Work Done for Hire (17 page)

“You know what you told me about racing cars?” she murmured into my shoulder.

“Racing cars?”

“You said if you're in a race and the car in front of you gets into trouble, you aim for him. Because he's liable to go anyplace but straight ahead.”

“That's right.”

She rubbed her face against my shirt and I could feel the tears. “So we should just keep on. Go the direction they went.”

“What if they double back?”

She looked up at me with bright eyes. “Then shoot the one with the camera.”

W
e went eighteen map miles down that little road, peanut farms alternating with acres of weeds and spindly trash trees. The motel that was supposed to be at the eighteen-mile mark was a weedy burned ruin with the words “Ffriendly Ffolkes” fading under broken neon tubes. British orthography or Americans trying to be classy? But it was only another four or five miles to a Comfort Inn.

Traveling by car, you can afford to have contempt for chain motels. But when every mile is forty-eight calories, they look pretty good.

There hadn't been much traffic, not even one car a minute. No black SUVs with bullet holes.

The next motel was still standing, but ramshackle. “Try this one?”

“Anyplace with a bed,” she said. Her color wasn't good, cheeks pale and forehead flushed, and she was breathing a little too hard. “Let's get these bikes out of sight.”

The black woman behind the desk was huge and suspicious-looking. “Where's y'all's car?”

“We're on bikes,” Kit said, convincingly clad in bright Lycra and sweat.

“Sure you are.” When I said we'd pay in cash, she nodded with grim satisfaction and handed me a corroded brass key on a plastic tag that might once have borne a number. “You go to Room 14.”

The room had a single low-watt bulb in the ceiling and a TV set that hissed and had no picture. Lots of roach tabs in the bathroom and closet, but no actual bugs. It smelled stale, but there are worse smells.

The drapes were stuck in blackout position. We got a slight breeze going through, with the front door and bathroom window open. The other windows were glued-shut plastic.

The fat lady directed me up to Bradley Road, where there was a mom-and-pop store and a porch where some old characters sat to drink beer and stare at alien invaders on bicycles. I got us a four-pack of tall cold no-name beers and some cheese crackers and a strip of what claimed to be alligator jerky.

Whatever the jerky was made of, it had a soporific effect. Or maybe it was the beer. Or maybe Jane Austen; the five-and-dime notebook had a few freebie book files, and I read about three pages of
Pride and Prejudice
. Kit was snoring by then, and I joined her.

I woke up about three, restless, mind racing. The hot water from the tap made something like coffee. Back to Hunter's world.

He had thought they were closing in on him. Twice yesterday morning he had seen unmarked police cars cruise by with men listening through headphones. A good thing his captive was gagged.

But nothing for more than twenty-four hours now. If they had brought in dogs it would not take very long, with all the buried bones around. Dogs would like that. But they didn't have them, he supposed. Not a rich county.

If it did come to that, he could move into another level of discourse. He could try to negotiate with them, essentially with a knife to her throat. Inviting a simple head shot from a police sniper.

Or he could cut her up and scatter pieces of her through the woods, hoping to distract them from his avenue of escape by repugnant overkill. Of course that might make it harder on him if they caught him—or maybe not. If you're brutal enough, they call you insane, and treat you as if you were handicapped. Though it is they who are handicapped, by timidity.

He approached the trailer in a large circle, checking seven suspended threads that crossed every route to the place. He retrieved his shotgun from the bushes and entered the trailer silently without turning on the light. He listened in the darkness to her irregular breathing. Drank in her smell. Then he pulled down the bandana that gagged her.

“Can we talk?” she said to the darkness.

He eased the safety off, and the small click was loud.

“If you're trying to scare me, you've succeeded.” Her tone of voice had told him that. He aimed the shotgun at her voice and touched the light switch.

“So that's what you look like.” He had grabbed her from her tent in the darkness and tied her up in the trailer without light. “You . . . you're even bigger than I thought.”

“Uglier,” he growled, the first word he had spoken in weeks.

“Are you the one they're looking for?”

He shrugged and stepped closer to her. Her breath was mint-sweet. His made her flinch away. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I didn't cook the last thing I ate. It had been on the road for a while.”

She coughed. “I'll do . . . whatever you want. Really.” She took a breath and straightened up her well-toned body. “Anything.”

“You wouldn't say that if you could see into my mind. Do you think there is nothing worse than death?”

She shook her head slowly.

He wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “What do you think you know about me? If I am the beast that has been on the news?” He smiled, showing too many teeth. “I am a beast, as they say. Not human.”

