We were approaching the midpoint of our journey, that barren stretch where the bedrock breaks the soil and the houses fall away like a shed skin. Lights got further and further apart. Here and there, on the hills, I saw the fallen stars of night-blooming flowers twist towards the moonlight. Their scent was faint, but bitter.
And Lester P. Budgell began to look at me more often, with a kind of wistfulness.
At last, he cleared his throat.
“Older lady like you,” he began, testing the ground for pitfalls. “Maybe you need someone looking out for you, all alone on a holiday trip. Your kids, maybe.”
“I have no children.”
“Husband, then? Friends?”
“All dead.”
He liked that. Hunger jumped in his eyes, a fact he tried to conceal by immediately transferring his attention to the steering wheel.
“Road’s a dangerous place, ma’am,” he said.
“Oh yes,” I replied. Almost as softly as he had. “I know.”
With that, we reached either an impasse or an understanding. He stared out through the windshield at the dangerous road ahead, reduced by the night to a pair of headlights crawling over the asphalt miles. The car sped on, unhindered by questions, black tar unravelling under our wheels like a spool of funereal ribbon. And the moon looked down.
I shut my eyes one final time, and slept.
* * *
There was a distant explosion.
Some time later, I resurfaced to the dull thud and scrape of a shovel’s blade on sand.
I lay in the back of the car. The hatch was up, obstructing the rear window. I stretched, rose, and stepped out for a better look, pausing only to check myself in the car door mirror.
As I thought. A neat bullet hole bisected my forehead.
Poor Lester. He had his routine down so pat—the “aw shucks, ma’am” country boy spiel was quite believable, and he obviously knew his territory and weaponry inside out. He had had practice. It would be interesting, in an academic kind of way, to try and spot how many similar graves dotted the surrounding hills. Not a lot of imagination to go with his initiative, however. He’d just fallen over a sweet deal and run with it ever since, because it worked too well to risk variation.
And here he was now, down on his polyester knees in the dirt, scratching out a shallow hole big enough for a large child. Or a small woman. His breath came in wheezy gasps as he threw each shovelful aside.
I stood and watched attentively for a few minutes before I tapped him on the shoulder.
“Hello, Mr. Budgell.”
He shrieked and jumped to his feet, dropping the shovel.
“You’re dead,” he said.
“True,” I conceded. “But you cannot really take credit for that.”
He drew the gun without thinking about it, and shot me six times in the chest. Point-blank range. He kept shooting, even after he ran out of bullets.
I yawned.
Then I broke down the door to his head with a single blow, and went inside.
Lester P. Budgell’s house took up his entire inner landscape, although a thicket of blasted trees moped around the front windows, shutting out the light. The house itself had many rooms, most filled with the leavings of his childhood—Playboy playmates whose faces had been erased with exacto-knives, a cat’s head on a spindle set amongst a circle of pastel birthday candles, his older sister Alice’s brassiere. As the upper levels grew gradually more modern, the souvenirs he kept there grew correspondingly more vocal. Some chambers had been sealed for years, and their inhabitants were extremely grateful when I let them go.
The upshot, boring as it seems, was that Lester had been picking up vagrants of both sexes and all ages along this strip of highway since he first got his real job as a travelling salesman. He would lie to them, charm them, take them out into the hills and eventually kill them. If they were female, he would shoot them in the head to preserve their attractiveness and then have sex with the bodies before he buried them. If not, he would hunt them on foot until he grew bored, shoot them in the knees and brain them with the shovel as they tried to crawl away. Two or three a trip, eight trips per year, ten years on the job And none of them had been missed yet.
“Puerile,” I muttered.