Work Done for Hire (5 page)

Stephen Spenser wasn't impressed by money, having grown up surrounded by rich people he didn't like. But there was a comfortable talismanic feel to the tight roll of C-notes, held with a fat rubber band, that rode in his left front pocket. Faded torn jeans, to go with his faded flannel shirt and well-worn tennis shoes.

The bicycle was a marvel of camouflage, or misdirection; a sturdy ancient Schwinn with a flaking paint job and a touch of rust. But the running gear and brakes were brand-new Campy and Shimano, the tires were Gators, and the seat cost more than the frame. It was comfortable and stopped on a dime and got forty miles to the gallon of Heineken.

It had two big reed baskets, one of which held his travel bag, carefully chosen after a couple of hours' browsing in pawn shops and thrift stores. It was beat-up khaki nylon, scuffed but strong, with lots of compartments and a lock. The middle part held a week's worth of clothes and dehydrated meals, and side pockets held wallet and change and a notebook, along with hardware like a bottle opener and flashlight and Swiss Army knife. What had really sold him on this one was a side pocket under a Velcro flap, large enough for a Glock 9-mm and two spare clips.

Under his shirt he carried a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson Chief's Special .38 Airweight—the kind of gun a private eye always had in the movies. But Steve knew too much about guns to rely on it alone. And Hunter was doubtless a big man. In Alabama he'd left three footprints in mud while he was carrying a two-hundred-pound victim. A police lab report said that it would take at least five hundred pounds to drive his size fourteens that deep. To kill him with a .38, you'd have to hit him in the eye or right down the ear, and Steve didn't want to get that close while the beast was still alive.

He recited the LAPD mantra: “Two in the chest, one in the head.” The first would get his attention, the second would kill him, and the third would kill him again. If he were human.

At Mr. Steinhart's insistence, he had a radio beacon Superglued to the underside of the seat. It used two hearing-aid batteries and would run for more than a year. If he were killed and the bike tossed somewhere, the cops could track it from fifty miles away. They might even find his body nearby.

If he were actually following the Southern Tier Trail, he'd start in the middle of St. Augustine. But Hunter wasn't going to nab anyone off a city street, so he studied the bus route and had the Greyhound drop him and his bike off at Molasses Junction.

It was like a scene out of
The Grapes of Wrath
. Bare dirt from horizon to horizon, a steady north wind, cold in the bleak sunshine, blowing needle-sharp sand into his face. He'd be headed west, so only his right ear would fill up with dirt.

The only building at the Molasses Junction crossroads was a general store. He locked his bike up, feeling foolishly urban, and carried his bag inside the dark dusty place. Mostly bare shelves. With the dust storm rattling the windows, it all felt like a set from a Woody Guthrie movie. With himself a fugitive from a Humphrey Bogart
noir
flick, armed to the teeth with no target in sight.

A tired old woman came out of a back room, wiping her hands on a bloody rag. Actually tomato guts. Behind her he could see a canning setup boiling, and a case of empty catsup bottles.

“What you want, somethin'?” She wasn't really that old. Her face was creased with fatigue, the lines stark in deep sunburn, maybe kitchen heat. Her body was not old, curves and muscle straining tight jeans and tank top. She turned halfway to adjust a Slim Jims display and not incidentally reveal that she was wearing a snub-nosed pistol in a butt holster. Probably smart in an isolated place like this. But the opposite of sexy.

He considered buying a box of .38 Special rounds to establish fellow-feeling, but decided against it. “Just a Coke, um, and a Slim Jim.”

“In the machine there.”

It was the kind of cooler he hadn't seen since he was a little boy, a big red icebox with a sliding top; inside, bottles of drinks racked in ice-cold water. He pulled out a twelve-ounce Coke in a heavy returnable bottle, also a time trip. There was a bottle opener at the cash register, which clanged and made satisfying greased-metal sounds. He got a quarter change for his dollar, and a finger-touch of warm flesh. “You need somethin', just holler.” He watched the .38 swivel back to the stockroom.

A good place to begin an adventure. Sex and guns and Mother Nature outside playing the noir witch. Forget Arlene and the evaporating check and weepy Mom and dear old Dad.

Just you and me, monster. I'm coming to get you.

I
was able to finish most of a chapter while she slept. She envied me for being able to get along on five or six hours' sleep; I envied her for being able to stay down for ten. She was always more rested than me, but then I theoretically had more time to work. An extra forty-hour week every ten days. If only I could get paid for reading trash fiction and watching TV, I'd be a wealthy man.

But this particular morning, I did write, and was pretty happy with it.

So was Kit. She read through it while we had motel-room instant in paper cups.

