“Then who’s tearing who apart?”
“Serial killers, mass murderers. No vampires, no werewolves, nothing like that.”
The waitress made one of those faces that suggested that she wasn’t likely to be interested in anything this guy wrote about. At least, not until she saw how well he tipped. If he dropped twenty percent or better, then she’d be a lot more interested next time. She knew a couple of writers. They were always broke. Only people who tipped worse were college students.
“You ready to order?” she asked, setting the pot down and pulling her order pad from her apron.
“If I do, will you answer the question?”
“You taking a poll?”
“I’m researching a book. The lead character in my novels is out here from Illinois to participate in a multistate manhunt for a killer. I’m trying to get a sense of what people are like here. Moods, politics, relationships, personalities.”
“Why not just make it up?”
He shrugged, blew across his coffee cup, sipped, and set it down. “Better to draw on real life.”
“Small-town color,” she said, “is that it? Make sure the hicks are properly redneck and uneducated?”
Gericke laughed. “I grew up in the burbs outside of Chicago. Not exactly ‘big town.’ And, no, I’m not profiling everyone as a redneck. It takes all kinds of people to make a town. There’s no one ‘type.’” He ticked his head toward the street outside. “I’ve met some interesting people so far. Chief Goss, a reporter named Trout, and —”
“Billy Trout? You met him?” Shirl managed a smile for that. Without the smile she looked north of fifty and off the radar for personality vitality, but the smile dropped fifteen years from her and chipped away a lot of the gray clay that seemed to have been built around her.
“You know him?”
Shirl gave him the kind of laugh that said that she not only “knew” Billy Trout, but could tell you stories.
“He comes in here every now and then,” she said with a wonderfully coquettish slant of her eyes that made Gericke smile. He’d already planned to base a character on Trout, but he was starting to sniff a juicy subplot about the seedy newsman with a soul and the lonely but still sexy diner waitress. Maybe she pines for the guy, or maybe she’s the one that got away. Something like that. Gericke knew he could take that and run with it. Put some desperate sweat-in-the-dark sex into the book.
“I’m planning on writing him into the novel,” said Gericke. “Not under his name, of course, but a character based on him.”
Shirl laughed. “Well, that wouldn’t be a stretch, mister, ’cause Billy is a character.”
At the other end of the diner the door opened and a man in a rain-soaked hoodie stepped inside.
“Damn, Sonny, close the door!” yelled Shirl, then she dropped her voice and in a confidential tone said to Gericke, “Speaking of characters. This one never did have enough brain cells to know when to come in out of the rain.”
Gericke hid a smile behind his coffee cup as he turned to look at the man. He couldn’t see Sonny’s face, but he was still standing in the doorway, his foot propping the door open. Rain was already pooling on the red tile floor.
“Come on, Sonny,” barked Shirl in a voice used to yelling out orders during packed lunch crowds of truckers. “In or out. Jeez … were you born in a damn barn?”
Sonny took a step forward, and Gericke frowned. The man moved heavily, awkwardly. Drunk, this early in the day? He figured he could get some mileage out of a character like that, too.
The door swung shut as Sonny took another couple of steps into the diner. He turned right and left as if uncertain of where he was.
“Come on and sit down,” said Shirl, affection tempering her annoyance. “Get some hot coffee into you before you catch your …
“Holy Christ!” yelled Shirl. She grabbed a clean towel and hurried down the counter as she yelled over her shoulder for Gericke to call the police. “Sonny … good lord, what happened to you? Were you in an accident?”
She came around the end of the counter, raising the hand with the towel, her face showing both a clear revulsion and a take-charge strength. Sonny staggered toward her, reaching out as if to accept the towel. Or a hug. Or …
“No…” said Gericke. The word escaped his mouth before he knew why he said it. A visceral, instinctive reaction. Then he said it louder as he came off his stool. “No!”
Shirl flicked a confused look at him.
Sonny leaped at her, slamming her back against the counter, his fingers tangling in her hair, pulling her head back, stretching her throat wide and pale. There was a scream, a deep moan, and then a flash of bright red that shot all the way to the overhead lights.
By then Gericke was moving, running down the length of the empty diner. He had no weapon, he was not a fighter, but none of that mattered. He dove at Sonny like a defensive tackle, knocking the man sideways, breaking the ugly contact between him and Shirl. Hot blood sprayed the side of his face and as he bore Sonny to the ground, Gericke heard the wet, choking, burbling sound as Shirl tried to speak. In a weirdly disjointed and detached part of his brain, Gericke wondered what the dying waitress needed to say so badly that she would try and force the words out through a torn windpipe. He would like to have put that in his next book.
He and Sonny crashed to the floor and suddenly all thoughts of writing and dialogue and curious characters were swept away. The only thing on Gericke’s mind then was keeping those red-smeared teeth away from his own throat.
He never heard the door open. Did not hear the wind and rain whip in, or the slap of slow, shuffling feet on the soaked red tiles of the diner.
Nick Pulsipher hated the place. The motel had been seedy when it was built back in the seventies and it had lost ground since. On the best nights he got a couple of decent family types looking to break up a long drive in a cheap room. Once in a while there were some bikers worth talking to. Sometimes even somebody from his home state of Nevada — people who had actually heard of Henderson, where he grew up. Though never anyone from Caliente, where he’d lived before moving east to this place. Nick thought that it might be an upward move, going from desk clerk to manager in the same chain of roach motels; but after three years here it was his opinion that if Caliente was the absolute asshole of America, then Stebbins was the “taint.” As career moves go, this one wasn’t going into the history books.
At least the motel office had cable, if the storm didn’t knock that out. The lights had already flickered and he wouldn’t have bet a torn dollar bill on making it through the night with lights, power, and cable all intact.
The rain was like a constant animal roar. The customers in the six rented rooms might as well have been on the moon. He hoped none of them needed anything from him. Nick did not want to go out in this shit. Winds like that, you don’t hold on to something, next thing you know you’re wearing ruby slippers and skipping down a yellow brick road.
He went around the counter and peered out through the window. The awning kept the rain from hitting the glass, but even with that it was hard to see all the way across the parking lot. The Crescent Motel was actually built like a blocky letter
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered. The carpet would be soaked, and when it dried it would smell like old underwear. He saw three people run in through the open door, but with the failing light and the rain it was hard to make out who they were. 18 was rented by a woman traveling with her grown daughter, heading to Washington, D.C., for some political thing. At least that’s what they told Nick during check-in. One-nighters. All well and good, but not if that one night left him with a soaked carpet and a mother of a cleanup job.
He saw two more people come out of the rain and enter the unit. Then another. And another.
“What the hell are they doing over there?”
