It was worth a few miles of daydreaming. I’d only spent $500 on this bike, leaving $49,500 for other stuff like rent. Minus Barb’s 15 percent. A decent road bike would run about $1,500, and they’d probably give me $400 trade-in. Call it a thousand-dollar investment, finally, out of the fifty I was getting for the book.
I almost had myself convinced, but a reality check came creeping in. How often, in real life, would I do even ten miles in a day, let alone fifty or a hundred? Going to the 7-Eleven for a six-pack, I’d rather have this comfy blue Cambridge than a sexy hard-riding racer. And it would be really stupid to buy both—where would I put them? I wouldn’t even leave my Salvation Army junker locked up overnight outside my apartment. Even if nobody was desperate enough to steal it, kids liked to demonstrate their budding manliness by stomping on spokes—and frames, if they were big kids.
Even the one bike dominated my so-called living room. Two would make it look like a bike shop.
I did have a get-thee-behind-me-Satan moment as I pedaled wearily into the suburbs of Des Moines. Two Guys Bike Shoppe had a signboard out front saying THIS WEEKEND ONLY ALL CAMPYS 25% OFF LIST!!! A Campagnolo would be just the right level of wretched excess—a Caddy, but not a Rolls.
I went past it a couple of blocks to a motel that was conveniently just behind a liquor store. A six-pack and a miniature of dark rum would take the kinks out fine. A burger and a couple of cookies for dinner, from the 7-Eleven beside it. It wasn’t dinner on the French Riviera with Duquest and his bevy of bimbos. But that might come in time.
CHAPTER NINE
He roasted a whole leg slowly, sawed in two to accommodate the oven, sealed up in heavy foil with herbs and spices and wine. After a few hours, timing by smell and touch, he used a long filleting knife to extract the bones for stock. He chunked the meat and browned it carefully under the broiler.
He wolfed a quarter of it down and then rested for a day. He checked his garbage-disposal map and dug a new hole for the cooked-out bones and burned her clothing on top of them, then relieved himself there before replacing the dirt and mat of humus and undergrowth. Three drops of butyric acid to keep away curious dogs and other digging animals.
Prudence dictated that he ought to change his location soon. This little patch of Alabama was perfect, but that perfection was a danger. People looking for him would eventually close in and be on his doorstep, by a process of elimination.
Where next? The challenge of living in a city had a perverse appeal. The probability of detection would be high, though; almost certain. He was prepared to face, and escape from, a squad car or two of country-bumpkin state troopers, but a city SWAT team would be formidable, and if he bested them there would be a small army after him, federal as well as state. He couldn’t afford to be tightly surrounded and observed in action. If they realized he wasn’t human, they would want to capture him alive and find out what he was. His masters would not like that.
He opened a third quart of Pabst Blue Ribbon and thought. Moving the trailer would be conspicuous and difficult. Burning it in place would be simple, but would draw investigators. If they found all the buried bones there would be trouble. He was too physically conspicuous to hide among humans, but he could find another place like this.
Maybe he should consider moving the trailer. It would be conspicuous on the road, but more conspicuous as a burned-out ruin. Fire inspectors might wonder why a hermit needed a big meat locker. If they checked it for DNA they would find out.
He considered burning on a monumental scale, a forest fire that incidentally consumed the trailer. That might not call attention to him if he planned it properly.
It would be unthinkable to abandon this place before he had a destination. Not very difficult to find, with time and resources. The past two homes, he’d arranged through the same Atlanta firm, a rural acreage broker who only worked online. Hunter’s Atlanta bank account was administered by computer and fueled by nighttime cash deposits.
Cooper’s purse had yielded an unexpected treasure: a roll of fifty hundred-dollar bills sewn into the lining. He had handled them only while wearing gloves. There was no pattern to the serial numbers; they were an assortment of five bills that looked and smelled brand new, with forty-five that had been in circulation. He crumpled them all up and soaked them in water with a little dirt, and dried them between sheets of newspaper.
It was interesting. Perhaps he should have talked to her longer. There was no way that money came from a regular paycheck, and details mattered. The more he knew about humans, the better his chance of eluding capture.
How long had he been doing this? He remembered recent events in microscopic detail, but only back to his first Alabama victim, six years ago. He had evidently not been programmed to “remember” anything before that. In a plastic envelope he had a birth certificate and a high-school diploma, along with drivers’ licenses from four states, with the same picture but different names.
He didn’t remember acquiring those documents, though he knew how he might buy replacements. They must have been with him when his masters brought him to Earth, probably just before his detailed memories began.
That had been in a run-down log cabin in a scrub pine swamp in Georgia. He had this old van and a cooler full of meat and a collection of fading memories, along with carefully sealed boxes of books and magazines.
He knew the meat was human but wasn’t sure how he had come by it. A memory of a lot of blood, and screams that stopped abruptly. From his aches he could tell he had been driving a long time. That was all.
He knew he wasn’t human; every human he’d seen was small and weak. He could deduce something of his heritage from the books and magazines, full of encoded references to his origin. The nature of his destiny unclear, ambiguous. He probably would have to die to fulfill it.
But he was not to die alone.
6.
“You got a new bike?” She was trying to smile, but her expression had an element of wide-eyed incredulity. Two new bikes the same month?
“Isn’t it a beauty?” I had rolled it up to her door, which she opened as I reached for the doorbell.
“But where’s the old one? I mean the old new one?”
“At a bike shop in Des Moines. I sort of traded it in—”
“Sort of? What, it was two weeks old?”
“This is sort of like a long test ride. I can take it back.”
“A hundred miles?”
I checked the cyclometer. “A hundred seven point two.”
“It is pretty,” she admitted. Sleek and classic, deep red lacquer. “How much?”
“A thousand dollars. Minus a penny.”
“Well, that was generous. How much you get for the old one? The old new one.”
“Three-fifty.” She pursed her lips and nodded. She probably thought that meant the total transaction had been $650; I didn’t elaborate. It was a thousand after the trade-in. A grand for a $1,350 bike was okay, even though a mathematical literalist, like Kit, might say it was actually $1,500, plus two weeks’ use of an increasingly clunky commuter bike. The Campy was like gliding on glass. I was still totally in love. But I hadn’t even had it long enough to add air to the tires.
“Can I try it?”
“Sure, go ahead.” She took it by the handlebars and looked down at the pedals and front chain ring, then the rear gear cluster.
“There’s no computer,” I said.
“Yeah, I see.” She frowned. “I had one like this when I was a kid, no computer.”