The SUV followed the speedy little black car through the bright city and out into the harsh glare of the desert. Wulf’s car looked like a black hawk sailing on the asphalt’s air currents with its wings swept back.
“Again, he is weaving,” Dieter said and flicked his fingers at the black sports car ahead of them veering onto the shoulder.
Hans sighed and dialed a cell phone. “Ja, Herr von Hannover,” and then something-something-something in Swiss or German or whatevs. Some more positive sounds, and then Hans hung up. “He says he will stop at the next truck stop for coffee.”
“That is not going to help.”
“He’s not drunk, is he?” Rae asked, doubly concerned because it wasn’t even nine o’clock in the morning yet.
“No,” Hans said. “He never drinks more than one when he is driving, and never in the morning, but he does not sleep this week. He usually sleeps no more than three hours, but he sleeps some. This week, not at all.”
“Not at all?”
“We have staff with him during the day, but he walks the house at night. The night staff tell us.”
“Does he have insomnia often?”
“No.”
“How long’s it been since he slept?”
“We think he must have slept some, at some time, but it has been a week.”
“A week?” People could die from lack of sleep, right?
Hans wrenched himself around in the seat and looked back at her. “At the truck stop, we tell him that you like his car very much and you want to try to drive it.”
“I don’t think he wants to be alone with me,” she admitted.
Dieter snorted.
Hans backhanded him on the arm.
Oh, Jesus in Heaven, they did know that she and Wulf had slept together at his house and they were talking about it. Rae wanted to melt into the seat cushions and leak out onto the freeway asphalt.
Hans said, “If he doesn’t want to ride with you, you can drive his car and he can ride in back seat with us.”
“Ja, maybe the back seat will make him sleep,” Dieter said. “My wife drives our little baby around if she won’t nap. Doesn’t work as well with hybrid cars, though. The babies, the engine noise, they like.”
Hans told Rae, “You act happy and smile.” He turned toward the windshield and the busy freeway beyond. “He like it when you smile.”
Rae didn’t think that her smile would have any effect on Wulf at all, but she resolved to try.
A few more miles of cacti and sand slipped alongside the SUV, and they followed the little black sports car off the highway at the next exit.
When they pulled up, Wulf was leaning on his car, pumping gas. He was wearing black fatigues like his staff men, and it was the first time that Rae had seen him not wearing a suit. His body looked leaner than when he camouflaged himself with a suit, and his shoulders looked broader. He blended right in with his paramilitary-ish guys, from his woven belt and his athletic stance to his high-and-tight haircut. The only difference was that Wulf wasn’t wearing combat-style boots like his men, just black tennis shoes.
Dieter got out of the SUV and strolled over to him, looking like a secret soldier in his black fatigues and projecting nothing-to-see-here. Rae stepped out and leaned against the car, smiling hopefully at Wulf. He nodded to her, acknowledging her but neither curt nor friendly.
Dieter and Wulf spoke in some other language, presumably German.
Rae smiled big, trying to look interested in the car, which kind of reminded her of a seventies hatchback but she knew a Porsche 911 when she saw one.
Wulf glanced at her once, then nodded agreement. Dieter motioned her over.
“I’m going to get coffee,” Wulf said. He still had that closed look. The desert wind barely ruffled his short, blond hair. “Would you like some?”
“Yes, please. Cream and sugar, please.”
Hans stepped up. “Sir, I can get it.”
“I’ll get it,” Wulf said and walked into the store. Hans and Dieter oscillated for a second, clearly trying to decide whether or not to follow him, when yet another man in black fatigues stepped out of the other black SUV that had pulled up behind Dieter’s SUV and followed Wulf inside.
Dieter said, “Friedhelm has him.”
Hans and Dieter rounded on Rae. They were even taller than she was, and the two big, blond men stared down at her.
“We have to get his keys from him,” Hans said. “If he won’t give them to us, you get them.”
