“And … after?”
She didn’t answer.
Heat shimmered up from Potar Road, invisible fire blurring the field beyond.
At the top of the rise, as the white sun took the sky, there was no shade, only less of the glaring light.
The clouds were still there, still spreading slowly out of the west, moving slowly.
He stood, fingers massaging his waist to the small of his back. He was tired of watching the infrequent spurt of traffic along the road, tired of watching a bedraggled one-eyed crow trying to find something to eat in the remains of a squirrel, and he was damn tired of sweating like a pig inside his own damn house. He wondered how long it would be before those damn clouds finally got here.
Aware of her gaze, preternaturally steady, he walked stiffly into the hall and flicked on the air-conditioning switch at the thermostat’s base. A glance toward the back door. How quick was she, really? Fast enough to get off a shot before he was through the door? She wouldn’t have to concern herself about neighbors—the nearest one north was Maurice, the closest south Janelle and Peter.
He had wanted isolation.
He cursed it now.
Besides, she wouldn’t have to shoot if he got outside in one piece.
It wouldn’t take her long to run him down.
In the kitchen he filled a glass with water and drank it without taking a breath, refilled and leaned back against the sink, trying to think, scowling at the stifling heat. A check of the window above the sink showed him nothing. The sun was too bright, trees and grass bleached; no miracles like a wandering horse, a wandering hiker.
Just the heat.
He mopped his forehead with his arm.
He reached into a drawer and pulled out a spoon, tapped it absently on the counter while he waited for the lethargy to pass. It was a way to let her know he was still here, maybe keep her away until he could muster some options.
A hand over his face.
Another glass of water.
The spoon, tapping slowly.
She stood in the doorway, unarmed, head slightly tilted to the right, staring at the spoon, then at him.
Then she was gone.
He heard the hollow silence when the air-conditioning was shut down.
He smiled, raised a quick eyebrow, and placed the glass in the sink. Ran the water, cupped his palms, splashed his face and sighed aloud, following the clear spiral into the drain—as if it might give him a magical answer—before he turned off the faucet and grabbed the hand towel, dried his face, and draped the towel over his shoulder.
Sweat gathered along his spine, under his waistband.
He realized he had begun to breathe through his mouth.
Funny how nobody had bothered to call back, or stopped around to check on him.
Funny how insisting on living alone for so long had formed habits in others, leaving him alone.
His stomach growled; he made himself a sandwich, took a beer from the refrigerator, and ate and drank standing up.
How fast was she? Really.
In the hall he reached for the doorknob, and pulled his hand back. He couldn’t think straight. Open the door, bullet in the back; get through the door, those teeth at his throat.
Jesus.
He took his time moving up the hall, not realizing how truly short it was until he reached the living room before he was ready; he leaned against the archway wall, arms folded, and raised the eyebrow again.
Rachel sat on the couch, pushed into the corner nearest him so that all he could see was the back of her head, the curve of the leg pulled up and under. The gun was on the table beside her. It mocked him, dared him, and all he could do was look away in disgust.
He couldn’t think.
He reached around the wall and flicked the switch up.
“Tum it off,” she said, not looking around.
“I’m dying in here, for God’s sake.”
“Tum it off.” Her voice was slow, throaty, as if she were drowning.
How fast was she now?
He shifted, braced himself, and lunged for the gun.
She turned at the same moment.
He froze when he saw her face—lips drawn back, eyes narrow, a sudden flush smeared across her cheeks.
“Tum it off,” was all she said.
He hesitated, not six inches between the reach of his fingers and the gun’s handle.
Six inches.
Those teeth.
Those goddamn pale-dark eyes.
He nodded, straightened, and did as he was told, leaned his forehead against the wall and lectured himself quickly and silently on the virtues of prudence and the pitfalls of being stupid. Then he dropped into his chair and let the heat smother him.
It’s what she wanted, after all.
She was waiting for the night.
Chapter Fifteen
When they stopped for gas, Ruthann put on a pair of oversize sunglasses and stepped out of the car, stretched languidly, and walked around to the trunk, leaned against it and opened her shirt halfway down as she scanned the empty highway, the hills and pastures on the other side. She fanned herself with one hand, squinting, and braced one sandaled foot against the rear fender. Despite the fact she was in the shade of the gas island’s corrugated overhang, she might as well have been standing in full sun.
Rachel, she thought, wiping a droplet of sweat from the hollow of her throat, I’m going to kill you personally, I swear to God I will.
Not five seconds later, Peter came out, grinning, pushing back his hair, wiping his palms on his jeans.
“Y’all need some help?” he asked, raising his voice against the sudden blare of a piggy-back truck raising dust toward Knoxville.
He stepped up onto the island and leaned against the pump. She saw him check the car’s interior, hard to do with the tinted glass, and puffed up a little to distract him, shifting her leg slightly outward. “Depends,” she answered. She looked toward the market. “You alone?”
“Could be.”
“You a garage?”
He shook his head, stepping closer but staying up on the island. Looking down.
She obliged.
