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universe had other ideas.

 
    5
    HUNT
    We made good time that next day, driving west on I-78 across New Jersey and into Pennsylvania. There we picked up I-81 South and passed through Maryland and West Virginia.
    We stopped to get some dinner in a mom-and-pop place just north of the Virginia state line. After weeks of TV dinners and fast food joints, a sit-down meal done the old-fashioned way tasted like heaven. Still, we didn’t dare linger too long; you never knew who might be watching.
    After eating, I convinced the others to give me a turn behind the wheel. Driving long distances has always been a monotonous chore for me, and being trapped in the car for so long with nothing to do but sit there and listen to the radio was driving me crazy. Besides, the two of them had both taken a turn at the wheel and needed the rest. Denise was reluctant at first, convinced that the lights of the oncoming cars would cause me problems, but I pulled out my trusty shades, slapped them on my face and told her I’d be just fine.
    “Besides,” I said with a grin as I took the keys from her hands, “I’m the one who can see in the dark, remember?”
    Dmitri didn’t care one way or the other, provided he got to stretch out in the backseat. Without his support, Denise’s objections soon crumbled. Muttering beneath her breath, she got into the passenger seat while I slid in behind the wheel. My eyesight turned the night’s darkness into broad daylight, and I had no problem seeing as I pulled back out onto the road. I turned the car’s headlights down as low as possible to minimize their impact. I considered turning them off entirely but decided that a black car racing through the night without headlights was a bit too much of an attention getter.
    The Charger was the kind of car I’d have loved to have owned in the old days, all brute force and pent-up energy packed into a sleek design, the kind that was built to eat miles for breakfast and ask what was for lunch. It took me a little while to get used to the way it handled the road, but once I had, I just relaxed and enjoyed the passage of time as the white lines disappeared beneath the wheels.
    We hit our first patch of trouble about fifty miles or so past the Tennessee state line, still headed south on Interstate 81. I had the cruise control set a couple of miles an hour over the speed limit and was humming along with the stereo, minding my own business, when I saw the patrol car sitting on the median between the north-and southbound lanes.
    Most of the other drivers on the road with me probably never even saw it as they zoomed past; the cop was pulled up off the road, hiding in the darkness of the emergency lane that bisected the median. With my altered sight I could see him as plain as day from more than fifty yards out. By the time I went cruising past him, I had the accelerator pegged right at the speed limit and made sure not to do anything that would have made us look out of place.
    Or so I thought.
    I kept my eyes on him as I went passed and got a good look as he pulled onto the highway a minute later.
    “Shit!”
    Beside me, slumped in the Charger’s passenger seat, Clearwater stirred at my outburst and in a tired voice asked, “What?”
    “Cops.”
    As I watched, the cruiser moved out of the far left lane and slid in behind me as smoothly as a shark cuts through deep water. The darkened windshield and reinforced front end seemed to give it a certain sense of malevolent intent, though that might have simply been my paranoia talking.
    I checked my speed, saw that it was a few miles beneath the limit now, and hoped the cops were just headed for the off-ramp coming up on my right.
    They weren’t.
    They’d remained immediately behind me even when traffic had opened up enough to let them switch lanes. I started to get worried. I felt my heart accelerate and took a couple of deep breaths to try to calm myself. It wouldn’t do to go into this out of control.
    I managed to get