Full Dark, No Stars(68)

“No, thanks,” Tess said pleasantly. “You’ve been helpful enough, and my cabdriver’s waiting.”

“Okay. Just do yourself a favor and stay away from that boyfriend of yours. And stay away from The Stagger. Of course, if you tell anyone I said that, I’ll have to find you and kill you.”

“Fair enough,” Tess said, smiling. “I’d deserve it.” At the doorway, she turned back. “A favor?”

“If I can.”

“If you happen to see Al Something-Polish around town, don’t mention that you talked to me.” She smiled more widely. It hurt her lips, but she did it. “I want to surprise him. Give him a little gift, or something.”

“Not a problem.”

Tess lingered a bit longer. “I love your eyes.”

Neal shrugged and smiled. “Thanks. They don’t quite match, do they? It used to make me self-conscious, but now…”

“Now it works for you,” Tess said. “You grew into them.”

“I guess I did. I even picked up some work modeling in my twenties. But sometimes, you know what? It’s better to grow out of things. Like a taste for bad-tempered men.”

To that there seemed to be nothing to say.

- 26 -

She made sure her Expedition would start, then tipped the cabdriver twenty instead of ten. He thanked her with feeling, then drove away toward the I-84. Tess followed, but not until she’d plugged Tom back into the cigarette lighter receptacle and powered him up.

“Hello, Tess,” Tom said. “I see we’re taking a trip.”

“Just home, Tommy-boy,” she said, and pulled out of the parking lot, very aware she was riding on a tire that had been mounted by the man who had almost killed her. Al Something-Polish. A truck-driving son of a gun. “One stop on the way.”

“I don’t know what you’re thinking, Tess, but you should be careful.”

If she had been home instead of in her car, Fritzy would have been the one to say this, and Tess would have been equally unsurprised. She had been making up voices and conversations since childhood, although at the age of eight or nine, she’d quit doing it around other people, unless it was for comic effect.

“I don’t know what I’m thinking, either,” she said, but this was not quite true.

Up ahead was the US 47 intersection, and the Gas & Dash. She signaled, turned in, and parked with the Expedition’s nose centered between the two pay phones on the side of the building. She saw the number for Royal Limousine on the dusty cinder block between them. The numbers were crooked, straggling, written by a finger that hadn’t been able to stay steady. A chill shivered its way up her back, and she wrapped her arms around herself, hugging hard. Then she got out and went to the pay phone that still worked.

The instruction card had been defaced, maybe by a drunk with a car key, but she could still read the salient information: no charge for 911 calls, just lift the handset and punch in the numbers. Easy-as-can-beezy.

She punched 9, hesitated, punched 1, then hesitated again. She visualized a piñata, and a woman poised to hit it with a stick. Soon everything inside would come tumbling out. Her friends and associates would know she had been raped. Patsy McClain would know the story about stumbling over Fritzy in the dark was a shame-driven lie… and that Tess hadn’t trusted her enough to tell the truth. But really, those weren’t the main things. She supposed she could stand up to a little public scrutiny, especially if it kept the man Betsy Neal had called Big Driver from raping and killing another woman. Tess realized that she might even be perceived as a heroine, a thing that had been impossible to even consider last night, when urinating hurt enough to make her cry and her mind kept returning to the image of her stolen panties in the center pocket of the giant’s bib overalls.

Only…

“What’s in it for me?” she asked again. She spoke very quietly, while looking at the telephone number she’d written in the dust. “What’s in that for me?”

And thought: I have a gun and I know how to use it.

She hung up the phone and went back to her car. She looked at Tom’s screen, which was showing the intersection of Stagg Road and Route 47. “I need to think about this some more,” she said.

“What’s to think about?” Tom asked. “If you were to kill him and then get caught, you’d go to jail. Raped or not.”

“That’s what I need to think about,” she said, and turned onto US 47, which would take her to I-84.

Traffic on the big highway was Saturday-morning light, and being behind the wheel of her Expedition was good. Soothing. Normal. Tom was quiet until she passed the sign reading EXIT 9 STOKE VILLAGE 2 MILES. Then he said, “Are you sure it was an accident?”

“What?” Tess jumped, startled. She had heard Tom’s words coming out of her mouth, spoken in the deeper voice she always used for the make-believe half of her make-believe conversations (it was a voice very little like Tom the Tomtom’s actual robo-voice), but it didn’t feel like her thought. “Are you saying the bastard raped me by accident?”

“No,” Tom replied. “I’m saying that if it had been up to you, you would have gone back the way you came. This way. I-84. But somebody had a better idea, didn’t they? Somebody knew a shortcut.”