Free Work Done for Hire by Joe Haldeman

on my way—twenty minutes to fix the tube, change the tire, and be back on the road. Short of my best by five or six minutes, but I wasn’t in a hurry.
    I should have been. Of course the weather couldn’t last. I slogged through a driving rain until I fetched up on the shores of the Angel Bless Motel. A flashing neon cross would normally repel me like a vampire, but the rain had weakened my resistance.
    I was suddenly on the set of a Hitchcock movie that never got made. I staggered dripping into a small Victorian room, a half-dozen cut-glass lamps giving a warm glow to the complicated floral wallpaper. Smiling older hostess wearing a full skirt and an apron. She didn’t say the only room left was #13, which might have sent me back out into the rain. But she did insist on showing me around the six glass cases along the walls, her late husband’s life work. Lots of miniature trains and airplanes and hundreds of butterflies pinned to velvet. She had been a widow for nine years, four months, and seven days.
    The room she led me to had only one butterfly, a big purple one pinned under glass, hanging over the bed like an invertebrate crucifix. There’s a sad irony to a moth-eaten butterfly.
    I set the coffeemaker to just heat some water, and took as hot a shower as the motel’s plumbing and budget would allow. A quick ramen dinner, and then I made weak tea with just a pinch of sugar. I didn’t want to stay awake.
    The TV’s depth axis was shot, so rather than watch crap in two and a half dimensions, I flipped through the various books on my notebook and settled on
Down the River
, a collection of short stories by recent Iowa graduates. I had a paper copy at home, a contributor’s freebie, but the only story I’d read in it was my own, checking for typos. Mildly curious about the competition, I got halfway through the second story before I turned off the notebook and the light.
    __________
    It was still raining when I woke up. Not cold or windy, so I guess if I were a serious cyclist I’d just man up and pedal out into it.
    Instead, I made a double-strong, double-sugar cup of coffee with ReelCreme™ and took the motel’s chair out under the eaves and sat looking at and listening to the rain, not thinking about the novel or anything in particular. Then I went back inside, made another cup, and unrolled the notebook and its keyboard.
    What would Hunter do in the rain? Not a scene from the movie, but what the hell.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    Hunter liked the sound of rain drumming on his metal roof. The fact of the rain, though, was a little annoying. He had eaten one frozen meal and wanted a fresh one, but there wouldn’t be many joggers out.
    Not many potential witnesses, either.
    No diversions left. He was tired of reading, and television was earnest documentaries and Saturday morning cartoons, which offered sufficient violence but no appetizing consequences.
    With no particular destination in mind, he got in the van and headed north, playing a Jacksonville radio station on the radio but not hearing the music, listening for weather updates. He got gas in Georgia, filling up at a place that was too ramshackle and open to have surveillance cameras. He did have to go inside to pay, and considered the risk/benefit ratio of killing the dimwitted clerk and emptying the register.
    The boy was skinny and sallow and smelled bad, which may have saved his life. And there could have been a hidden camera amidst the chaotic jumble of merchandise behind him. Hunter bought eight Super Red Hot sausages and, unseen back in the van, ate them like a sword-swallower, one after the another, while he studied the map.
    The rain had let up when he stopped, but now it continued with redoubled force. He took a left turn and then angled down a county road that pointed into Alabama.
    He came upon his prize only fifteen minutes down the road. A large woman on the gravel margin hunched against the force of the rain,