Work Done for Hire (16 page)

W
e dozed till noon and then picked up a cheap cell at a convenience store next to the motel, just to make two calls. Didn't want our families to worry enough to call the authorities—all we needed was state troopers from Iowa to Mississippi sharing their databases, looking for us as missing persons.

From researching my first novel I knew how to engage a proxy cell host, to make it look like we were calling from New Orleans. It wouldn't fool a government agency—or the Enemy, presumably—but it would cover our tracks on the domestic front.

Dad wasn't home, so I left a message saying Kit and I were leaving the New Orleans heat on a road trip up to New England. Kit's father answered and she improvised a little, saying that we'd probably visit an uncle up in Maine, verifying his address. Didn't know when we'd get there; she'd be in touch.

I checked my e-mail one last time and there was a note from my agent saying hey, no big rush, but Duquest wants to know how the monster story is coming along.

“Let's get into Mississippi,” I said. “Find a place in the middle of nowhere and stay for at least a day. I'll write up another little chapter.”

“And maybe print it out?” she said.

“Yeah, if we find a place.” I was getting nervous, too, not having a paper copy. I did e-mail the manuscript to myself every couple of days, but the dime store computer's word-processing program was Neolithic and had a small mind of its own. I eased the thing shut and for about the thousandth time regretted not spending a few bucks more, for a machine that could talk to a thumb drive or something.

I'd mailed a paper copy home when we first got to New Orleans, but I was at least thirty pages past that now, and had made changes in the earlier chapters as well.

“Should you call the Underwood woman or somebody?”

I wasn't sure. “Maybe not. Let's see what happens if we don't make it easy for them. But maybe . . .”

“Maybe what?”

I opened the phone and contemplated it. “We've got nine thousand some dollars. Enough to go maybe nine months?”

“I think so,” she said, “living simply, under the grid. With no emergencies.”

“Still not enough. Let me call my agent, see if she can wire us another ten grand or so.”

She was with another client, but called back in a couple of minutes. I told her I was in a real jam, a legal problem I was advised not to tell anybody about.

“Ten grand?” she said. “Jack, if I had ten thousand dollars to spare it would go to the rent on this god-damn place. I'm way overextended.”

“It's really serious.”

“Life or death?”

“I think it could get there.”

“Want me to try your movie guy, Ronald Duquest? He's got millions, and I can pretend he owes me a favor.” I said sure.

Hooray for Hollywood. Duquest told her he'd consider it an additional advance against the movie rights—pretty generous, considering that ten grand was all he'd actually paid anyhow. He took a penny away for some IRS thing, and deposited $9,999.99 in my PayPal account.

I couldn't exactly shake the computer until the cash came out, but it would stay there until we needed it. Once in Key West, I could use nested firewall proxies and retrieve at least 80 percent of it without leaving any trail.

Outside the motel room I gleefully stomped the cheap phone and bundled its mortal remains with our trash and tossed it in the parking lot dumpster. Pure paranoia. There was no way the Enemy could have put a tap on a random phone from a convenience store—but could our benevolent government? Every phone in every cheesy little store? Could the Enemy know everything the government did?

I could worry about it or I could get a new phone next week.

Hunter slept for twenty hours and awoke around midnight, pale lunar light filtering through drapes. The warm trailer still had a stale smell of roasting meat. Sharp sweat tang.

He had a painful small erection, which he couldn't see over the mound of his belly. He pulled on it until it emptied, and lay thinking, calculating.

There was enough meat in the freezer for about ten days of his normal diet. Two weeks if he stretched it, but he knew if he got too hungry he might do careless things.

The woman's purse held enough money for months of food, five or six sides of beef. The idea of nonhuman meat turned his stomach now, but when he was hungry enough he would eat anything. Anything animal. The closest he could come to a vegetarian diet would be eating vegetarians.

Which he had probably done. Not Ms. Cooper. Out of curiosity he had squeezed out the contents of her large intestine, and could see that she had been a meat-eater. Too little fiber in her diet. It would have killed her one day, much more slowly.

What had he lived on before he came to Earth? His dentition was similar to a human's, though presumably a dentist could tell he was different. He could crack bones with his molars, and his jaws were strong enough to tear apart humans and other animals. Clothing was sometimes too durable; he could break a tooth on a zipper or bra clasp. Though it was peculiarly satisfying to tear into people through their clothing, and it made the remains look more like an animal attack.