“Would they really have to shoot him in the eye, or the ear? I mean in the real world.”

“They say people who kill people for a living don't like .38s. The army stopped using them in the Spanish-American War, the Philippine part. The enraged Moro natives would absorb several shots and just keep coming.”

“Pretty tough customers.”

“Well, they tied leather thongs around their balls before they went into combat. The leather got wet and constricted, and the pain drove them mad.”

“That's got to be bullshit,” she said. “Racist bullshit. They couldn't walk.”

“Hey. I read it in a book. That's why the army changed from the .38 to the .45. The .45 bullet was big enough to knock them down.”

“But they don't use the .45 anymore. You said you had a 9-mm in the desert. That's got to be smaller.” She rubbed her chin. “Forty-five hundredths of an inch is like twelve millimeters. Way smaller.”

“Yeah, I guess. But it knocks them down better.”

“Goodness. Smaller is better. Where will it all end?”

“A tiny little bullet, obviously, that moves at the speed of light. A photon.”

“Have to be a heavy photon.”

“I'm sure they're working on it.” I should've paid attention in physics. How could a photon weigh anything, if it always moved at the speed of light? If it didn't move at the speed of light, it wouldn't be a photon.

“So is the monster really from another planet?”

“He thinks he is.”

“Yeah, but
you
know. Don't you?”

“Right now he's Schrödinger's Cat. And I haven't opened the box.”

“Ah.” She took a sip of coffee. “So you don't know yet.”

I wagged a pedantic finger at her. “That's not what I said.”

She squinted at me while wheels turned—she was the one who first told me about the paradox: Mr. S's cat is in a box, presumably soundproof, with a gun pointed at its helpless little head. The gun will go off if the trigger is struck by an alpha particle from an alpha-particle generator that the cat's sadistic owner purchased at the local quantum hardware store. Schrödinger's point was that because of the quantum nature of elementary particles, there was only a probability, not a certainty, that the alpha particle had done its job. You couldn't tell whether the cat was alive or dead without opening the box—which takes the problem out of the quantum universe and into the real world.

Of course in the real world, there would or would not be a smoking hole in the box and cat brains all over the place. But that's not what scientists mean by “real.”

“That's cute, Jack. You mean it literally?”

I shrugged.

“So right now—in your mind—the monster is both a human and an alien.”

I almost didn't say anything. I trickled a little bit of rum into my coffee. “Until I open the box,” I said.

__________

I had a WeatherCard but hadn't charged it, and of course didn't bring the adaptor, but the morning sky was seamless blue and the weekend forecast had been good when we left home. So we filled our water bottles and pedaled off into deepest darkest Iowa, which is to say sunny rolling hills with wildflowers anthropomorphically nodding approval as we cruised by on our modest quest. Then the smallest grey cloud peeked over the western horizon, and then it loomed, and then all hell broke loose, lightning and thunder and a screaming gale pelting us with fast fat drops.

Lightning blasted a copse of trees not a hundred yards in front of us, while I was looking at it and trying to decide whether to stop there for shelter. Then Kit's bike slipped on gravel and she went down hard. Gloves protected her hands, but her left knee was torn and the shoulder hurt.

The bike was all right but she couldn't ride it, left leg stiffening. She couldn't even push it, really.

Neither of our cell phones got a signal. “Let's just lock it and leave it here,” I shouted over the wind. “If somebody steals it, they steal it.”

She nodded, her face screwed tight. “You go on for help. Or back to the motel?”

“No! I'm not leaving you.”

We compromised by hiding the bike behind a sign and piling all her stuff on the back of mine, which I then trundled back toward the Tidy Inn while she limped alongside.

I wasn't much of a companion, pushing the double load through pelting rain and grit. I sort of wasn't there, going into a kind of zen state familiar from the desert: you can get through anything, one minute at a time. When the minute's up, do another minute. Go blank, stay blank.

So she startled me when she cried out “There! There it is!” A dim red VACANCY sign flickering in the gathering gloom. Only two hours and twenty minutes of trudge.

The cruddy place did look a thousand percent more comfortable than it had the evening before. The old crone got all maternal and taped up Kit's leg. She let us have the same room for ten dollars off, since it hadn't been made up yet. I could've collapsed into a pile of dirty laundry and slept for a week.

Kit filled the tub while I worked over the bike a little with paper towels and WD-40. Slipping into the water was pure heaven. Almost literally, like dying quietly and drifting off to a somnolent reward. We both fell asleep and woke up in cooling soup. While the tub drained we scrubbed each other with the hand shower attachment, more giggles than hygiene.

