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 soporific 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.”