“Go to the driver’s side,” Dieter said. “Get into the driver’s seat and sit there with your hand out. You can drive manual transmission, ja?”
“Yeah, I can drive a stick shift.”
“Goot,” Hans said. The two tall security men marched backward one step and pivoted, standing about as relaxed as Marine honor guards at a military funeral, holding the flag, on the Fourth of July.
All that pomp must be exhausting.
Hans retrieved her backpack from the SUV and popped the hood of the ebony Porsche, which was so shiny that it looked like it was made out of black piano keys. He dropped her backpack under the hood, between the headlights. Rae peeked. The sealed-off storage area looked big enough for a wheelie overnight bag but not much else. Hans pressed the hood closed.
Wow. So Porsches had their trunks up front, like old-time Volkswagen Beetles. Weird.
Wulf came back from the store, holding a tray with four cups. The other oddly fit staff man, Friedhelm, also held a tray full of coffee cups, and he nodded to Hans and Dieter as if he were passing the responsibility to them before he climbed in the passenger side of the other SUV.
~~~~~
Two Weeks
Rae curled her big toe to depress the touchy accelerator on the Porsche 911. With even that ginger touch, the Porsche kicked and pressed her back in the seat, speeding them down the flat, straight highway that cut through the desert.
Rae watched the shallow sand dunes roll by as she drove. At the heart of every dune lay the skeleton of a jackrabbit or coyote or murdered woman. Wind heaped sand over desiccated dead animals or anything else that caught the air. Snakes slithered between the berms and sunned themselves on the blazing asphalt until a car smashed them into roadkill.
Wulf hadn’t said anything to her. He sipped his coffee and stared at the road. The toasted tar smell of their hot coffee overpowered the plastic new-car smell.
Rae didn’t know what to open with. She wanted to bring up so many subjects: his black-clad security entourage like he was the freaking President, what he had meant by fallen because he sure didn’t act like it, and why the heck he was moving, and where, and when, and why, oh Lord, why?
“This is a really nice car,” she said. “Thanks for letting me drive it.”
She saw Wulf nod out of the corner of her eye.
“The accelerator is kinda touchy.”
He nodded again.
“Are you moving?”
Wulf nodded. Rae sneaked a look but didn’t see any other reaction from him.
“Why?”
He sipped his coffee again and swallowed hard. “It’s getting dangerous.”
“Has someone threatened you?”
“Not as such. It’s too dangerous for people around me. Friedhelm, who is in the other car, his father was hit in the spine the day that we were shot. He was in a wheelchair the rest of his life. It’s negligent of me to take chances, to endanger them, and you.”
“Me?” It squeaked out before she could stop it.
“Yes.” He sipped his coffee and leaned his head back.
“I won’t tell anyone about the tatt or the scar or your name. I haven’t told anyone. No one else knows anything.”
“Jeffrey saw the scar. He heard you call me ‘Wulf,’ though he didn’t recognize it as a name, but it is a matter of time.”
Rae tightened her fists on the leather-bound steering wheel. “I can’t believe you’re just going to up and move.”
“Perhaps it is rash, but it’s done and it’
s the right thing to do. Besides, I still have some family, and they would rather that I wasn’t killed.”
“Of course.”
“I don’t want anyone else to die for me, or to be hurt. It is enough.”
“Are you in the Mafia or something?”
“No. It’s nothing that I have ever done.”
“Who are you?” She gripped the steering wheel, holding on as the highway and desert slipped behind them. Lizzy and Georgie had warned her about that question on that very first night in the limousine on the way to The Devilhouse party downtown. No one knew who Wulf was, what he was, under that shiny shell.
“It doesn’t matter,” Wulf said. “I’ve managed six years here, but it’s time to go.”
“Because of what I saw. Because of me.”
“Especially you. I couldn’t stand watching you die while someone pulled me to safety. I won’t let it happen.” He closed his eyes.
“I don’t want you to leave,” she said. If she could have taken it back, she wouldn’t have. She wanted him to know. If he still left her, fine. Fine-goshdarn-fine, dang it.
