I dropped the suitcase and backed away from him. He looked surprised. Well, not really surprised, but as if he wanted to look surprised. Eamon was a master at putting on emotions like outfits.
“Something wrong?” he asked. “You’re not one to shy away from violence; I know that for a fact.”
“You killed him,” I said. “Who is he?”
“You don’t know?” He studied my face, and I felt naked. Way too exposed. “I know you’re not generally popular with your peers, but I’m surprised you don’t at least know the ones who want you dead.”
“This isn’t about me. This is about the dead man in your trunk.” I was clenching my teeth now, and wishing I had a weapon. A big one. Large-caliber. “What the hell is going on?”
“No idea,” Eamon said. “He was waiting for you outside of the prison with a rather nice three-eighty, which would have put a large and bloody hole in your back, shredded your lungs, and blown your heart halfway to hell. I say your back because of where he’d stationed himself. Because of the angle.”
I felt sick, and a little bit relieved. Okay, so it’s a bad guy dead in the trunk. That’s better, right? Of course it wasn’t, and just because the psychopath went after other villains didn’t make him any less of a psychopath, did it? Besides, I had no idea if Eamon was telling the truth. He seemed sincere, but he seemed a lot of things he wasn’t-nothing if not facile.
“Oh, don’t look so worried,” Eamon said, and opened the back door of the car for Sarah. She moved as if she were missing some bones, folding like wet cardboard when she was finally in the seat. I opened the other side and put her suitcase inside. She promptly used it as a pillow, and went right to sleep. “I doubt he’ll be missed. Contract killers rarely have what you might call an extensive social circle.”
Eamon had brought out a cheap-looking velour blanket. He spread it over Sarah as he spoke. It was an odd gesture of kindness from a guy who thought nothing of loading up the trunk with corpses, and his contradictions were starting to make my head hurt.
“What are you going to do with him?” I asked.
“Let’s just say he won’t be accompanying us all the way to California,” Eamon replied. “There’s plenty of desert between here and there.”
“Do you know who he is?” I asked.
“Not a fucking clue,” he said, and reached in his pocket. He took out a slim black wallet, which he flipped over the car’s roof to me. I caught it, startled. “Perhaps you’ll see something that rings a bell, eh?”
I opened it and checked for ID. There was a driver’s license for a guy named John T. Hunter. I wondered if that was a joke of some kind: John The Hunter. Like, assassin. But why would I have a professional assassin on my case? Then again, why wouldn’t I? Given the gigantic mountain of nothing that I knew about my life, I supposed I couldn’t rule it out.
Other than the license, his wallet was empty except for a fat stash of cash, which I felt sick about taking, but hey, I needed it.
“Well?” Eamon asked, staring at me over the top of the black car. “His chances of recovery aren’t improving, I assure you. So I’d suggest we roll along.”
“What if I just walk away?” I asked. “What if I go to the police?” I darted a look into the backseat. Sarah slept on peacefully.
“Well, two things will happen. First, you’ll be arrested, because of course I’ll have to give a statement that you shot this poor man and stole his money. Second, your sister will be dead, and it’ll look as if you had quite a bit to do with it. Did you know that statistically most murders are committed by a person close to the victim? Shocking.” He said it flatly, without any emphasis, but I believed him. “All right, even if you’ve lost your memory, you know exactly who I am and what I can do, because there’s ample evidence in the trunk with a bullet in his head. So let’s stop dancing around the proprieties and get on with it, shall we? I need your particular talents for one thing and one thing only, and then, as far as I’m concerned, you can go to hell and take Sarah with you. Are we clear?”
His eyes glittered. There was something feral in him, something pushed into a corner. I didn’t doubt he’d kill. He was right. The body in the trunk was proof enough of that.
I didn’t answer him. I held his stare long enough to promise him a whole lot of things, most of them violent, and then I opened the front driver’s-side door, got in, and started the engine. I considered gunning it and leaving him there in the dust, but all he had to do was make a phone call, and I was a wanted felon with a body in the trunk.
Play along. Find an opportunity. Wait for Venna.
It was risky, but it was the only card in my hand at the moment.
NINE
We buried Mr. Hunter, whatever his name might have actually been, in a shallow, sandy grave six miles from Ares, in a stretch of desert that probably hadn’t had human visitors for ten years, and wouldn’t again for ten more. Eamon and I buried him, that is; Sarah slept on in the backseat, the sleep of the OxyContin-coddled innocent. By the time it was done I felt sick, angry, filthy, and gritty with sweat and sand. I wanted to kill Eamon, in a figurative if not literal sense. He had, apparently, saved my life, even though he’d shot someone to do it. Once again, the sticky gray center with him. I wanted to be able to hate him with a whole heart.
Well, of course, there was the threat against my sister. That helped keep me from doing anything stupid.
We didn’t talk, except that he directed me along Highway 95 to 160, where we turned west. He wasn’t telling me the final destination.
I hated the car about as much as I hated him. The pedal was sluggish, the steering was loose, and it shimmied through curves. Looked good on the outside, rotten on the inside, just like Eamon himself.
I didn’t draw Eamon’s attention to it, but somewhere outside of Pahrump we picked up a tail. Of course, it was hard to be sure-highways by definition had a lot of people traveling the same direction, especially in the boonies-but I did some experimenting with speed, and the white panel van stayed right with me, whether I sped up, changed lanes, or slowed down. He was hanging back, and he was covering up with other traffic, but he was a fixture in my rearview mirror.
He hadn’t been there when we’d dumped the body, though. That had been a clear road for miles, and no chance of being spotted by anything but a high-flying eagle. So if he was hoping to catch us red-handed, literally, he was out of luck. No doubt the trunk would sink us with forensics, if it came to that, and of course I was driving, wasn’t I? And Eamon had made sure that my fingerprints had stayed on the wallet, which was safely in his coat pocket. Insurance.
The weather was shifting. I felt it rather than saw it, a sensation like pressure in my head. I tried to focus on it as I drove, and before I knew what I was doing, I was looking at the world through the lenses that David had shown me. Oversight, he and Lewis had called it. And the world was different when you knew how to interpret the clues.
The car I was driving, in Oversight, was a rust bucket, tainted by indifference. Past the hood, the road glimmered flat black, sparking with little explosions of light-tiny creatures, maybe, living and dying in their own little dramas?-and in the distance the sky was a rolling, strange landscape of grays and blues and orange streaks. More like fluid than air. The orange was pushing its way through. I had no idea if orange indicated heat; if so, that was some kind of warm front, and it was creating all kinds of swirls and eddies and muted flashing chains of energy. Those showed as black streaks, like oil dropped in water.