But his little talks with them were probably more interesting when they were naked. They were more frightened, which made them taste better. He knew the Chinese would beat dogs before they butchered them, partly to tenderize the muscle, but also for the endocrine tang of fear. When he had taken humans by surprise, killed them without warning, their flesh had been relatively bland. Much better to play with them for a while, and let ductless glands work their magic. The taste of hope, and the loss of hope.

Thinking made him hungry. In the back of the refrigerator he had a pair of hands in a large jar of dill pickle juice. He fished one out and had it with bread and butter, gnawing around the small female bones. Then he threw the bones into the stockpot simmering on the stove.

That pot had enough evidence to hang him four times over, in this state. He would ask that they do it without the hood. He wanted to see their faces when he plunged through the trapdoor and hung there alive, smiling, at the end of the tether.

He grinned and picked bits of Ms. Cooper from between his teeth.

K
it quietly closed the top of the computer. “Maybe let's not have breakfast.”

“Oh, come on. It's not that bad.”

“Okay. Just don't order a hand sandwich.”

“Or finger food?”

“Seriously . . . don't tell me that scene's going to be in the movie.”

“I guess not,” I admitted. “Wrong genre. No chainsaws or goalie masks. But the book has to go a little further than the movie.”

“So what does he eat in the movie?”

“Well . . . that particular scene isn't in it. Later on, he ladles a spoonful of broth and sips it.”

She smiled. “That's a distinction. You're grosser than Ron Duquest.”

I shrugged. “Different medium. Besides, you want to be over the top on the first draft. Easier to cut stuff than to add it.”

She nodded microscopically, not looking at me. “Yeah, you explained that.”

Storm signals. “It bothers you that I would even think of such horrible things.”

She didn't say anything for a couple of seconds, lower lip between her teeth. “Really, it's all right. You've seen worse, I keep forgetting.”

I tried not to think of yards of intestine unspooled across a dusty road, the owner festering in a ditch, arms wide in dumb supplication. Why was that so close to the surface?

She put her hand over mine. “If you want to talk about it, we could.”

Actually, we couldn't. There was no vocabulary. Smell, heat, pain, always the edge of nausea. Just the smell of diesel exhaust made me clench my teeth. The somatic memory of it back behind the sinuses, shit burning in diesel, rot, the buzz of fat flies. Mud spatter, blood soaking desert sand. The guy had looked like a Matthew Brady daguerreotype, mouth open in dark bloated features. The second dead man I had seen, but the first had only been a dusty bundle.

“Honey? You want to lie down?”

Actually, I wanted a drink. But maybe I'd better not say that. “Naw. Get some chow.”

She smiled. “Okay, soldier. Make a mile first?”

“Check the map.” I unfolded it and found our motel. There was the Burger King across the way, but nothing else on the map for about twenty miles. “Let's see what they've got across the street.”

“If it's hands, we go someplace else.”

“Deal.” We rolled up yesterday's clothes and repacked the bikes in about a minute. The air was cool and clean, and if it had been just me I would have gone on down the road. But if she doesn't have breakfast she turns into something dangerous, so we crossed to the Monarch of Mediocrity.

In truth, Burger King wasn't half as bad as McDonald's. I got three little hamburgers and fries while she had some egg thing. On impulse I asked for a salad. The high-school girl behind the counter acted like I had asked for a human hand.
Would you like guts with that?
She wrinkled her nose and said it was breakfast time. Hamburgers, sure. Salad, no.

There's something weirdly satisfying about hamburgers for breakfast. Some would disagree. Kit made a face when I squirted mustard and catsup on them. “Caveman,” she said.

“Og like meat. Meat with blood and the yellow stuff.”

“Your internal clock is off. Hamburgers and fries?”

“I suppose.” Actually, she knew I didn't like regular breakfasts unless I fixed them myself. Eggs completely dead, no evidence of their actual origin . . . which isn't all that appetizing, if you think about it. Og not eat that. It come from bird's asshole. Cloaca. Same difference. An asshole by any other name, the poet said, would smell just as sweet.

The sun was still low behind us when we took off down the service road that paralleled 90. Not much traffic, no wind or weather. It would be a great vacation if we were on vacation. Riding alongside quiet bayous, wading birds oblivious to us, stalking breakfast.

But I couldn't not think.

