—Officer Williams—the second policeman I spoke to—said the official start of the Lincoln Highway is on the corner of Forty-Second Street and Broadway. From there, you take a right and head toward the river. He said that when the Lincoln Highway was first opened you had to ride a ferry across the Hudson, but now you can take the Lincoln Tunnel.
Gesturing to the map, Emmett explained to Sally that the Lincoln Highway was the first transcontinental road in America.
—You don’t have to tell me, she said. I know all about it.
—That’s right, said Billy. Sally knows all about it.
Emmett put the car in gear.
* * *
? ? ?
As they entered the Lincoln Tunnel, Billy explained to Sally’s apparent dismay that they were going under the Hudson River—a river so deep that he had seen a flotilla of battleships sailing up it just a few nights before. Then for her benefit, he launched into a description of the elevated and Stew and the campfires, leaving Emmett to his own thoughts.
Now that they were in motion, what Emmett had imagined he would be thinking about, what he had looked forward to thinking about, was the road ahead. When the Gonzalez brothers had said that they put some extra horsepower under the hood, they weren’t kidding. Emmett could feel it—and hear it—every time he put his foot to the accelerator. So if the highway between Philadelphia and Nebraska was reasonably empty, he figured they could average fifty miles an hour, maybe sixty. They could drop Sally in Morgen late the following afternoon, and be on their way, finally heading west, with the landscapes of Wyoming and Utah and Nevada stretching out before them. And at their terminus, the state of California with a population on its way to sixteen million.
But as they emerged from the Lincoln Tunnel, having put the city of New York behind them, what Emmett found himself thinking about rather than the road ahead was what Townhouse had said earlier that morning: that he should gain some distance from Duchess.
It was a sound piece of advice and one consistent with Emmett’s own instincts. The only problem was that as long as the assault on Ackerly was an open matter, the police would be looking for Duchess and for him. And that was assuming that Ackerly recovered. Should Ackerly die without regaining consciousness, the authorities wouldn’t rest until they had one of the two of them in custody.
Glancing to his right, Emmett saw that Billy had gone back to looking at his map while Sally was watching the road.
—Sally . . .
—Yes, Emmett?
—Why did Sheriff Petersen come to see you?
Billy looked up from his map.
—The sheriff came to see you, Sally?
—It was nothing, she assured the two of them. I would feel silly even discussing it.
—Two days ago, it struck you as important enough to drive halfway across the country, pointed out Emmett.
—That was two days ago.
—Sally.
—All right, all right. It was something to do with that bit of trouble you had with Jake Snyder.
—You mean when Jake hit him in town? asked Billy.
—He and I were just working something out, said Emmett.
—So I gather, said Sally. Anyhow. It seems that when you and Jake were working your somethings out, there was another fellow there, a friend of Jake’s, and shortly afterward, he was hit on the head in the alley behind the Bijou. This fellow was hit so hard, he had to be taken to the hospital in an ambulance. Sheriff Petersen knows it wasn’t you who did it because you were with him at the time. But then he heard talk of a young stranger being in town that day. And that’s why he came to see me. To ask if you’d had some visitors.
Emmett looked at Sally.
—Naturally, I said no.
—You said no, Sally?
—Yes, Billy, I did. And that was a lie. But it was a white lie. Besides, the idea that one of your brother’s friends was involved with that business behind the Bijou is nonsense. Woolly would walk a mile out of his way to avoid stepping on a caterpillar. And Duchess? Well, no one who can cook a dish like Fettuccine Whatsits and then serve it on a perfectly set table would ever hit another man in the head with a two-by-four.
And thus endeth the lesson, thought Emmett.
But he wasn’t so sure. . . .
—Billy, on the morning when I went into town, were Duchess and Woolly with you?
—Yes, Emmett.
—The whole time?
Billy thought for a moment.
—Woolly was with me the whole whole time. And Duchess was with us for most of the whole time.
—When wasn’t Duchess with you?
—When he went on his walk.