“So they say.” Her breath caught. “Of course we are all animals.”

“Not in the sense that I am one. I really am
not human
. I don't even come from Earth.”

After a pause she said, “So what planet are you from?”—as if that were an ordinary question.

“I don't know. It was a long time ago. I have memory issues.” He studied his long blunt nails as if the answer might be there. “Thousands of years of memory issues.” His eyes came up. “You think I'm crazy.”

Her voice shook a little. “On the news they say you are.” She tried to stare back at him but looked away.

“Now you're going to tell me that someone is looking for you. If I let you go, they will be easy on me.”

“That could be true,” she said quietly, looking at the floor.

“Not quite lying. I like that.” He went to a window and peeked through the blinds. “Would you like to offer your body to me?”

“It's yours, of course. But you don't seem to want it.”

“What if I wanted you from behind? Rough.”

“That would . . . be all right. I've—”

“From the front?” He took a clasp knife from a deep pocket and shook it open with a snap. The blade was a dagger about eight inches long. “I mean the abdomen, as usual. Have you read about that?”

She shook her head in jerks, staring at the blade.

“Most newspapers haven't printed that. The fact is, not being a man, I have no particular interest in vaginas.” He sat down on a barstool. “They look like a wound to me, even when they're not bleeding. I prefer to make my own wounds.”

She started to say something, but just swallowed.

“I enjoy it that you're scared, as you may know. You will live a little longer for that.”

“But not very long?”

“No.” He tested the blade with his thumb. “Would you like for me to be kind, and end it quickly?”

“I want to live.”

He smiled condescendingly. “I have a news flash for you: The universe doesn't care. Neither do I. But even if you were to survive this . . . little meeting, you would die very soon. A half century? That's nothing to me.”

“How . . . how old are you?”

“I remember Pompeii. And a flood before that. I may be immortal.”

“Or insane,” she whispered.

He nodded. “Or insane. Maybe both.” He picked up a sharpening stone, and drew the blade over it slowly. “Maybe I
was
sane, a couple of thousand years ago. And it wore off.”

T
here was a light on in the motel office, so I went in and printed out the chapter while a black kid about high-school age watched me. Making conversation, I explained about what a pain it was to try to do work on this dime store computer, not being able to just push a button and send it to my agent. He understood, and volunteered that they had a scanner, if I'd like to make an electronic copy and send it.

It felt kind of funny, switching between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I sent copies to myself and my agent, as well as Duquest.

Perversely, writing the nightmarish chapter helped me get to sleep. And when dawn showed through the drapes, Kit kissed me awake and slowly had her way with me, a quiet and dreamy kind of sex.

There was a message slipped under the door, evidently printed on the office computer:

RONALD DUQUEST

HOLLYWOOD

If you got this you know my number

This is fucking fantastic. Keep the girl alive, stretch it out, like the old
Silence of the Lambs
 . . . maybe a POV shift with some cops who can't figure out the craziness. You got a fucking movie here, man.

It might be real money. I'll talk to some people.

rd

We took showers, laughing and chatting over the noise. Celebrate our good fortune and go back up to Bradley Road for breakfast.

But when I braced the door open and started maneuvering the bikes out, a kid, younger than the one who'd helped me, opened the office door and jogged over.

“Mister . . . guy said not to wake you up, but give this to you 'fore you leave.” He handed me a heavy padded mailing envelope with no address. On the back of it, a crayon scrawl in green block letters: SOMEONE THOT YOU SHD HAVE MORE FUN.

We went back inside and sat on the bed.

I tore open the envelope, causing a blizzard of gray shreds. There was a thick hardcover book inside—Dexter Filkins's old history of the Gulf War—but most of the text was missing. Someone had hollowed out a large enough volume for two thick packages of hundred-dollar bills, banded $25,000 each, and one big bullet heat-sealed into a plastic bag.

And the key to room 15, next door, and a car key.

We stepped around the bikes and opened the door to 15. On the bed, no surprise, a long rectangular box.

“He was in here,” the boy said from behind us, “the one who give me the envelope. Musta left before the sun come up. Left his car, too.”

“What kind of man was he?”

“Old guy.”

“Old like me?”

“No . . . way old. Old white guy with a white 'stash.”

I picked up one end of the box and let it fall, heavy. “What exactly did he say?”

“He say give you the thing.”

“Nothing else?”

“Huh–uh. He don't say
nothin'
!”

“Come on. What did he say?”

“Nothin'!” The kid bolted. I got to the door just in time to see him run behind the motel.

“Did he threaten you?” Kit called out. “We could help.” We could hear him crashing through the woods in back.

