The White Road-CP-4 by John Connolly Page A

corrected. “In fact, lots of armed postmen. Now, I bet you fifty bucks that if you accessed the records of shitty video stores in any city in America, you know what you’d find?”
    “Porn?”
    “I wouldn’t know about that,” he lied. “You’d find that the only people who rented The Postman more than once were other postmen. I swear it. Check the records. The Postman is like a call to arms for these guys. I mean, it’s a vision of an America in which postal workers are heroes and still get to blow away anyone who pisses them off. It’s like porno for postals. They probably sit around in circles jerking off at their favorite parts.”
    I discreetly took a step away from him. He wagged a finger at me.
    “You mark my words. What Marilyn Manson is to crazy high schoolers, The Postman is to postal workers. You just wait until the killings start, then you’ll say to yourself that old Sam was right all along.”
    That, or old Sam was crazy all along. I still wasn’t sure how serious he was. I had visions of him holed up in a farmhouse in Virginia, waiting for the postal apocalypse to come. He shook my hand and walked to the truck. His wife and children had already gone on ahead of him, and he was looking forward to the peace of the road. He paused at the door of the truck and winked.
    “Don’t let the crazy bastards get you, Parker.”
    “They haven’t succeeded yet,” I replied.
    For a moment, the smile departed from his face, and the under-current to his comments rippled his surface good humor.
    “That don’t mean they’ll stop trying.”
    “I know.”
    He nodded.
    “If you’re ever in Virginia…”
    “I’ll keep driving.”
    He gave me a final wave and then he was gone, his middle finger raised in a last farewell to the future home of the U.S. Mail.
    From the porch of the house, Rachel called my name and waved the cordless phone at me. I raised a hand in acknowledgment and watched Walt tear away from me at full speed to join her. Rachel’s red hair burned in the sunlight, and once again I felt a tightening in my belly at the sight of her. My feelings for her coiled and twisted inside me, so that for a moment I found it hard to isolate any single emotion. There was love—that much I knew for certain—but there was also gratitude, and longing, and fear: fear for us, a fear that I would somehow let her down and force her away from me; fear for our unborn child, for I had lost a child before, had watched again and again in my uneasy sleep as she slipped away from me and disappeared into the darkness, her mother by her side, their passing wreathed in rage and pain; and fear for Rachel, a terror that I might somehow fail to protect her, that some harm might befall her when my back was turned, my attention distracted, and she too would be torn away from me. And then I would die, for I would not be able to take such pain again.
    “It’s Elliot Norton,” she said as I reached her, her hand over the mouthpiece. “He says he’s an old friend.”
    I nodded, then patted Rachel’s butt as I took the phone. She swatted me playfully on the ear in response. At least, I think it was meant to be playful. I watched her head back into the house to continue her work. She was still traveling down to Boston twice weekly to hold her psychology tutorials, but she now did most of her research work in the small office we had set up for her in one of the spare bedrooms, her left hand resting gently on her belly while she wrote. She looked over her shoulder at me as she headed into the kitchen and wiggled her rump provocatively.
    “Hussy,” I muttered at her. She stuck her tongue out and disappeared.
    “Excuse me?” said Elliot’s voice from the phone. His southern accent was stronger than I remembered.
    “I said ‘hussy.’ It’s not how I usually greet lawyers. For them I use ‘whore,’ or ‘leech’ if I want to get away from the whole sexual arena.”
    “Uh-huh. You don’t make any exceptions?”
    “Not