A truck took him from Baltimore to Washington. He didn’t get to see much of the country, because he slept most of the way. He knew he was going to have to be wide-awake later on, so he forced himself to relax and sleep while he could.
Actually, it wasn’t that tough to get to sleep. He’d had a very active four days, coupled with some nervous running around today, and whizzing along a superhighway on a sunny summer afternoon was pretty relaxing anyway. He conked out within ten minutes in the salesman’s car, and didn’t wake up till they reached Baltimore. Then the salesman wished him luck, Vince thanked the guy for the ride, closed the door, stuck out his thumb, and a truck stopped. Just like that. He was running in luck, and he hoped it kept up that way.
By the time he got to Washington, he was pretty hopeful. The salesman had driven like a madman, and the truck driver hadn’t been any slouch either. Both of them had gone a hell of a lot faster than Saralee would dare to, and Vince figured by now he couldn’t be more than four hours behind her.
Then came Washington, and things slowed down to a crawl. For one thing, the truck driver let him off at the northern edge of the city, which meant he was going to have to work his way all the way through Washington, and he knew from experience that hitchhiking within a city is hell. For another thing, he was beginning to feel starved, and the money he could have spent on a fast cab-ride through town had to go for food. And the eating of the food took time, too, no matter how fast he tried to chew.
Then he was back on the street again, thumbing once more. And, as he’d expected, hitchhiking through the city was hell. He did it in four short rides, with long waits in between. And the fourth ride didn’t turn out to be so short after all.
It was a woman, driving a new Pontiac convertible, the incredibly expensive car for people with enough money to buy a Cadillac convertible and not enough sense to come in out of the rain.
This woman was about forty. He didn’t know whether she had any sense or not, but she very obviously had money. She was dressed in an obviously expensive blue suit and, even though it was warm as hell in Washington, a waist-length fur jacket over it. On her head was one of those goofy hats that was one-tenth hat and nine-tenths veil. She was a good-looking woman for forty, as far as the face was concerned. The fur made it impossible to tell much about the body, though her nylon-sheathed legs looked pretty good from the knee down.
She stopped the car next to him, smiled, and said, “Hop in.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said, and hopped in. He’d barely had his thumb out, not expecting a woman to stop for a hitchhiker, and the fact that she had stopped surprised him so much it took him a second or two to react.
Once his suitcase and University of Miami sign were stowed in back, and he was seated in front beside the woman, the Pontiac slid away from the curb and purred southward through the evening traffic.
After a minute, the woman said, “I went to Miami, too. Quite a number of years ago.”
Vince tensed. He knew what was coming next, a lot of talk about the new buildings and the old professors and how the old town is getting on and all that garbage, none of which Vince would be able to handle, since he’d never been near either Miami or its university in his life. “Well, uh,” he said. “Uh, as a matter of fact I don’t go there myself. My brother does. I’m going down to visit him. This’ll be my first trip down there.” There, he thought, that ought to do it.
The woman turned to look at him for a second, smiled and said, “Crap.” Then she looked back at the street.
Vince blinked. He gaped at the woman, and waited for her to explain what that had been all about, but apparently she had no intention of doing so. She just kept driving along, a half-smile on her lips. He noticed that they were good lips, just slightly touched with lipstick, and that her hair was in a tight permanent that wasn’t blowing around even though the convertible’s top was down. Black hair it was, with just a touch of gray in some of the hairs at the side. It looked good on her, very sophisticated. She looked like a real heller who had grown older gracefully.
They drove two blocks in silence, and then the woman said, “Well? Aren’t you going to defend yourself?”
Vince decided the only thing to do was let this graying chick have the lead, until he could figure out where she thought she was going. “Defend myself?” he asked. “From what?”
“You don’t have any brother in the University of Miami,” she said. She glanced over at him, smiled again, and looked back at the traffic. “That sign of yours is just something to make it easier for you to get a ride.”
Vince shrugged. This time, he thought, the best thing to do was admit everything and say nothing. “It’s pretty tough to get a ride,” he said, “unless you do something like that.”
The woman nodded. “I know it is,” she said. “You’re absolutely right.” She glanced at him again, looked back at the road, and said, “What’s that bulge inside your coat? Is that a gun?”
“Gun?” Vince hadn’t even known he had a bulge inside his coat. He looked down, and realized all the road maps tuck into his inside coat pocket did make a healthy bulge. Now that he thought about it, with a bulge like that in his coat, it was a miracle he’d gotten any rides at all. And here this was the sixth person to pick him up. And this one was even a woman.
“Well?” she asked him. “Is it a gun?”
“No,” he said. He grinned uneasily, not sure what this crazy woman was leading up to. “Heck, no,” he said, playing it boyish. “Nothing like that. It’s just road maps. See?” He dragged them out of his pocket and showed them to her. “I really am going to Miami,” he said. “And I’ve got these road maps so I won’t get lost.”
The woman looked at the road maps, looked at him, stopped smiling, looked out at the street again, and said, “How disappointing.”
A nut, decided Vince. That’s what she was, a grade A, first-prize, number one nut.
He didn’t know just how nutty she was. They were in the southern part of the city now, near the Potomac, and Vince was surprised to see that they were coming to wooded sections among the built-up areas. And he had the crazy feeling they were going the wrong way.
The feeling got stronger, a lot stronger, when the woman suddenly made a turn onto an unpaved street and drove down past two rows of unfinished ranch-style houses to the end, and stopped.
Vince looked around, half-expecting a couple of guys to come running out of one of the half-built houses and grab him. “What’s going on?” he demanded. “What is this?”
“You’re an awful disappointment,” the woman said. She was sitting half-turned in the seat, facing him, and she was half-smiling again, her eyes shining at him in the moonlit darkness. “I certainly didn’t expect anything like this when I picked you up,” she said. “You turned out to be a complete flop, do you know that?”
“Well, for God’s sake,” Vince cried, “what the hell do you want from me?”
“Isn’t that obvious?” she asked him. “I want you to rape me.”
He could only stare at her. He couldn’t say a word or do a thing or move a muscle, all he could do was just sit there in the car in the moonlight and stare at her.
“If you look over that way,” she said, pointing beyond him, “you’ll see lights. There are lots of houses all around here full of people. If you don’t rape me, I’ll throw you out of the car, and then I’ll tear my clothes and go to one of those houses and say you did rape me. And I don’t suppose it would take the police very long to find you. You’d be on foot, and you don’t know Washington at all.”
A nut, thought Vince for the thousandth time. A complete and utter nut.