We carried lightweight emergency meals, dehydrated ramen or rice with mystery meat—just add hot water and pray—but decided to have regular food whenever it was available. So when we checked in we'd made a call to one of the Amana Colony restaurants, the Wheel, that did home dinner deliveries. I got dressed enough to open the door at eight, and a teenaged boy brought in armloads of Styrofoam boxes—the minimum order, a family dinner for four. Famished, we tore into the mountain of roast pork and sausage, mashed potatoes, green beans, beets, yams, and all. We didn't open the container of pickled ham, the place's specialty, saving it for tomorrow, wrapped up along with a loaf of fresh bread and some butter.

The motel TV only had network, so we lay in bed and watched mind-rot for a while. I fell asleep in the middle of the first sitcom, and when I woke up the room was dark except for the luminous clock, 4:44, a lucky-looking number. Kit snored quietly while I set up the laptop on the desk, angled so the light wouldn't bother her. I made some instant with hot water from the tap and sweetened it with rum, and let the screen take me into Hunter's world.

Hunter kept his police-band radio going all night while he sat on the steps of the dark trailer and peered out into the night with infrared goggles. He saw a fight between an owl and a weasel, but no human activity. If anybody was missing Lane Jared, PhD, they hadn't told the police.

You should know as much as possible about the things you eat. From his flat sharkskin wallet, Hunter could tell that Dr. Jared was thirty-two, single, and perhaps did not drive; he had a “non-driver's license,” a state ID, issued in Atlanta, and his leg muscles were so tough and stringy that if he owned a car he had probably only pushed it around for exercise.

He had a membership card for a vegetarian co-op, which no doubt was why he tasted so bland. Not enough poisons. He was either gay or complex; a hidden pocket in the wallet held a much handled photo of a plain-looking young man wearing only a smile and an erection. It also hid three tightly folded hundred-dollar bills; otherwise, Jared had only a single, a fiver, and a ten. No credit cards. An eight-year-old university ID showed him with a Rasputin-style black beard; the head freezing in Hunter's cooler was clean-shaven and going grey.

Most of the wallets Hunter collected from his meals were full of documents like membership cards and business cards and receipts. Dr. Jared was parsimonious in that regard. He wished now that he'd talked with the man awhile. He'd said he was a minister; was that a lie? Probably not. Maybe he was a Christian who believed in transubstantiation, and eating him would be a kind of perverse sacrament. It would have been fun to discuss that with him.

He would probably just scream, though, or get all weepy, like the last female. How could this happen to me? She asked that over and over. Perhaps you were a bad girl. Though you didn't taste bad. Lots of good fat.

When the sun came up, Hunter lumbered around the perimeter of his camp checking the alarm devices. Monofilament stretched at toe height. When he first set it up, touching the lines would ring little chimes. Now the system was more sophisticated; lights on a computer map inside would show where the intruder was.

If it was just one, he could shoot him from the dark. If it was a group, he would arm the trailer's timer and drive off in the van. The trailer would blow up after five minutes. The van would unroll two mats of nails on the gravel road to slow down pursuers, and where it intersected the state road, he'd buried a hundred-pound crate of dynamite topped with buckets of rusty nails.

Still, he might be caught. He hadn't decided whether to be taken alive. An autopsy would immediately reveal that he wasn't human, which would displease his masters. If he were captured, he would have a good chance of escaping before they found out the truth. But in the process of escaping, he might reveal his superhuman strength.

Exercise time. Hunter squatted over a truck axle, red with rust except for the two places where he gripped it, and smoothly he lifted it over his head. He pressed and curled it silently fifty times and let it drop.

Breathing a little hard, he crossed the clearing to where an ancient live oak had grown a stout limb about eight feet off the ground. He grabbed it and did twelve pull-ups, the tree groaning in protest, and then reversed the position of his grip and did twelve more. Then he did three with his right arm alone, grunting.

He could not run like a human, not in this gravity and atmosphere, but he staggered around his property three times in a well-worn figure eight path.

It made him hungry. He had a few cuts that had gone straight into the refrigerator's meat compartment. He took out two arm steaks and smeared them with chopped garlic in olive oil, then sliced an onion and fried it up in butter. Seared the steaks on both sides and lowered the heat to braise them in red wine with some rosemary. He took the jug of Gallo burgundy and sat on the steps, drinking from it while attacking a large can of Sam's Club potato chips.

Once each minute, he would stop chewing and listen. He could hear birds and animals going about their business and the quiet simmer of the steaks under the heavy cast-iron skillet top. The smell of rosemary and garlic and sweet flesh was intoxicating.

A large car or small pickup whispered by on the state road, more than a mile away. A human would not have heard it, he was sure; nor could a human smell the cooking so far away. Hikers were his only worry.

It smelled so good, we had to come and check.

You must join me, then.