by Unknown
I exchanged a look with David. "Not -- dead exactly. But confined. It's not getting out."
"I want it dead, not confined."
"I know. I'm sorry."
"No, you don't know. I want it dead, do you understand? I want its guts strewn over half the county. I want its fucking head on a pike!" The sudden burst of fury out of him was unexpected and shocking, because he did such a good job of hiding it behind that casual toughness. I swallowed, but didn't flinch. He balled up his fists at his sides and took a step into my space. "Now you let it out of whatever prison it's in and give it to me. I'll -- "
"You'll end up dead," David said flatly. He hadn't moved, but there was a sense that he had, that he'd gotten larger, somehow. "Guts strewn over half the county. And it wouldn't bother to stop and put your head on a pike, because you wouldn't matter enough. People don't matter. They're only vessels, or meat. What's in that bottle is insane, and it's powerful, and it's far out of your ability to destroy." His eyes went dark. "Now you need to take a step back, because I promise you, I'm not going to let you touch her."
McCall said nothing. His eyes burned, but they were just human eyes, after all. He didn't strike me as the type to step off from a fight, but this time, he did. He must have had the sense to know that David wasn't kidding.
I cleared my throat. "Look, McCall -- you have to trust me. I'm not letting this thing go, all right? But you have to do something for me. You have to stay quiet about it."
He pulled his stare from David to lock it on me. There was a bleak fury in him, but a bleak humor, too. "Fuck. I look like the chatty type to you?" he asked, and jammed his hands in his pockets. "In my line of work, keeping your mouth shut is a condition of continued breathing." He shook his head and walked away.
I watched as he got into the dusty Cadillac and drove it off the lot. No good-bye wave. Not even a glance back.
When I turned back to David and took his hand, I caught sight of the proprietor of the Desert Inn standing in his doorway, watching us. Amazing. He hadn't bothered to come out for the excitement, but now he was watching.
He tapped his watch. "Eleven thirty," he yelled. "You owe me for another day."
I blinked. "What about him?" I gestured at McCall's Cadillac as it crested the hill and disappeared into the vastness of the desert.
"What about him? That bastard's dangerous, I ain't asking him for money. You, you got to pay another seventy dollars. Plus damages for all those doors you broke in."
Some days, being heroic really doesn't pay.
###
We negotiated it down to an even hundred, and got Mona back out on the road in half an hour. Heading for Las Vegas. Since the motel owner was ripping me off anyway, I'd borrowed a couple of pillows, and they were tightly tied around the beer bottle. As soon as I had a chance, I'd hand it over to a Warden, who could get it back to New York to put into the vault.
David was characteristically silent as I drove, the sun flickering over his skin and hair. He wasn't reading. He was watching the landscape slide by outside the window. Sand, cactus, more sand. Not a lot to see.
"We're not going to make it," he said softly, after a while.
I hoped like hell he was talking about Las Vegas.
"We will," I said, and held out my hand.
He took it, and the warmth of it made me smile and settle deeper into the comfortable seat, and urge another few miles an hour out of the Dodge Viper.
We were on our way to a fight I couldn't begin to imagine, but dammit, we had each other, and that was, for the moment, enough.