No Man's Land (John Puller 4)

back of the van.

Rogers slowly followed. She turned around, kissed him again, and started to undress. Rogers looked around at the cluttered interior of the van and then stared over at her as her clothes hit the dirty floor. He eyed something on a shelf, pulled out the cloth tarp, and laid it down.

“How gentlemanly of you,” said Davis with a smirk. She crawled over to him.

He looked down at her. He had seen her naked twice now. But this was different. Her body was…beautiful. Even the dragon on the triceps was arousing him.

Davis pushed her breasts into him as she reached up and slipped off his jacket. When she started to undo the buttons on his shirt he stopped her.

She looked uncertain. “You don’t want to?”

He was thinking, No, I don’t want you to see the scars.

“Better this way,” he said.

They lay down on the tarp, he above her.

He started breathing more quickly. And his brain seemed to be misfiring.

She said, “Um, you can keep your clothes on, but you do have to unzip your pants.”

She helped him with this, and then he settled down on top of her. But his brain was still misfiring.

In frustration he gripped the edge of a shelf built into the van’s wall so hard it broke off and a heavy tool toppled down and almost hit them.

“Shit, what was that?” exclaimed Davis, who half sat up.

“It’s…it’s nothing.” He slowly settled her back down.

“Paul, everything okay?”

His heart was beating so fast he thought it might burst. He couldn’t remember how to do this.

I can’t even remember how to make love to a woman. How pathetic is that?

“Paul,” she said again, squirming under him.

He felt a strong impulse to grab her neck and break it. Desperate, he racked his brains and suddenly hit on it.

Davis and Quentin in the bedroom. He rolled over and brought her up on top of him, settling his hands around her taut waist. He was careful to grip her very gently.

She smiled down at him. “How’d you know I like it this way?”

“Lucky guess,” he muttered.

Ten minutes later it was over.

Because he had failed and grown soft.

She lay down next to him.

“That was great.”

“Don’t bullshit.”

“It was great for me. I’m sorry it wasn’t for you.”

“It was great for me, even if…” He looked away from her.

“I liked the way you were holding me. You’re so strong, but you were so gentle. I like that. I liked that a lot.”

He looked at her searchingly. “Really?”

She kissed him on the lips. “Yeah, really.”

She nestled closer to him and put her bare leg over him.

A minute passed and he heard her soft snores.

Then he closed his eyes and joined her.

Chapter

40

ROGERS SLOWLY BLINKED himself awake.

Next to him, Davis slept on.

He rubbed the back of his head and tried to make sense of what had happened between them.

But he couldn’t. He had always imagined that he had left humanity behind when they had changed him. And he had thought having sex with a woman impossible.

Before he’d viciously killed a man in a bar fight and gone to prison for ten years, he had killed others. Only he’d never been caught. He had no fear. But he also had nothing else that would inhibit him from taking another’s life.

He had read of serial killers who were missing something critical in their frontal lobes. It was the significant difference that made one normal or made one a monster. Just a piece of DNA lacking or forming the wrong sequence. Or a lobe not quite as developed as it should be. You went from mainstream to Jeffrey Dahmer.

And that’s what they did to me. I was born right and they made me wrong.

But ten years in prison had given Rogers something he thought he would never have. An opportunity to be away from anyone he might have otherwise killed. A buffer of bars and guards. It had given him time to think, to regain a measure of control.

He turned on his side and studied the sleeping Davis.

What had surprised him, when he finally thought about it, was that he had no impulse to harm her. But he had to remind himself that he had killed the couple in the alley only when they tried to kill him. And Donohue the gun dealer would still be alive if he’d just stayed in his truck eating his Mickey D’s.

And I let the boy live.

He rubbed his eyes and wondered whether what was apparently happening to him was a good thing or not. After five minutes he had no conclusive answer.

He looked at his watch. It was nearly eight o’clock. The sun was shining brightly. Davis was still sound asleep next to him.

He once more marveled at her beauty. And then he looked down at his hands. Scars. He lifted his shirt. More scars. He touched the incision on his head. The biggest scar of all.

The analogy was obvious, Rogers thought: Beauty and the Beast.

He climbed back into the driver’s seat and looked at himself in the rearview mirror.

For so long as he could remember he had looked just like this.

Not his features. That was obvious enough.

No, it was the look in his eyes.

Haunted. Crippled. Hungry for something I’ll probably never get.

“Paul?”

He turned to see Davis rise and start dressing.

“Yeah?”

“I need to get home.”

“Okay. I’m ready. Let’s go.”

She climbed into the passenger seat. As he started the van she reached over and kissed him on the cheek.

“What was that for?”

“Do I have to have a reason?”

“I guess not.”

“We need to do this again. Really soon.”

“You think that’s smart?”

“I don’t care if it’s smart. It’s what I want.”

She gave him directions to the destination. He didn’t know if it would be the rental on the beach or the fortress where the owner had taken a dive into expensive cobblestones.

It turned out to be the fortress.

As they neared the destination, Rogers began to panic a bit. What if Jericho was here? What if, despite all the years, she recognized him?

When Davis directed him to the front gates he said, “Damn, after what you said about the problems with your parents, I wasn’t expecting something like this.”

“It is a little much. But I hit the jackpot. The people who adopted me are really, really rich.”

He stared at her, dumbstruck. Ballard had adopted her? So he’d killed her father? “So you live with them here?”

“That’s right.”

“But I thought you said you were on your own? That you didn’t have anybody?”

“I didn’t really know you back then. Now I do. A girl has to be careful.”