Everything felt strange—loose—like she was made of jelly all of a sudden, her arms and legs flopping like dead fish when she tried to move them. The one thing she knew she could feel was the heat of the blood seeping out of her neck, staining the ground now, pouring in such quantities that she could not comprehend it.
Rubie lifted her head to look into the distance, the lights of the town where her sister lived still just a speck on the horizon. So far away that it might as well have been the stars. The wound on her neck opened like a mouth to pour out another gush of blood, and she felt her face hit the ground, no longer strong enough to hold it up.
She only registered dimly that she could no longer feel the cold before there was nothing left to feel at all.
CHAPTER NINE
Zoe was dismayed to find that the motel was even shabbier on the inside than it had looked from the outside.
“Only the finest for the FBI,” Shelley joked. “That’s why they call us ‘special’ agents, right?”
Zoe grunted, turning back from her examination of the threadbare sofa in the lobby just in time to see the receptionist returning. “Here’s your key,” he said, tossing one plastic card onto the surface of the counter. It slid over toward them, stopping just before it teetered off the edge.
“Thanks,” Shelley said, picking it up and lifting her hand in a gesture of acknowledgment.
Zoe didn’t think his customer service skills warranted even that.
The man said nothing. He slumped back into his chair and grabbed up his cell from in front of him, resuming whatever activity he had been engaged in when they entered.
“You know where we can get a decent bite to eat at this time of night?” Shelley asked.
“Diner ’bout five miles down,” he said, lifting his chin in the approximate direction without looking up.
Shelley thanked him again, to as little response as the first time. They left him where he was, Zoe leading her away before she could try to start another conversation with the world’s surliest clerk, heading back out into the cold night of the parking lot.
“Should we go for dinner?” Shelley asked. “Or set up the room first?”
“We should put our bags in, at least,” Zoe said, sighing. She rubbed the back of her neck, stiff and sore from the long day and the driving they had done. “Then food.”
“So much for getting on a plane before the day was out,” Shelley remarked, hefting the key and examining it for the room number. She led them across the lot to a door much like all of the others in the long, low building, unlocking it with a swipe.
“It looks like this was more of a complex case than expected,” Zoe agreed. The mild words hid the anger she was harboring toward herself. She should have been able to solve this one, read the numbers and taken him down. Not leave him the chance to kill again. If someone died tonight, it would be on her.
The room was small, two single beds placed less than a foot apart with old-fashioned floral bedspreads. The kind that had probably been purchased in the eighties, or even earlier, and washed over and over again until they were thin and scratchy. At least, Zoe hoped they had been washed.
She kicked one leg of the bedframe, eyeing it warily to see how much it shifted. It felt good, but not good enough. Zoe could probably have kicked the whole place until her leg hurt, and it still wouldn’t work out the frustration she felt. She should have been home by now, not sitting in a motel and waiting for a killer to claim another victim that she could do nothing to prevent.
She thought of Euler and Pythagoras, and hoped they were all right. She had a delayed-release feeder set up for nights like these, but the cats were too clever for their own good. Once before, they had broken into it and eaten half a week’s supply in one night. She’d come home a few hours later to find them lying bloated and happy, so full they could only wave their tails in response to her voice.
“Ready?” Shelley asked, her voice quiet. Perhaps feeling that Zoe was not in the mood for this, for any of this.
Zoe nodded and allowed her partner to lead the way. It was with no great joy that she approached the diner, seeing the lights an oasis in the darkness of the rural area, already mostly shut down for the night. Only a few cars were parked outside in the small lot, and the large windows on all sides of the building allowed them to see just a few patrons sitting to eat or drink coffee. It made her catch her breath in her throat, memories flooding in unbidden of diner meals from her childhood.
Zoe stifled a groan of complaint as they walked inside. It was your typical small-town diner. Wipe-clean tables and green-covered seats and booths, an attempt at kitsch 1950s stylings that contrasted against the modern appliances and images of local sports teams on a bulletin board. The two tired-looking waitresses, both middle-aged women, wore nondescript uniforms that were neither stylish nor well-fitting. Her eyes told her that one was wearing one size exactly too small, the other one size too large. She blinked, shooing the numbers away. She just wanted to eat and go to bed.
Zoe slid into a booth and examined the menu. At times it could be soothing to see a familiar list of items and know what you wanted to order, but here it was grating. It was a standard, generic offering of diner fare, the kind of all-day pancakes and burgers you could get at any similar spot in the country. It could easily have been the precise menu offered by the diner in Zoe’s own hometown, where she had slunk sullenly after church, following her parents for their weekly celebratory meal.
Not that it had ever been a real celebration, for her.
She stared at the menu without reading it, feeling her mother’s hot gaze on the top of her head, the glare she would always look up to find. Silently, as she always did when faced with a menu, she let the numbers fill her head—telling her the predicted cost per weight of each meal, the number of calories to expect, which held more fat and which more sugar. A pointless exercise, because Zoe never used any of that to choose her meals. She had learned long ago just to pick something she liked and put the numbers away.
“Can I get you some coffee?” their waitress asked, pausing at their table with a jug in hand. Zoe held out her cup wordlessly to have it filled, while Shelley assented and gave her thanks. With a promise to come back for their food order soon, the waitress was gone again, heavy footsteps slapping the linoleum in flat shoes.
“What are you getting?” Shelley asked. “I can never choose. I’m so bad at picking what I want to eat. It all sounds good.”
Zoe shrugged. “Burger, probably.”
“With a side of fries?”
“Comes with it.”
Shelley scanned the menu again a few more times before nodding and closing it. “Sounds good enough.”
Zoe lifted her gaze to momentarily analyze the alcoholic, the long-distance trucker, and the family man with no desire to go home before deciding the other patrons of the diner were not worth looking at. She turned her eyes to the salt shaker, measuring the precise amount of salt left within it and comparing it with the sugar, before tuning out even that.
The numbers weren’t helping. The case was still unsolved, nothing left behind by the criminal that she could use even with her unique abilities. Now she was stuck in this two-horse town for at least another day, looking at things that reminded her of her childhood and all the things that her mother had been at pains to point out were wrong with her. All the while, somewhere, some woman might be fighting for her life, losing it in an empty parking lot or by the side of the road.