“You know what this is about?”
“This is about six hundred bucks to yours truly. That’s all I need to know.”
She put the stick in gear and they sped off. They drove for so long that Decker found himself dozing off. That was remarkable when he woke and thought about it, since he was traveling to his death.
Or, more accurately, my murder.
They crossed over Interstate 74, reached nearly to Seymour, and then got onto Interstate 65 heading north toward Indianapolis. But they exited well before then. They sped west, passing Nashville, Indiana. Decker saw a sign for Bloomington to the south, but they didn’t take it. He was thinking they might be driving all the way to
Terre Haute near the Illinois border when the woman pulled off onto the shoulder at an exit a few miles before Interstate 70, running east to west, could be picked up.
She said, “Walk up this exit ramp. There’s a rest stop. There’ll be somebody there.”
As Decker exited the car he thought again that all of this had been arranged well before he had contacted them through the website. They had clearly expected him to do this. Or at least hoped that he would.
And he had. Which meant they had read him right.
He hoped to have done the same for them.
He trudged through the snow to the rest stop with his bag slung over his shoulder. The snowfall had slowed but his feet were soaked through. His belly was rumbling and his nose was running.
The white panel van was backed into the first parking space. The headlights blinked twice as Decker approached. The driver’s window came down. It was another woman, with hollowed-out cheekbones. She looked like a druggie slipping in and out of withdrawal.
“You want me to drive?” said Decker, running his gaze up and down her skinny frame. “I want to get there in one piece.”
She shook her head and jerked her thumb toward the back of the van.
“You sure you’re good to go?”
In answer she put the van in drive and stared out the windshield.
Decker clambered into the back and slid the side door closed.
The woman drove off as Decker settled into the seat.
The gun placed against his right temple didn’t unduly surprise him. After all, how many people could they engage to get him to this point? He had figured two max, and he’d been right.
His bag was taken from him and thrown out the back door. He was searched and he could tell the searcher was surprised that Decker was not armed. His phone was taken from him and hurled out the back as well.
The man tugged on his sleeve and tossed an orange jumper over the seat and into Decker’s lap. He held it up. “It looks a little small.”
Neither of them spoke.
“Do you go by Billy now, Belinda?” Decker said to the driver. “Or was that just for the 7-Eleven gig?”
He watched as the wig came off. The eyes that flashed at him in the rearview were the same ones he’d seen at the convenience store. But they were very different from the eyes that he had remembered seeing at the institute, the pair that had belonged to the devastated teenage girl named Belinda Wyatt. She apparently was gone for good.
He said, “The disguise was good, but I have your hands memorized. Hard to change them unless you wear gloves.”
She just kept staring at him, and in those eyes Decker could see the cumulative hatred of twenty years that was about to be unleashed.
On me.
Decker held up the jumper. “A little privacy, please?”
The eyes looked away.
He started undressing, which was difficult in the confined space for someone so large. The person with the gun took his clothes and shoes and threw them out the back. Decker struggled into the jumper but could not zip it up in front because of his large gut.
Because these two weren’t the only ones on a mission. So was Amos Decker. He hadn’t come here to simply die, although that was a very real possibility.
Wyatt said, “I think it speaks for itself, don’t you?”
Her voice was deeper than when she was a woman, and deeper than when she had spoken to him in the role of Billy the mop boy. It was amazing how she was able to modulate it. But the tone was far less important than the words. She didn’t care. There was no remorse. There was nothing behind the eyes. She was thirty-six now. And he doubted she had had an easy, normal day in the last thirty of them. That couldn’t help but change you. How could you respect or appreciate or care about a world and the people in that world when they loathed the fact that you shared their planet?
“Did you kill the people who raped you? I mean other than Giles Evers?”
“Well, that would have been a little obvious,” said Wyatt. “So