“I know.” Wulf set his coffee in the cup holder, reclined his seat a few degrees, and reached for her hand on the steering wheel. His fingers wound around hers, and he drew her hand down between them. “This, also I know: life is precious and all too short.”
The pain in those words drove into her chest. The news picture of the screaming child drenched in blood on a sunny day filled her memory again.
“Let’s enjoy these two weeks before I leave. Let’s not regret the time that we have.”
Two weeks. She had two weeks with him.
Why didn’t she tell him that every time she took a breath, her heart swelled with longing for him?
Because he was leaving in two weeks, and no matter how he tried to dress it up, he must have seen all her feelings for him written in her eyes last Saturday night, and that might be the real reason he was leaving.
Because he had told her that he wanted her to sit naked at his feet wearing nothing but his collar, but when Lizzy had offered him exactly that, he tossed her to some other guy because submissive women were as common as muck.
Because he was The Dom of The Devilhouse, and he liked women, craved women, in the plural, and everyone knew that he never took any of the girls out on a Dom-Date twice in a row.
Because Rae didn’t want her heart to break, not just yet, not if she could have two more weeks with him before she broke all apart.
Rae said, “All right. Two weeks.”
“I have sold The Devilhouse to a friend. You and everyone else will remain employed at the same rates. You’ll be fine, Reagan. You can finish college. You can open your clinic. You’ll have everything you want.”
She hadn’t even thought of that. The job and college bleached like bones in the desert, compared to the thought that in only two weeks, Wulf would be gone.
Rae held his warm hand while she drove down the open highway, passing dusty towns and winding through mountain passes, trying to think of anything that would make him stay.
After a while, his grip on her hand loosened, and his breathing deepened.
In sleep, some of the severity left his face, and she could see what that stern child in the photo must have looked like when he slept.
After a while, a black SUV drove up on their right, then drifted back. Rae wondered if Dieter and Hans were checking on them, or whether that was Friedhelm, who had seen his father confined to a wheelchair while in Wulf’s security detail and yet had followed the same career path.
Rae couldn’t imagine the responsibility of being the focus of such violence and trying to keep everyone around herself safe from it.
She would have gone to live in a cave in the desert with the rattlesnakes.
Holding onto Wulf’s warm, soft hand, Rae drove two hundred miles through the searing desert, trying to hold onto each fleeting moment.
~~~~~
The Ranch
The brown slump-block houses of Pirtleville huddled with their rear walls to the constant wind-driven sand. Rae’s family’s ranch was on the outskirts of town, vulnerable to dust devils, scorpions, and rattlesnakes. Every year, they hacked back the tumbleweeds and scrub brush where the desert made incursions into their cattle pasturage. Locoweed grew everywhere no matter how they tried to eradicate it and drove the cattle mad. A locoweed-drunk bull will kill a grown man out of sheer cussedness.
As they approached Rae’s family’s ranch, Wulf phoned his staff and asked them to wait with the SUVs at the head of the dirt road. It wouldn’t do to arrive with a parade, he said, and Rae and Wulf switched seats at the trailhead so he could drop her off and drive away.
The car’s tires slipped on the gravel in the dirt driveway as Wulf stopped the car in front of the hunkered-down house.
To Rae’s consternation, her father was sitting on the top rail of the fence beside the house, holding a rifle in the crook of his arm and reading a paperback book.
Good thing that Dieter and the guys had waited up the road. They might not have reacted well to a gun-toting welcome.
She suppressed the urge to jump out of the car and hug her dad because that would have encouraged him to hassle Wulf.
Her father hopped off the fence and landed heavily on the hard-packed dirt because the poor guy had arthritis in his knees from years of hard work. He advanced on the car.
Rae thought about her backpack under the car’s hood, wondering if she really needed her toothbrush and stuff or whether she could grab it later so Wulf could get out of there.
