“Not really, no. You weren’t disposable till you were overseas.” I hefted the rifle. “This thing is heavy. I guess it’s a match model, for accuracy. Deepens the mystery.”
“How so?”
“It’s wasted on me, really. I’m a pretty good shot, but I was far from the best in my platoon, even my squad. The army’s full of people who could shoot one round from a sniper rifle like this and shave a hair off a fly’s ass.”
“None of whom wrote a novel about a sniper.”
“More’s the pity.” I aimed it out the door. The scope really was beautiful, a hard bright image with no color fringe. I could spin the power up to 40X, but without support the image danced around like crazy; I couldn’t even tell what I was looking at.
“Can I try it?”
“Sure.” I spun the power all the way down and automatically made sure the safety was locked, not just “on.” Product of a thousand spot inspections.
She put it to her shoulder and pointed into the parking lot, the muzzle waving around in a sloppy orbit. She craned her neck, peering into the scope. “Don’t see anything.”
“Your eye’s too close. Back off to a natural distance.”
“Like this?” She leaned back too far.
“No—” I reached toward her and the room suddenly darkened as a huge form blocked off the light.
“What you all—” the big black woman said, and then screamed, and backed away so fast she tripped into the parking lot and fell hard onto her back.
I ran out to help, and Kit was right behind me, still holding the rifle. The woman’s eyes were open, showing mostly whites. I couldn’t feel a pulse in her neck, but her wrist had a slight one. “She’s alive.”
“Call 9-1-1?”
“No! Jesus!” I looked wildly around; there didn’t seem to be any eyewitnesses. “Leave the bikes. Get in the car and get the fuck out of here.”
“But…” She looked as helpless as I felt.
“I know. Let’s carry her in onto the bed and go!” She put the rifle down and took one arm. I took the other and we dragged the woman in through the door.
No question of lifting her dead weight onto the bed. I scooped up the book with all the hundreds. The loose high-tech round, the joystick. Picked up the rifle off the sidewalk.
“Maybe we should leave all that stuff behind?”
“No, maybe we’ll ditch it someplace else. Let’s just get outta here!”
We threw everything into the car and it started right up. I backed out carefully and turned it around.
In the distance, sirens.
“Fuck it!” I floored it and fishtailed out of the gravel lot onto the two-lane road.
“Don’t!” she said.
“’Course.” I took my foot off the gas and pulled over, reaching for my wallet. “‘I wasn’t running from the body, officer. Just the FBI and DHS.’”
Two Highway Patrol squad cars bore down on us, sirens screaming, blue lights flashing. They went right past the motel without slowing down. I clenched the wheel and watched them close in—and then pass us, engines roaring flat out.
We looked at each other. “So what was that all about?” she said. “We must not be the only criminals in Mississippi.”
“At least they’re not after this car.” I put it in gear but sat for a moment. “We really ought to…”
“Yeah. She could be really hurt.”
“We should check.” Still I hesitated. “Hell. ‘Avoid the appearance of wrongdoing.’” I did a slow U-turn and went back to the motel parking lot. The door to the room was still ajar.
She was still where we had left her, but her eyes were closed now. Still a pulse in her wrist. Her name tag said “Mary Taylor,” and tasked her with Customer Relations. And everything else, I supposed.
“Mary?” I said. “Miz Taylor?”
I put my hand behind her head and raised it slightly. There was a little blood in her hair. Her lids fluttered.
“You fell and hit your head,” I said, which was true.
“I was… you was…”
“You slipped on the gravel,” Kit said.
She stared at Kit. “You had a gun.”
“Hunting rifle,” I said. “She was just checking the sights when… you came to the door.”
“What you suppose to be huntin’, this time of year?”
“Nothing yet. It was a present.”
She rolled over onto an elbow and touched the back of her head gingerly. “Don’t like guns.”
“Me neither,” Kit said emphatically.
The woman fixed me with a baleful stare. “This present. The man give it to you, why he didn’t just knock on your door?”
“My uncle Johnny,” I improvised, “he’s kind of crazy. I mean, he’s always doing stuff like this, elaborate pranks.”
“With a gun? Sure.” She sat up with surprising grace, and a groan. “Your Johnny, he give my boy a twenty-dollar bill to tell you look in that room. That’s some uncle.”
“Yeah. He’s crazy.”
“You wouldn’t mind if I called the police.” She said po-leese, mocking her own accent.
I might have paused too long. “Do what you want.”
“Let me put it some different way. Would it be worth a hundred dollars to you fo’ me not to call the police?”
“I suppose it would.”
“Uh-huh. Then I suppose it might be worth a thousand.”
“No way.”
She rocked a little bit, thinking. “How ’bout for five hundred bucks I let you tear that page out of the logbook, and I never seen you, neither of you.”
“I can’t believe this,” I said to Kit. “Bargaining with a woman we came back to—”
“You best believe it,” the woman said. “I do appreciate you coming back, but get real. You got money and I ain’t. You on the wrong side of the law, and I got a cell phone. You want that page for five hundred dollars?”
“We’re not criminals,” Kit said.
“I know you ain’t that kind. If I thought you’d do me harm I’d be hiding.”
“So you’re just trying to make an honest buck,” I said.
“Dishonest buck,” she conceded. “You got a lot more than five hundred dollars, and I got a lot less.”
“Okay,” I said, “but you have to throw in the cell phone.”
She nodded. “Six hundred, then.” She unclipped the cell phone from her belt holder and handed it to me. Just a symbolic gesture, but I took it.
“Why don’t you put the bikes in the car,” Kit said, turning her back to count out bills from a banded stack. “I’ll take care of the logbook.”
“Okay.” It wasn’t quite that simple. I wheeled the bikes out to the hatchback, but they were too long to just stuff into the back. I had a panic moment—no tools—but Mary told me there was a tool kit under the counter in the office. I removed the front wheels and the bikes stacked into the back easily.
While I had a pair of pliers, I took the precaution of sabotaging this new rifle the same way—take the powder out of a bullet and fire just the primer, to lodge it halfway up the barrel. Useless to an assassin, but that was never really in my job description.
8.
I called Underwood on the lady’s cell as soon as it was 9:00 in Washington but got a recording. I asked her to call this number back and also send an e-mail. Phone trouble.
We decided to stay off the expressway, and just crawl down the two-lane. Might as well make it easy for the Mississippi cops, if Mary Taylor decided not to stay quiet for $600. We had bigger problems.
How had the Enemy caught us? From the billboard encounter we knew that they weren’t following cell phone information; I’d stomped the cell long before that. Maybe, far-fetched as it seems, the mystery did go back to the surgery in the army hospital in Germany—a tracer bug imbedded in muscle mass. What would it use for power? Can a tiny battery or fuel cell work after sitting for ten years? Maybe there was some biological thing, generating electricity from my own body chemistry.