“Sure we could.” I sat back down on the bed and tried to open the tough plastic bag. Finally punched a hole through it with the door key and widened the hole enough to get the bullet out.

“What is it?” It was heavier than a normal cartridge and had a small crystal lens on its tip.

“Smart round,” I said. “Like a little guided missile. You fire it at the target and little fins snap out for steering. Self-propelled, slow.” I pointed at the tip, painted light red. “It's an incendiary, for good measure. I'm supposed to shoot some poor dick with this and hope the ensuing fire will dispose of the evidence?”

“Or cause confusion,” she said. “Would it be a big fire?”

“Don't know; I never used one except on the range. It doesn't look like it could be a big fire, unless you hit a gas tank or something.” I turned it around in my hand, looking for clues. “Of course the red paint doesn't really mean anything; they could paint it baby blue if they wanted.”

“Does it shoot like a regular bullet?”

“Yes and no.” I opened the end of the cardboard box and slid out yet another M2010. This was a civilian one, the Remington Model 700, with a heavy blond wooden stock sporting expensive grain, and a big heavy finderscope. I eased the bolt back slightly; it wasn't loaded.

I pushed a tab on the side and a three-by-three-inch screen popped out beside the fat Leupold finderscope. It had a blurry picture with bright crosshairs and a faint bull's-eye. Hadn't seen one since the desert.

“Watch this.” I slipped the cartridge into the receiver and pointed the rifle out the door; the picture on the screen snapped into focus, a bright picture inside a dark circle, like looking through a keyhole. The parking lot.

“So it shows where the bullet is going?”

“Exactly.” I set it down and reached inside the carton. Taped into a square of Bubble Wrap, a little box with a joystick. “That's weird.”

“How so?”

I set it down carefully. “I did spend a week training with things like this. But that was like ten years ago, twelve. They expect me to squeeze the trigger and then guide this thing into a target, with no practice? I couldn't do it even if I wanted to, not with any certainty.”

She picked it up and studied it. “Maybe they don't know that? They seem to think you're one of the people you write about.”

Odd but true. Maybe there were people with the combination of power and ignorance required for that kind of mistaken identity. The only thing I was sure of, though, was the ignorance on our side. “Let's think. We should just go to the cops. Homeland Security.”

“Where they'd have your file open on the desk before you sit down.”

“Granted. But the Enemy has way upped the ante now. Or again, rather. And I still haven't broken any law.”

I eased the cartridge out and held it in my hand. “You can't buy this shit in a store, not anywhere. I don't think they let hunters take deer with incendiaries—Smokey the Bear and all. It's a plain terror weapon.” The weight of it was both repellent and fascinating. In training we had fired off a box of these, one for each of us, aiming at old paint cans, each with a spoonful of gasoline inside. Boom, fireball. Better than winning a Kewpie doll.

“Pretty expensive?”

I nodded. “The sergeant made a point of that. The round was worth more to the United States Army than we were. So aim. Or you might have to be the target next week.”

“They wouldn't do that.” She was serious.

“Not really, no. You weren't disposable till you were overseas.” I hefted the rifle. “This thing is
heavy
. I guess it's a match model, for accuracy. Deepens the mystery.”

“How so?”

“It's wasted on me, really. I'm a pretty good shot, but I was far from the best in my platoon, even my squad. The army's full of people who could shoot one round from a sniper rifle like this and shave a hair off a fly's ass.”

“None of whom wrote a novel about a sniper.”

“More's the pity.” I aimed it out the door. The scope really was beautiful, a hard bright image with no color fringe. I could spin the power up to 40X, but without support the image danced around like crazy; I couldn't even tell what I was looking at.

“Can I try it?”

“Sure.” I spun the power all the way down and automatically made sure the safety was locked, not just “on.” Product of a thousand spot inspections.

She put it to her shoulder and pointed into the parking lot, the muzzle waving around in a sloppy orbit. She craned her neck, peering into the scope. “Don't see anything.”

“Your eye's too close. Back off to a natural distance.”

“Like this?” She leaned back too far.

“No—” I reached toward her and the room suddenly darkened as a huge form blocked off the light.

“What you all—” the big black woman said, and then screamed, and backed away so fast she tripped into the parking lot and fell hard onto her back.

I ran out to help, and Kit was right behind me, still holding the rifle. The woman's eyes were open, showing mostly whites. I couldn't feel a pulse in her neck, but her wrist had a slight one. “She's alive.”

“Call 9-1-1?”