“Damn thing keep making noise.” she told him.
He slipped a hand into his hip pocket. puffing a little himself. “Your, uh, friends, they don’t work cars?”
She grinned. “Not a bit.”
He lifted his chin, scratched his neck thoughtfully. “Well. look, I ain’t really a garage, no, not anymore. But I’ve been known to do some work here and there, you know? Friends and all? Emergencies and such? Strictly off the record, of course.”
“Of course.”
He checked the rear window again. “So. You want me to check ’er out?”
Slowly she turned her head toward the highway.
“Damn, it’s hot.”
“Cooler inside.”
She waited a minute before she nodded, took her time looking back. “Bet it is.” She pushed away from the car with her heel, patting his stomach with her palm as she passed.” They know how to Pump gas.” She jerked her head toward the car. “You got cold beer?”
She walked on, knowing he was watching, pausing only when she heard him rap a knuckle against the driver’s window, heard the hiss of the pane descending.
“Be better if you turn the engine off,” she heard him say, and heard Bobby grunt an answer.
Once inside, she took her sunglasses off, twirling them in one hand. Empty counter to the right, a coffee maker brewing, a row of hot dog spindles, a small display case that held sandwich meats and cheese. She strolled casually across the floor, checking the aisles, seeing no one crouched down there, looking for something on a bottom shelf A metal door with a peep hole behind the counter, closed.
She turned when she heard the bell ring over the entrance.
“Bitch of a day, ain’t it,” he said, coming toward her.
She hoisted herself onto the counter, stretched her neck, plucked at the shirt.
“Nice and cool in here, though, you were right.”
She almost laughed aloud: he couldn’t stop his hands, didn’t know where to look now that they were alone, didn’t know how to pose.
She plucked at her shirt again. “Too cool.” Her hand reached out, an inch shy of his arm. “You ever see that John Wayne movie, the one where he’s in that old mansion, only a lady left and some servants?” A shift, and her fingers had his sleeve. “She’s kind of pretending she don’t want anything to do with them, she being a Southern lady and they being Yankee soldiers and all.” She tugged, gently. “You know this one?”
He shook his head, ducked it a little, then suddenly checked the window.
“Oh, don’t worry about them,” she said with a dismissing wave. Another tug, and she had him again, a step closer. “They were at dinner, these soldiers and the lady? She has all kinds of stuff, even though there’s a war and all, and she has this big old plate.” Close enough now that her knees touch his thighs. “Has lots of chicken on it, you know?”
His expression made her smile, and she very carefully placed the sunglasses on the counter beside her. Her legs parted, and she drew him closer. He was handsome, no question about it, in a young man, old boy way.
Not her type at all.
“Look,” he said, trying to be bold, still a little nervous about the car outside.
She ignored him. “So she stands up, see, and she has on this gown, this dress that has a neckline …” She used her free hand to trace the image across her chest, as slow as her speech. “Then she kind of leaned over. Like this? Holding the plate of chicken?” She licked her lips and smiled. “You like chicken?”
“I guess.”
Her legs wrapped around his, one at a time, carefully, so as not to spook him, and she saw his chest rising, falling, not thinking anymore, she was sure of it. She could smell it as her right hand slid around his neck and up into his hair.
“The lady says,” whispering now, close to his ear, “would you gentlemen like a wing … or a breast.”
He didn’t answer, didn’t smile, didn’t blink.
“What do you want, Peter?”
His hands answered for him.
She sighed, tilted her head as he tilted his, and pushed herself lightly into his palms, and let him kiss her.
Felt him stiffen a moment later, but she didn’t let him pull away.
“Hey, how did you know—”
She grabbed his hair, cupped her other palm under his chin, and twisted his head around.
It made hardly any noise at all.
Chapter Sixteen
Jonelle drew blood, biting down hard on the in side of her cheek to stop herself from crying out. The distortion of the peep hole made the view seem unreal, and she had to pull away and blink before she was sure.
Peter was dead.
The woman still had him snared between her legs, one hand holding him away as a large, bearded man came through the entrance, saw them, and grinned. He said something, then turned and beckoned toward the car she had seen at the pump.
They’ll check here, she realized with a start, and backed away, hands tight at her sides to keep a spiraling panic from gaining control. A fast scan of the office for something to use against them was futile, too many at once for the knife, and there was no time to open the safe and get the gun Peter kept here. She had to get to the house.
Peter was dead.
She checked the peep hole again. Her brother was gone, the woman still on the counter, stripping the wrap ping from a candy bar with her teeth. The bearded man had lit a cigarette, shook a scolding finger at the woman, and bared his teeth in a soft, head-back laugh.
Jonelle nearly doubled over at the sudden nausea that made her shudder.
Oh God, she thought with a stagger-step backward; oh God, they’re here.
A clamp fastening abruptly around her head made her dizzy. She reached blindly behind her, found the doorknob, and held on, feeling the anger rise as the nausea subsided, feeding it with the muffled voices she heard in the store.
The muffled laughter.
The doorknob turned.