How deep shit were we in, and with whom?

Besides the Enemy, we were in at least shallow shit with the forces for good in the universe, Agent Underwood and her ilk. Presumably they would understand why we had dropped out of sight.

Kit was reading my mind. “Should we let somebody know where we are?”

“Maybe. Who would be safe?”

“God knows. If they're tapping phones, they probably have our parents covered, and your agent. But you say they can't tap a random phone from the 7-Eleven?”

“No way. Not unless they had possession of it first, got at its software.”

“So why did you destroy that one this morning?”

“Just caution.” I was on shaky ground—I'd researched it for
High Kill
, but that was four or five years ago. “They couldn't tap the phone, but maybe they could track it. Given the information they could pick up from our parents' phones.”

“Think so?”

“Well . . . at the very least, they could call us back and as soon as we answer, they know where we are.” Or where the nearest booster antenna is? “Wish I'd taken some engineering courses.”

“Me, too,” she said. “Amazing how little help quantum electrodynamics is in real life.”

We switched places; my turn to lead. I preferred following, since all I had to do then was keep an eye out for her and drop back when she came into view. I was a stronger cyclist, so if I was in front I tended to pull away steadily, especially if there were hills—power up and streak down. On the level like this, I had to keep an eye on the speedometer, keep it below thirteen or fourteen miles per hour.

If it were only about logic, it would be sensible for her to lead all the time. We found out in a couple of hours that that didn't work; she pushed herself, trying to stay in my comfort range, and was dead tired by noon. Whether that was competitive or accommodating, I wasn't sure.

It bothered me a little that she was upset by the direction the novel was taking. I wanted to stick to my guns, though. The first stuff I really loved reading was the horror fiction of the late twentieth, early twenty-first century—Stephen King and Peter Straub and those guys. Though it started with Poe, which must often be the case—books your parents let you read because they were in somebody's canon, even if they were more dire in their own way than horror movies or slasher comix.

When I was in grade school I read to the other kids on weekends and in the summer. There was a construction site at the end of my road; when the workers weren't there we'd crouch in the shadows with a candle and stolen matches, and I would intone Poe in the spookiest voice my short unformed vocal cords could manage.
For the love of God, Montressor!
In a squeaky voice.

I hadn't thought about that in years. How much different is what I do now? The stories aren't spooky, I suppose, except when they are.

If I'd known then that I was going to be a soldier, killing people and getting shot myself, I would have been thrilled.
And then you're going to spend the rest of your life in a small room pecking away at a keyboard.
No, Montressor! For the love of God, no!

One of the guys in our outfit—I don't remember his real name; his radio handle was Hotshot—he was going into the private sector after he separated, hiring out as a mercenary soldier. They were getting about triple our pay, doing stuff that looked less dangerous.

Still, we all agreed that he was fucking crazy. He laughed and agreed, too. But you could tell he really loved the work. His eyes actually gleamed; he smiled when other people looked grim. Loved guns and grenades—and guys, you had to suppose. In a thoroughly manly way.

Though that must be cyclic. One thing Grand-dude despised about the army in his day was the aggressive locker-room masculinity of it. Brutal hazing for anybody who was quiet or intellectual. I guess we had some of that; I took some ribbing for always carrying a book everywhere in Basic and AIT. But in actual combat all of the men were more quiet. More serious and introspective. Repeated exposure to death and suffering plays hell with your sense of humor. Or tilts it in a gallows direction, anyhow. Like putting a lit cigarette in the ruined face of a napalm victim, between his bright teeth. We laughed so hard we almost shit. But I guess you had to be there. It's not so funny in the recollection.

Cyclic, cultural. When I taught the short workshop in Iowa, none of the kids had heard of the Grand Guignol. But then when I was their age, the image of an audience laughing at nipples being cut off with lawn shears was pretty extreme. They probably do it on soaps now.

Before I finish the book I should spend a couple of days watching daytime television. Kit is shocked by the things that go through Hunter's mind, and life. But she's no more mainstream than I am. Maybe they're eating babies on prime time now.

To thine own self be true.
I'd read
Hamlet
on my own before we got to it in school, and I Magic Markered that line. Embarrassing to find out that Polonius is a fathead, and the profound observation was a laugh-line to the Elizabethan groundlings.
And it must follow, as night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.
So if you're a fathead, and are true to yourself, you say fatuous things.
Quod erat demonstratum
, we may have learned the same day.

