“That would make me extraordinary then, right?” Reassured, he slid quickly from uncertainty into the home base of cocky smugness; professor to teenager in less than sixty seconds flat.
“Don’t push your luck,” I said without any real heat. But all the while I was thinking that he wasn’t far off the mark. Not far at all.
Chapter 22
Lunch turned out to be more exciting than I’d planned. It wasn’t the fun fest that had ended up with me shot in a parking lot, but neither was it hot dogs and a football game on the big screen. It just goes to show that it’s true what they say. No good deed goes unpunished, “unpunished” being the euphemism for many things. It could be a mild inconvenience or it could be a royal ass kicking. My punishment lay, as it usually did, somewhere near the ass-kicking end of the spectrum.
Picking up the pregnant girl was my first mistake.
Several minutes into the ride, Michael spoke up. He’d been busy entertaining the malevolent Zilla. Out of the cage and creating havoc, it was a must-buy option for every car—air, power locks, carnivorous eel with fur. And then there was the odor. What genetic manipulation had given Michael in healing and supersmarts, it had obviously taken away from his sense of smell in the worst sort of robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul scenario.
“I was thinking,” he contemplated as the ferret perched on his shoulder. “One of the books mentions a Dr. Bellucci who . . .” He stopped and reached over to tap my arm. “Stefan, there’s a girl.”
I’d already seen her. She was standing nearly half a mile past the park entrance. On the gravel shoulder she stood prim and proper as a princess attended by her royal hound. They matched, the two of them. Woven into two thick strawberry blond plaits, her hair was nearly identical in color to the red-gold color of the dog sitting upright beside her. An unusual dog, it looked as if someone had wrestled Lassie to the ground and given her a marine buzz cut.
The girl was wearing jeans, a long lavender sweater, and a thigh-length white jacket trimmed in blatantly fake fur. Some Muppet had apparently given its all in the name of fashion. Together, she and the dog were pretty as a picture and completely out of place in the middle of nowhere. Those were the first things you noticed. That she was about nine months pregnant came as a surprising distant second.
“What’s she doing out here?” I muttered, my foot automatically easing up on the gas as we approached her. One hand was resting on the dog’s smooth head while the other was held shoulder height in a breezy thumbs-out. She was hitching. The princess was actually hitching, dog and all.
“Are we stopping?”
“Not hardly,” I retorted, getting my foot back under control. Feeding the car gas, I steered us into the opposite lane to give the girl a wide berth.
“But”—his head swiveled to keep her in view—“she’s pregnant, and she’s out here alone.”
“And that’s a big fat clue, isn’t it? No pun intended.” Hearing the engine of our car, she turned to face us while waving her thumb with almost-imperious demand. Royalty all right, even if only in her own mind. I swung the wheel even wider. “This is an urban legend in the making. Why doesn’t she have a cell phone? Everyone has a cell phone. Her
“All from a girl and her dog? And I thought I had trust issues.” He returned the ferret to its cage. “I’ll clean out the back.”
I was about to tell him there was no point, but at that moment in the rearview mirror I caught sight of the girl leaning over, clutching her stomach, and the happy hitching thumb gone. Even the dog looked worried.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
And just like that we were saddled with a hitchhiker. I didn’t kid myself. I would’ve kept driving and called her a cab—hell, no cabs out here; I’d have called 911. I would’ve let the local sheriff give her a ride, but with this . . . and in front of Michael. I’d told him I’d been a criminal, and I’d told him I would change. Passing up a pregnant girl at the side of the road possibly in labor didn’t make me appear particularly changed, but change I would. I’d promised Michael and I’d promised myself.
In other words, I was screwed—on the path to all that’s good and goddamn righteous, damn it, but still screwed. The knowledge didn’t improve my mood any when I pulled over. Michael rolled down his window and said, “Um . . . are you . . . you know . . . all right?”
The insistent tone he’d taken with Saul and the critical one with the ex-doctor had disappeared under this newly diffident one. I’d found a weakness in Mr. Extraordinary. He was shy around girls; how relentlessly common and mundane. How would he ever live it down? I smothered a grin as one pink-nailed hand found the window opening with entitled assurance.
About nineteen, the girl had a heart-shaped face—which I’d thought a trite phrase every time I’d read it— twilight blue eyes, that one as well, and a sudden and complete lack of labor pains. With pale skin free of makeup and only the lightest gleam of gloss on her lips, the princess was as beautiful as in any fairy tale or Miss Universe pageant, depending how your media tastes ran. She smiled and drawled in an accent as thick as clover honey as she addressed Michael’s concern, “Oh, that? That was just a little bit of indigestion. Goes with the territory. But right now, sweetie? I’m finer than frog hair.” I could all but hear Michael’s heart clunking against his ribs.
I couldn’t help but take the teasing shot and said lightly, “
Studiously ignoring me, he asked her, “Do you need a ride?”
“That would be fabulous.” The smile and the drawl became even broader. “You boys aren’t killers or perverts, are you?”
Rarely in life is fifty percent a passing score, but it was the best that Michael and I could do between us. If she didn’t call us on that, I wouldn’t call her on her slightly overdone modern-day Southern belle act. She was playing us, although maybe modern-day Southern girls did say “finer than frog hair.” I wasn’t a Georgia guy; so I couldn’t say. But she was conning us. It probably was for a simple ride and not anything more sinister, on par with a pretty woman flirting her way out of a ticket, but that didn’t quell my suspicion completely. You never knew with people. You just never frigging knew. I did try to keep in mind she was just a teenage girl, but my faith in innocent girlish appearances had faded considerably in the past week thanks to Jericho’s Wendy.
“Not so much that you’d notice,” I replied in a lazy drawl of my own. “But we can call someone to come get you if you’d rather.”
“Oh, no. This’ll be just fine.” Before Michael could get out to open the back door for her, she’d already helped herself. The dog jumped in before her and she scooted with a heavy grace into the seat behind it. “I’m Fisher Lee. Fisher Lee Redwine. This is Bouncing Blue Blossom.
Blossom,
I held back a hand over the seat and waited until hers slid into mine. Shaking it briskly, I said, “Nice to meet you, Ms. Redwine.” I was far less concerned with the etiquette of introduction than I was with checking out her stomach to see if it looked authentic. Paranoia, suspicion; call it whatever. It had kept me alive thus far. Wendy wasn’t the only member of the fairer sex in my lifetime who had demonstrated deadly tendencies. One of the strippers at the club had once stabbed her boyfriend in the bathroom and then had calmly gone out to work another set. I’d been the one to find him. Facedown on the tile with his blood spider-webbing around him as it flowed along the path of the grout, he hadn’t been dead, but he probably wished he had been. She’d taken him down with a deep wound to the belly and then she’d gotten creative. The surgeons had stitched his face together like a patchwork quilt. Other parts of him weren’t so easily pieced together. She’d flushed those down the toilet.
It could’ve been that he’d deserved it; it could’ve been that he didn’t. I had never asked, but it was a lesson I hadn’t forgotten. Anyone could be dangerous—absolutely anyone.
