and came down another dark street. Here the houses were small and very close together. Narrow two-story clapboards, most of them, with little porches. There was a small lawn out in front of each house, and narrow alleys between them. Most of them had lights on in the windows, sending a yellow glow out into the night.
    I saw those lights and for a moment my mind drifted. I thought about the families inside those houses. They’d be sitting down to dinner with one another just now. There’d be the smell of food and the mom would be saying something to the kids like, “So what did you do at school today?” Maybe the dad would say something about what happened at work, or maybe he and the mom would talk about something, just normal stuff . . .
    And they wouldn’t know—that’s what I was thinking. They wouldn’t know how great things were for them. How great it was that they were all there together with plenty of food to eat and a house around them to keep them dry and warm. They wouldn’t know how great it was that they were talking to one another, how lucky they were that they could all go to their rooms at the end of the day and sleep in their beds when the day was done. They wouldn’t think about the fact that it could disappear, all of it, in the snap of a finger, just like that. They could wake up one morning and it could all be gone just like it was gone for me. They could find themselves out here, in the night, alone, with no food and no bed and no mom or dad or sister or brother and no friends and no one to help them. Then they would miss this dinner they were having now. They would miss it more than they thought they could ever miss anything in their lives . . .
    That’s what I was thinking about—when, all at once, every thought I had was blown away and the darkness and quiet all around me were blown away by a fresh howl of sirens and a sudden burst of light. Monstrous white light rushing at me headlong. Blue and red light catching the branches and the trunks of the trees.
    A police car had appeared as if from nowhere, right there suddenly on the street in front of me. It was racing toward me, blocking my way, making it impossible for me to pass. I heard another siren scream and looked behind me and there was another one, another cruiser, closing in on me, cutting off my retreat.
    The police cars came toward each other with me in the middle. I was blinded by the