“
No!
Jesus!” I looked wildly around; there didn't seem to be any eyewitnesses. “Leave the bikes. Get in the car and get the fuck out of here.”

“But . . .” She looked as helpless as I felt.

“I know. Let's carry her in onto the bed and go!” She put the rifle down and took one arm. I took the other and we dragged the woman in through the door.

No question of lifting her dead weight onto the bed. I scooped up the book with all the hundreds. The loose high-tech round, the joystick. Picked up the rifle off the sidewalk.

“Maybe we should leave all that stuff behind?”

“No, maybe we'll ditch it someplace else. Let's just get outta here!”

We threw everything into the car and it started right up. I backed out carefully and turned it around.

In the distance, sirens.

“Fuck it!” I floored it and fishtailed out of the gravel lot onto the two-lane road.

“Don't!” she said.

“'Course.” I took my foot off the gas and pulled over, reaching for my wallet. “‘I wasn't running from the body, officer. Just the FBI and DHS.'”

Two Highway Patrol squad cars bore down on us, sirens screaming, blue lights flashing. They went right past the motel without slowing down. I clenched the wheel and watched them close in—and then pass us, engines roaring flat out.

We looked at each other. “So what was that all about?” she said. “We must not be the only criminals in Mississippi.”

“At least they're not after this car.” I put it in gear but sat for a moment. “We really ought to . . .”

“Yeah. She could be really hurt.”

“We should check.” Still I hesitated. “Hell. ‘Avoid the appearance of wrongdoing.'” I did a slow U-turn and went back to the motel parking lot. The door to the room was still ajar.

She was still where we had left her, but her eyes were closed now. Still a pulse in her wrist. Her name tag said “Mary Taylor,” and tasked her with Customer Relations. And everything else, I supposed.

“Mary?” I said. “Miz Taylor?”

I put my hand behind her head and raised it slightly. There was a little blood in her hair. Her lids fluttered.

“You fell and hit your head,” I said, which was true.

“I was . . . you was . . .”

“You slipped on the gravel,” Kit said.

She stared at Kit. “You had a gun.”

“Hunting rifle,” I said. “She was just checking the sights when . . . you came to the door.”

“What you suppose to be huntin', this time of year?”

“Nothing yet. It was a present.”

She rolled over onto an elbow and touched the back of her head gingerly. “Don't like guns.”

“Me neither,” Kit said emphatically.

The woman fixed me with a baleful stare. “This present. The man give it to you, why he didn't just knock on your door?”

“My uncle Johnny,” I improvised, “he's kind of crazy. I mean, he's always doing stuff like this, elaborate pranks.”

“With a gun? Sure.” She sat up with surprising grace, and a groan. “Your Johnny, he give my boy a twenty-dollar bill to tell you look in that room. That's some uncle.”

“Yeah. He's crazy.”

“You wouldn't mind if I called the police.” She said
po
-leese, mocking her own accent.

I might have paused too long. “Do what you want.”

“Let me put it some different way. Would it be worth a hundred dollars to you fo' me not to call the police?”

“I suppose it would.”

“Uh-huh. Then I suppose it might be worth a thousand.”

“No way.”

She rocked a little bit, thinking. “How 'bout for five hundred bucks I let you tear that page out of the logbook, and I never seen you, neither of you.”

“I can't believe this,” I said to Kit. “Bargaining with a woman we came back to—”

“You best believe it,” the woman said. “I do appreciate you coming back, but get real. You got money and I ain't. You on the wrong side of the law, and I got a cell phone. You want that page for five hundred dollars?”

“We're not criminals,” Kit said.

“I know you ain't that kind. If I thought you'd do me harm I'd be hiding.”

“So you're just trying to make an honest buck,” I said.

“Dishonest buck,” she conceded. “You got a lot more than five hundred dollars, and I got a lot less.”

“Okay,” I said, “but you have to throw in the cell phone.”

She nodded. “Six hundred, then.” She unclipped the cell phone from her belt holder and handed it to me. Just a symbolic gesture, but I took it.

“Why don't you put the bikes in the car,” Kit said, turning her back to count out bills from a banded stack. “I'll take care of the logbook.”

“Okay.” It wasn't quite that simple. I wheeled the bikes out to the hatchback, but they were too long to just stuff into the back. I had a panic moment—no tools—but Mary told me there was a tool kit under the counter in the office. I removed the front wheels and the bikes stacked into the back easily.

While I had a pair of pliers, I took the precaution of sabotaging this new rifle the same way—take the powder out of a bullet and fire just the primer, to lodge it halfway up the barrel. Useless to an assassin, but that was never really in my job description.