Free The Suicide Motor Club by Christopher Buehlman Page B

inside, dropping a fork with a
ting-tank
. The waitress thought she saw sharp teeth on him but wasn’t sure, never told anyone, not even when she saw the papers in the morning. The police would ask her what she remembered about the man, but the truth was she remembered nothing about him. Several people who dined at Honey’s that night offered careful descriptions of the women, right down to their pumps and the white piping on Barb’s mod but tasteful crimson dress, but nobody could say who the man was or what he looked like. Only one remembered the car, though any who heard him start it might have said it grumbled like storms coming, like the beginning of a biblical plague, that it was a noise Pharaoh would have noted and hardened his heart anyway.
    Luther Nixon stood up.
    Barbara Atwater and Peggy McMullen stood up, too, watching him.
    â€œYou girls pay already?”
    They nodded.
    â€œYou park close to here?”
    They nodded again.
    â€œWhere?”
    Barb pointed at a bottle-green two-door across the street and one block down.
    â€œChevy Nova. Small-block V-8. Sixty-three?”
    Barb nodded.
    Luther Nixon pointed at it and a large, hairy-looking fellow in a neck brace and sunglasses appeared from an alley and walked over to it, leaning against the trunk like it was his.
    â€œNot too shabby. What’s your name, sassy horsy?”
    â€œBarbara.”
    â€œBarb,” he said, leaning close so only she heard, “you nickel-plated bitch, I’m going to watch you shave all that pretty blond hair off your head tonight and then you’re going to die, and die bloody. That cool with you?”
    â€œSure.”
    â€œGroovy,” he said, flicking his cigarette at a passing car. “Let’s go for a ride.”

12
    THE SLIGHT, YOUNG-LOOKING WOMAN MADE HER WAY THROUGH THE TALL GRASS close to the shoulder of Route 66, carrying her messenger bag, her Indian-print dress wet with night dew. Her face shone white beneath a chip of moon floating over fast-moving clouds. The wind made the trees hiss. She waited until she saw headlights, only one set, then mounted the shoulder so her pale skin would blaze in the headlamps and the driver could not help but see her.
    The car that pulled over was a Chrysler Windsor; she knew it by the big grille like the fat half of an upside-down triangle. The driver was fat, too, and when she leaned down to the window she smelled his stink of sadness and loneliness even under his excess of aftershave. He was an ordinary man well into homely middle age, with his friar’s crown of salt-and-pepper hair, a second chin starting under the first, a belly blooming out over the belt that seemed to bisect him. A sticky-looking coffee mug lay on its side on the passenger seat next to a tie like a dead snake. A worn briefcase slouched on the floor as though it had been kicked there.
    â€œI don’t normally do this,” he said, “but you look like you might be in trouble.”
    â€œI am,” she said, smiling like she and trouble were friends.
    â€œWhere ya headed?”
    â€œDepends. Where are
you
headed?”
    He stiffened. She had played the wrong card. She saw the wedding ring now. She had to catch his eyes before he drove off.
    â€œI don’t mean any offense by this, but you aren’t a—”
    â€œNo,” she interrupted. “I just meant that I have to get away from here. They hit me.”
    â€œWho?”
    â€œThey,” she said, “here.” She pointed just above her left eye and, while she knew there was no mark on her, she hooked his gaze with hers. She pulled him with her thin-ice eyes, so gray they were almost clear, and he fell through them and into her. It was almost as though he knew she was going to say, “Open the door,” almost as though he were saying it with her.
    She looked at his gas gauge, then tossed the coffee cup into the grass she had emerged from and sat down, shutting the door. She