She gaped at it, holding her breath, trying to remember if it was locked or not.
“Damn.” a man’s voice said.
”Just break it in,” suggested another, sounding a lot younger. “We ain’t got all day. Hell, the damn thing looks like plywood.”
A wary check outside, and a fearful scan of the slope. It looked so high, a mountain of grass topped by a forest. If she didn’t get up there fast enough, if one of them decided to go around the building instead of trying to smash the office door, if the ground was still slippery from the rain, if she fell, … too many ifs.
Something struck the inner door.
She ran.
Across the blacktop, using her hands when she reached the slope to pull herself upward, not looking back but waiting for the cry of alarm until she plunged through the shrubs and threw herself to the ground, gasping, not quite sobbing. Her face was drenched, T-shirt clinging to her chest and back, her hair a sodden weight that made her head too heavy to lift. Pushing branches aside, she saw nothing below but the roof of the car at the pump. No movement, no sign of life.
Soon, though.
Soon.
Another sprint even though she was winded, keeping as low as she could, her back and thighs protesting, eyes stinging and blurring. She didn’t dare use the front door, ran around the side instead and fell wheezing, weeping, into the kitchen. Raging. Kicking to her feet and racing into the living room, standing to one side of the curtain framed picture window, and holding her breath when a man, the tall bearded one, stepped through the office door and squinted up at the house.
Do they know?
He left the door ajar as he returned inside.
It wouldn’t be long.
She hurried back to the kitchen and lunged for the wall phone, dialed Jim’s number, and cursed, nearly shrieked, when the busy signal sounded. She slammed the receiver back onto its cradle and dropped into a chair, elbows on the table, palms pressed to her temples.
She needed to think, needed a moment however long to settle the whirlwind that used to be her mind.
She couldn’t stay, Peter was dead.
She had to get to the garage, get to her bike, get to Jim’s and tell him what happened.
They were here.
A series of slow deep breaths soon calmed her without disarming the rage or dulling its edge.
She tried calling Maurice, but no one answered; she tried Dunn’s Place, but the girl who answered told her Nola was too busy and couldn’t be reached.
There was no one else. She was alone.
They were here.
A second trip to the living room; this time the car had been brought around to the back door.
She didn’t have to wonder what they had done, what they would do, to her brother. She had not yet seen it firsthand, but she’d heard Jim speak of it often enough so that she leaned heavily against the wall and pressed a fist to her stomach.
They would do it to her, too.
If they caught her, they would do it to her.
A car’s impatient horn shifted her attention to the highway, and a ragged line of a dozen vehicles sped west past the station, another line east, this one mostly trucks. Then she thought she saw Maurice’s old Lincoln sweep by, but the sun was too bright, and her squinting gave her nothing but the first spark of a headache.
A state patrol car followed a van, hanging back, not passing.
Four bikers in tandem pairs.
An ordinary day in an ordinary hot summer, and they didn’t know. None of them knew.
She wondered if the Modeens were going to wait until sunset, hiding out in the market until they had shadows to roam in. If they did, she had a chance to get away without being heard. She could roll the bike across the side lawn, kick it if she had to up the short embankment to the road, and keep going until she was out of sight. The heat would pro
bably kill her, but it was better than doing nothing.
A car pulled in to the pumps then, and she almost found the nerve to throw the door open and scream; but it pulled away after only a few seconds, tires protesting angrily as it swerved onto the service road that would take it back to the highway. Someone had put up the “Closed” sign. Nobody was going to stop; nobody was going to help her.
Leave now!
Oh … Peter.
Then they came out of the office, two men and the woman, and one pointed at the house.
When will they be here?”
“You worry too much, Jim. Soon enough. You have to be patient.”
“What about the others? My—”
“We’ll get them when we need them.”
“All of them?”
She looked at him, looked at the ceiling, and ran her tongue over her top lip. “I … don’t think so.”
Nola leaned impatiently against the cash-register counter, looking at but not seeing the handful of late lunch customers spread through the booths. Cider yelled something at the cook in back. A fly bounced against the ceiling, over and over. The shrill yell of a small child in the parking lot, the answering shout of its mother.
She had tried Jim twice in the past hour, both times getting nothing but a busy signal. After the second call, Cider had pulled her into the kitchen, red-faced, hands on his wide hips, and reminded her of those church folk who would be here any minute, two buses, who knows how many starving kids and their desperate mothers. Before she could get a word in, he gave her the you’re-atwork-damnit-not-home routine she was so familiar with, she could have given it back to him word for word. As it was, her nerves were only drawn more tightly, and it was all she could do from throwing her apron into his face and walking out. It wasn’t, she thought as she stared at the diners, as if she really needed this damn job anymore. Her local bank had a nest so deeply feathered she could have traveled first class around the world with two friends and a damn dog, and still have enough left over for a trip back the other way. But she was used to it, it was comfortable, and Jimmy needed her besides.
She rolled her eyes.
Sure, darlin’, right.
That man needed her like he needed a hole in the head, and who the hell did she think she was kidding?
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