“I guess you’re smarter than we are, then.”
“I guess so. I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Hold it.”
“I can’t.”
“Think about the desert.”
“Do you have one of those things on your palm?” Lou asked.
“What things?”
“The star thing.”
“A pentagram?”
“Yeah.”
Ivan held up his palm, which Lou checked out in the rear-view mirror. “No. And would you like to know why I don’t have a pentagram on my palm?”
“Because you’re not a werewolf?”
“Exactly! Because I’m not a werewolf! I manage a temp agency! This is bullshit!”
“Again,” said George, “the only way this is going to end is with you being delivered as promised. Pleasant or unpleasant. The choice is yours. Most people go with pleasant.”
“They’re calling me a werewolf, but you’re the ones who are inhuman!” Ivan said. “You’re the monsters, not me!”
“That’s deep,” Lou noted.
“If you do this, it’ll haunt you for the rest of your life. You will always be somebody who took an innocent guy to his death for being a werewolf. That doesn’t go away. No matter how long you live, you’ll never not be that person. Thirty years from now, when I’m long since tortured and dead, you’ll still be the guys who were told that a man in a cage was a werewolf--a werewolf--and delivered him into the hands of a deranged maniac who believed in that kind of nonsense. Do you really want all those years of sleepless nights?”
“Thirty years from now, one or both of us will probably be dead, too,” said George. “Our work is pretty dangerous. I’m actually surprised Lou is still around. He really doesn’t take care of his body.”
“Not only will you be the men who drove an innocent person to his death, but you’ll be the men who casually dismissed him when he tried to explain the insanity of the situation. Even if I were a werewolf, you’d be the villains here.”
“Okay, you’ve talked enough,” said George. “Shut up for a while.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, are my desperate pleas for my life annoying you? I wouldn’t want to be an inconvenience. I certainly hope that my shrieks of pain when they’re dissecting me don’t cause an unpleasant sensation in your eardrums--I don’t know if my mutilated body could live with itself!”
George turned on the stereo, cranking up some classic Metallica to drown him out.
CHAPTER THREE
Lycanthrope Chatter
“Holy crap, look at all of those things.” Lou pointed out the window at where eight or nine alligators were sunning themselves along the edge of the water. The wretched creatures were all along Tamiami Trail--Lou had stopped counting about an hour ago when he reached one hundred, much to George’s relief--but that was the most they’d seen at once. The fact that they were on the other side of a fence didn’t provide much comfort.
“That’s why I’d never live in Florida,” said George.
“The gators?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t think anybody ever gets eaten by them. Maybe in extreme cases, if somebody’s dumb enough to go messing with them, but aside from that I think gator attacks are pretty rare.”
“Still, I wouldn’t want to live around them.”
“We’ve got rats in New York.”
“Rats don’t bite people’s legs off.”
“If you lived in Florida, I can almost guarantee you’d never get your leg bit off by an alligator, whereas in New York City, I can almost guarantee you will get your car crapped on by a pigeon. Which is worse?”
“I’d rather take the one-hundred-percent chance on pigeon crap than the one-percent chance on an alligator bite.”
“I think it’s way less than one-percent.”
“Any percent is unacceptable.”
“It’s probably not even one in a million. So what’s that...one percent would be one in a hundred, so you’d times it by, uh...ten thousand?” Lou frowned as if mentally checking his math. “One ten-thousandth of a percent chance of getting a leg bit off by an alligator. That’s pretty slim.”
“They also have hurricanes.”
“Again, low odds.”
“And it’s too damn hot.” George had grown up in Cleveland, and moved to New York City in his late twenties. As far as he was concerned, the entire bottom half of the United States could just fall off into the ocean.
“I completely agree about the heat. That’s what should keep you away from Florida--the climate, not the alligators and hurricanes.”
“Are you two entertaining yourselves?” asked Ivan.
George turned around and glared at him. “Yeah, it’s called a conversation. Do you have a problem with it?”
“No, no, by all means, continue your insipid conversation.”
“We’re driving across this miserable state on a road that has nothing to look at but alligators. Why shouldn’t we talk about alligators? If we drive past an anti-abortion billboard, we’ll be sure to have a spirited philosophical debate for your entertainment, but for now it’s alligators and pigeon crap. Are you going to be okay with that?”
“Sure. Go right ahead.”
George grinned. “You didn’t think I’d know what ‘insipid’ meant, did you?”
“Nope. Surprised the hell out of me.”
“Well I do. Fuck you, werewolf.”
Ivan settled back against the bars of his cage. “You know, if I was a werewolf, this cage wouldn’t hold me. I’d be picking my teeth with your ribs in about thirty seconds.”
“Is that so?”
“Yep.”
“Then I’d deserve it, because I would’ve let my guard down and failed to take the necessary precautions. If you do that, you deserve to have your ribs used as toothpicks. But Lou and I, we don’t let our guard down like that. Would you like an example?”
“By all means.”
“Right now, I want nothing more than to smack that smirk right the hell off your face. Not torture you, not beat you bloody--just smack you really, really hard. If we pulled off to the side of the road, I am ninety-nine point nine-nine percent sure that I could get in this smack with no danger to myself, and then we could proceed on our merry little way. But even though it would give me intense pleasure to do this, I’m not going to. Instead, we’re going to continue to drive your werewolf ass to Tampa, just like we’re supposed to.”
“Then I salute you,” said Ivan, saluting him. “A lesser man would have succumbed, but not the mighty George.”
“You’ve become kind of sarcastic all of a sudden.”
“Hey, if I can’t appeal to your common sense or your sense of decency, I might as well be a dick for the rest of the ride. How are we doing on gas?”
“No need to worry yourself about the gas situation. We’ve got everything under control.”
“I’d hate to be stranded out here. I know how concerned you are about the alligators.”
George glanced at the GPS. “We’re going to get gas in a few minutes at someplace called Hachiholata. Nice Indian name.”
“Native American,” said Lou. “Indians are from India.”
“I thought ‘native’ was offensive?”
“No, ‘native’ is offensive to people in the jungle with spears, like if you say ‘the natives are restless.’ Native American is fine. Did you know that the word ‘midget’ is offensive?”
“To Native Americans?”
“Very funny. To a little person, the word ‘midget’ is as offensive as the n-word to a black person. Can you believe that? You hear midget, midget, midget all the time, and it’s like saying n-word, n-word, n-word. If a politician said the n-word, his career would be over, but he could probably say ‘midget’--hell, he could probably tell a midget joke--and he’d be fine.”
“Can other midgets say midget?”
“I don’t know. But I don’t say it. It’s not their fault they were born like that.”