“A penny for your thoughts.” Kit had pulled up alongside of me.

“Polonius,” I said.

“I've got to pee-lonius. Next billboard?”

No shops or gas stations for miles. “Sure.”

The next billboard was a weathered relic that some anti-abortion group had stopped paying for. A faded fetus claiming that it had a heartbeat at two weeks. Was that true?

The unpainted latticework that formed the base of the sign didn't really offer more than symbolic privacy. She took the small roll of toilet paper and went behind it. I turned my back to her and watched the road.

A big black SUV slowed as it approached. The passenger window rolled down and a man pointed out a camera with a fat lens. They passed close enough for me to hear the shutter go chop-chop-chop three times, like a newsie covering a game or a speech. “Pervert,” I said.

He lowered the camera and smiled.

It wasn't a leer. It was a smile of quiet satisfaction. Did I recognize the face? Fat white guy with a dark tan and a shock of white hair. White moustache.

The license plate number was partly hidden behind a crust of mud. But it hadn't rained in weeks. They rolled to a stop about two hundred yards away.

“Shit,” I said, and unzipped the handlebar bag.

“What's he doing?” Kit said.

“I don't know. Get down flat.” I let the bike go, dropped to one knee, and tried to get a sight picture with the stubby revolver. I'd be lucky to hit the car, let alone something the size of a human. I pulled back on the hammer, unnecessarily, and it clicked like a quiet door latch, cocking.

The passenger door opened slightly. I held my breath and squeezed the trigger.

The flat
bang
was louder than I'd expected. If the bullet hit the car, it wasn't obvious. The door opened more and then slammed shut, and the tires squealed as the car peeled away. I kept the sight picture but didn't fire again.

“My god,” she said. “My god.”

I was busy keeping my asshole tight, and didn't say anything. This was too much like reality. I willed my trigger finger to relax. But I kept the sight picture until the car went over a rise and disappeared.

“Jesus,” she said. “Did you have to do that?”

“I don't know. If I did have to, it might have saved our lives.” I clicked the cylinder around so the firing pin rested on the empty shell. “If not, I guess we'll be talking to the cops pretty soon.”

I could hear her pulling up her Lycra shorts. “That's not something I ever looked forward to before.”

I picked up my bike and put the revolver back in the handlebar bag, but didn't zip it shut. I studied the map carrier. “Nine or ten miles to the next town. Or should we head back to New Orleans?”

She had picked up her bike and was adjusting her helmet. “Nearest phone. You ought to call Underwood.”

“I guess.” Where had I seen that face behind the lens? Could it have been Springfield? “Did you see the guy?”

“With the camera? Kind of.”

“Look familiar to you?”

She paused. “Just from old movies. A bad guy.”

“Yeah, the enemy spy in James Bond. But somebody real, maybe in New Orleans?”

“I don't know. I must've had ten thousand customers at Mario's. Maybe a thousand had white hair and tans.”

My ears were still ringing from the gunshot. Hands shook and my chest was so tight I could hardly breathe. “I shouldn't've stomped the phone.”

“As it turns out, no. But how do you think they found us? If it
was
them.”

“Who else would it be?”

“Ja-ack . . . I had my bare ass out there in the sunshine. You see it every day, but to some other man it might be worth a picture.”

“All right,” I said lamely, “but someone who had a fancy big-lens DSLR sitting there ready to go? ‘Maybe I'll see a pretty ass to shoot'? I don't think so.”

“Okay. But then why
didn't
they shoot? I mean with a gun. If they were the bad guys?”

“I don't think that's part of the plan. They've had all kinds of chances, if they wanted me dead.” I clenched the handlebar to stop my hands from shaking. “Probably didn't even have a gun in the car, if they were smart.”

She didn't say anything. I turned and saw that she was crying silently. Dropped the bike and went to hold her. Awkward, with her bike still leaning against her hip. She let it fall away and wrapped her arms around me. “I'm sorry,” she said.

“Nothing to be sorry for.” My mind spun out of control. If I'd only had a camera, instead of a gun. A phone with a camera, like normal people. Or both phone and gun; aim both at the same time? Click, bang, click, bang. How the fuck did they find us on a back road in Mississippi, and was anyplace on the planet safe? Hell, if Iowa isn't safe, where would be?