Wulf set the handbrake between them. “I’ll pick you up at three for the funeral.”
“I can’t. I’ll ride with my family. You should meet us there.” Rae pushed open the door and tried to step out of the car before her father could say anything to Wulf but he was already standing right there and opening the door for her. She loved her father, but she knew how he felt about boys and his little girl.
“Hey there.” Her father leaned down to peer in the door as Rae turned back to Wulf, worried about how this might go. “Is this here that fellow Dominic that Hester’s been telling us about?”
Dominic? Oh, Rae had told Hester that “Dom” was Wulf’s name when she had freaked out over seeing those newspaper pictures.
She said, “Yes, this is my friend, Dominic. He’s just a friend. He just drove me down here because he didn’t want a delicate creature such as myself subjected to the open highway.” Good Lord, even accounting for sarcasm, her redneck accent had come right back. “Dominic, this is my father, Zachariah Stone.”
Her father leaned into the car and offered his hand to Wulf. “Right charitable of you to drive her down, Dominic. Is that a Catholic name?” Her father said it casually and with friendly tones, despite what Rae knew was under it.
Wulf leaned over the handbrake to shake her father’s hand in front of Rae’s nose. “Pleased to meet you. I was baptized Lutheran.”
“Well, there’s that, then,” her father said. “But you are a man of faith?”
“I would say so,” Wulf said, which surprised Rae.
“He’s coming to escort me to the Celebration of Life,” Rae told her father, looking him in the eye. “But then he’s going right back to town. He’s not staying.”
“How’re you getting back to that college?”
“I’ll ride up with Hester tomorrow.”
“Well, that’s all right, then.”
Rae stepped out of the car to end that ridiculous conversation, but her father dodged her and stuck his head farther into the car. He was spry for someone with that much arthritis. “Where’re you going until the Celebration of Life, Dominic?”
From inside the car, Rae could just hear Wulf’s deep voice say with his British accent, “I had planned to find lunch.”
“The Hungry Bear’s food isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Come on in the house for a spell. We’re just about to eat. Plenty for company. It’s just simple fare,
of course.”
“I would appreciate it.”
Rae froze. Dear Lord. Her family was going to get out the flood lamps and truth serum and give Wulf the third degree. Or else they would get out the Bibles and drag him down to the creek to baptize him or hold him under until he agreed to a shotgun wedding.
It hadn’t rained lately. The creek would be a dry ravine. They’d have to use the horse trough.
She leaned into the car beside her dad. “Dominic, don’t you have people waiting for you?”
“I’ll phone them. It would be nice to have a home-cooked meal.”
Anything served in her family home would be an albino-pale imitation of the grandiose meals that were served at his house. Rae kept herself from cringing.
She loved her family, but Pirtleville was very different than how Wulf must have been brought up in Switzerland.
Dustier.
Less stuff.
Simpler food.
More real, she was sure.
“Reagan,” her father said. “You run on inside and help your mother with lunch.”
“Yes, sir.”
Rae had gotten used to living outside the shadow of her father’s proprietary attitude. Maybe Rae should establish her autism clinic, A Ray of Light, in Cochise, the next town over and three times the size of Pirtleville. Pirtleville didn’t have enough autistic kids for the size of clinic that she wanted to build, anyway.
Rae went into the house to change into one of her long skirts and white blouses, as befitted an unmarried woman.
~~~~~
Plinking
For Wulf, lunch was a tense affair, though he tried to set Reagan’s family at ease.
Rae’s mother fried cheese sandwiches, and Rae served the men at the table, who began eating as soon as she set the plates before them. Wulf waited until Rae and her mother sat down with their sandwiches, though the men pressed him to eat while the sandwiches were hot off the griddle.
He sat amongst Rae’s family, whom she had described as the most important people in the world to her, and watched.
Ingratiating himself was preposterous. He merely wanted to ensure that no damage had yet come to Rae’s relationship with her family. Any other motive was ridiculous.
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