Bubbling over with giddy energy, she worked through all the papers he needed to sign with an eagerness that surprised even Zafir. In all his travels, he’d never rented a car and he fretted over this one moment more than any other part of his plan — even his death. Above all else, Zafir hated to look foolish
The jiggling briar rose tattoo peeked out when Gail filled in the paperwork, leaning over the chest-high counter to show him where to initial when he declined unneeded insurance. He’d trimmed his coarse beard into a neat goatee and cut his windblown hair in the style of an American movie actor. She touched his scarred hand gently, as if it made no difference that he had a claw there instead of fingers.
Feeling heady, he pulled away, struggling to gain control of his emotions. He was not used to a woman who paid attention to him of her own accord.
“And this…” He coughed, swallowing hard. “This is the GPS?”
“Yep,” Gail said. “You just punch in the address of where you want to go.” She pressed her breast against his shoulder as she demonstrated. “It’ll even talk to you in Spanish if you want.”
“English will do.” Zafir smiled, straining to look pleasant. “I need the practice.”
“What’s the address?” Gail’s red fingernail poised over the little colored screen.
Zafir paused. In his lust to find Carrie Navarro, he’d only thought to get to the city where she lived. He’d assumed finding her in a place as open as America would be simple enough.
“West Fort Worth,” he said at length.
“That’s an area.” Gail Taylor giggled. “Not an address. I have to put in a street and numbers.” She tapped the back of his hand with a red fingernail.
“I understood everything was mapped here in the U.S.,” he said, feigning his best Mexican accent. “Can you not type in a name and have the GPS give me an address?”
Gail gazed up at him, batting big, cowlike eyes. There wasn’t an ounce of guile in them.
“Well, no… that wouldn’t get us anywhere, not with this little guy. You’d need a computer for that.”
“I have no computer.” Under the lip of the counter, out of the girl’s line of sight, Zafir clenched his good fist. He had no time for this.
“My jackass manager shut down our Internet or I’d help you look it up on our computers. I guess you could go to the library, but my guess is you don’t have a library card…” Gail suddenly brightened. “An iPhone would do. They’re just little computers anyhow. I have one in back with my stuff.”
“You would show me how to use it, this little computer iPhone of yours?” Zafir smiled, willing himself to relax, though his instinct was to strike this woman as hard as he could.
Gail mistook his seething anger for passion and lowered thick, black lashes accented by peach eye shadow to match her blouse. Her full cheeks flushed pink. “I could do that.”
Charm was not Zafir’s strong suit. He did not have to play games with women. They did as he told them to do and he did to them as he pleased. The importance of his mission pushed him forward. He knew he was a wanted man and needed to get out of the public eye as soon as possible.
“Perhaps we could go somewhere… more private,” he said, clenching his jaw.
The fleshy woman stepped back, letting her hand trail along his arm. “Mr. Ramirez…”
He hung his head, to hide the fire in his eyes. “I hope I have not been too… how do you say it… aggressive.”
“Why, Mr. Ramirez… I… I think I’d like that very much,” she said. “We meet some real weirdos here, but I can tell you’re not one of them.” She glanced at the digital clock on the wall behind her. “It’s a quarter to six. I get off in fifteen minutes. Tell you what, you buy me breakfast and I’ll help you find what you’re looking for.” She touched him on the arm again. “Everything you’re looking for.”
“I would be most happy to buy you breakfast in return for your kindness,” Zafir said. In his mind’s eye, he saw the plump thing in a burqa. She was much too forward with him, a complete stranger. In the Kingdom, breakfast alone with an unrelated male would have earned her a hundred lashes.
“Meet me back here in fifteen minutes,” she said. “I’m so hungry I could eat a cow.” She lowered her gaze. “I can promise you one thing. I’m a lot more fun to be around when I’m not hungry…”
CHAPTER 43
Zafir wiped a smeared droplet of Gail Taylor’s blood from the iPhone with the tail of his shirt. The infidel woman had been overly helpful, falling all over herself as she showed him how to use a free people-finder website to find Carrie Navarro’s address in her small, handheld computer. She’d played the part of bold lover almost to the end, giggling and winking until he’d taken the eagle-head knife out of his duffel bag and passed it slowly in front of her flushed face.
Remembering, Zafir lifted his collar to his nose and smelled the scent of the American woman that lingered on his clothing. He rolled down the window of his car and breathed a deep breath of the humid morning air.
Imminent death, he thought, was a liberating thing indeed. The notion of its certainty endowed him with a sort of heady focus he’d never before experienced, even in the heat of deadly conflict. His perspective changed. No longer would it be important to fret over fingerprints he might leave behind. Stains of the American woman’s blood on his clothing would never cause him a problem. The sloppy manner in which she’d died didn’t matter. And the fact that he’d left his DNA on her body was something from which he could walk away and never give another moment’s consideration. The filthy woman had obviously been of loose morals to flaunt her body the way she had — with him, a complete stranger. She was a common whore and deserved what she got. Was he not a man? Did he not have natural tendencies and desires that such a wanton woman would inflame with her behavior?
At the end, when he’d already begun his work with the eagle-head knife, she’d been so pitiful, so utterly without spirit, absent even a hint of the strong will possessed by his old friend Carrie Navarro. Gail had whimpered and begged. Her eyes covered in garish makeup, eyes that had once flirted with him, had snapped wide in abject terror. She had pleaded for mercy as long as her tremulous chest held a breath — when the only merciful thing to do would have been to kill her more quickly. The woman’s weakness made Zafir despise her, but it had made him hate Navarro even more.
He drove on into morning traffic on the littered streets of East Fort Worth near Gail Taylor’s scabby apartment off a frontage road that ran parallel to Loop 820. He passed a western store with a giant red cowboy boot out front and a McDonald’s restaurant with its golden arches rising heavenward like a heathen idol. A line of coffee worshipers queued in the drive-through waiting to show their devotions to their morning fix. Used-car dealerships sprawled along the access road. Stores selling every kind of goods imaginable from mobile homes to baby clothes lined the littered streets. Zafir shook his head at such decadence. America the wealthy, America the fat, America the arrogant. Soon, in a matter of weeks, stores and restaurants as far as the eye could see would stand vacant. Those few infidels who were left alive by the hand of Allah would be too frightened to venture into public places among the rotting corpses of their neighbors.
The heady memories of Gail Taylor ebbed away like a receding tide with each new breath. A single burning desire drew Zafir forward like a flaming string through his heart. Though his death was a certainty, he had to survive the moment. He had to make it to Carrie Navarro’s home, to take care of the unfinished business with her. What happened beyond that was irrelevant. At first he’d thought to try and save his son, send him away somehow, back to the sheikh. But such a thing was impossible. No, he would take the boy from the pitiful shadow of his harlot mother — take him and allow him the great honor of dying as a glorious martyr alongside his father, where he belonged.