[18] “Is that far from here?”
“Forty-five minutes, maybe half an hour this time of night. Out in the boonies, though. Don’t look at me that way. I’ll take the dude. Won’t even charge him for my gasoline.”
Alicia whistled under her breath. “Look at this,” she said. “The guy’s an astronaut.”
“Let me see that,” Dak said, and grabbed the card. Then Alicia played keep-away with her flashlight for a moment until Dak and I overpowered her.
“This expired three years ago,” Dak said. But before that it had been a gate pass to the Kennedy Space Center, and identified Broussard as a colonel and a chief pilot in the NASA VentureStar program.
3
* * *THE QUICKEST WAY from the beach to Rancho Broussard involved twenty miles or so on the Florida Autopike. Dak eased Blue Thunder onto the ramp and allowed the Pike computer to interrogate his precious baby. There are several things about the Autopike that just rub Dak the wrong way. The most basic is simply that he hates to surrender control of his rig. “You go driving, you should have at least one hand on the wheel, like God intended.”
I didn’t argue with him on that one. There was still something profoundly creepy about cars that steered themselves, at least to folks like me and my mother. We could barely afford the thirty-year-old Mercury that Dak and I were always rescuing from a one-way trip to the junkyard. That Merk was not Pike-adaptable without spending about ten times what the old wreck was worth. Poor folks like us ride the Autopike about as often as we take the ballistic Orient Express to Tokyo.