The guy next to him on the bus absolutely reeked of booze. For Alex this was not uncommon, but always annoying. Moving from place to place was never easy when you were trying to stay off of the grid. Greyhounds became your cars, cash your only currency, cheap motels that charged weekly rates your only addresses.

Alex took a look at the magazine he had bought at the station in Toledo. It was something, anything to keep his mind off of the near 30 hours he had ahead of him to Houston. He was careful to avoid news magazines on the Greyhound. They were both conspicuous and he had no desire to resurrect memories of the reasons for his exile as he made this journey.

Hopefully Houston would change all that. A whispered conversation at a highway rest stop on I-75, just over the Michigan border had led him to believe that maybe, just maybe, there was a man in Houston who could do something with the terrible secret he had learned.