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?
“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.”
6.
We 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 soporifi
c 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.
CHAPTER TWELVE
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.”
7.
There 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 th
e 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.