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She heard an indifferently muffled engine approaching, turned, and saw an old white van come around the curve that had done her in. On the side was a cartoon skeleton pounding a drum kit that appeared to be made out of cupcakes. Written in drippy horror-movie script above this apparition (much more peculiar than a fan foto of Richard Widmark on a librarian’s office wall) were the words ZOMBIE BAKERS. For a moment Tess was too bemused to wave, and when she did, the driver of the Zombie Bakers truck was busy trying to avoid the mess on the road and didn’t notice her.
He was quicker to the shoulder than Tess had been, but the van had a higher center of gravity than the Expedition, and for a moment she was sure it was going to roll and land on its side in the ditch. It stayed up-barely-and regained the road beyond the spilled chunks of wood. The van disappeared around the next curve, leaving behind a blue cloud of exhaust and a smell of hot oil.
“Damn you, Zombie Bakers!” Tess yelled, then began to laugh. Sometimes it was all you could do.
She clipped her phone to the waistband of her dress slacks, went out to the road, and began picking up the mess herself. She did it slowly and carefully, because up close it became obvious that all the pieces of wood (which were painted white and looked as if they had been stripped away by someone in the throes of a home renovation project) had nails in them. Big ugly ones. She worked slowly because she didn’t want to cut herself, but she also hoped to be out here, observably doing A Good Work of Christian Charity, when the next car came along. But by the time she’d finished picking up everything but a few harmless splinters and casting the big pieces into the ditch below the shoulder of the road, no other cars had come along. Perhaps, she thought, the Zombie Bakers had eaten everyone in this immediate vicinity and were now hurrying back to their kitchen to put the leftovers into the always-popular People Pies.
She walked back to the defunct store’s weedy parking lot and looked moodily at her leaning car. Thirty thousand dollars’ worth of rolling iron, four-wheel drive, independent disc brakes, Tom the Talking Tomtom… and all it took to leave you stranded was a piece of wood with a nail in it.
But of course they all had nails, she thought. In a mystery-or a horror movie-that wouldn’t constitute carelessness; that would constitute a plan. A trap, in fact.
“Too much imagination, Tessa Jean,” she said, quoting her mother… and that was ironic, of course, since it was her imagination that had ended up providing her with her daily bread. Not to mention the Daytona Beach home where her mother had spent the last six years of her life.
In the big silence she again became aware of that ti
She had almost plucked the answer from her mental junkheap when her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of an engine. As she turned toward it, sure that the Zombie Bakers had come back after all, the sound of the motor was joined by the scream of ancient brakes. It wasn’t the white van but an old Ford F-150 pickup with a bad blue paintjob and Bondo around the headlights. A man in bib overalls and a gimme cap sat behind the wheel. He was looking at the litter of wood scraps in the ditch.
“Hello?” Tess called. “Pardon me, sir?”
He turned his head, saw her standing in the overgrown parking lot, flicked a hand in salute, pulled in beside her Expedition, and turned off his engine. Given the sound of it, Tess thought that an act tantamount to mercy killing.
“Hey, there,” he said. “Did you pick that happy crappy up off the road?”
“Yes, all but the piece that got my left front tire. And-” And my phone doesn’t work out here, she almost added, then didn’t. She was a woman in her late thirties who went one-twenty soaking wet, and this was a strange man. A big one. “-and here I am,” she finished, a bit lamely.
“I’ll change it forya if you got a spare,” he said, working his way out of his truck. “Do you?”
For a moment she couldn’t reply. The guy wasn’t big, she’d been wrong about that. The guy was a giant. He had to go six-six, but head-to-foot was only part of it. He was deep in the belly, thick in the thighs, and as wide as a doorway. She knew it was impolite to stare (another of the world’s facts learned at her mother’s knee), but it was hard not to. Ramona Norville had been a healthy chunk of woman, but standing next to this guy, she would have looked like a ballerina.
“I know, I know,” he said, sounding amused. “You didn’t think you were going to meet the Jolly Green Giant out here in the williwags, didja?” Only he wasn’t green; he was ta
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that I was thinking you don’t ride in that truck of yours, you wear it.”
He put his hands on his hips and guffawed at the sky. “Never heard it put like that before, but you’re sort of right. When I win the lottery, I’m going to buy myself a Hummer.”
“Well, I can’t buy you one of those, but if you change my tire, I’d be happy to pay you fifty dollars.”
“You kiddin? I’ll do it for free. You saved me a mess of my own when you picked up that scrapwood.”
“Someone went past in a fu
The big guy had been heading for Tess’s flat front tire, but now he turned back to her, frowning. “Someone went by and didn’t offer to help you out?”
“I don’t think he saw me.”
“Didn’t stop to pick up that mess for the next fellow, either, did he?”
“No. He didn’t.”
“Just went on his way?”
“Yes.” There was something about these questions she didn’t quite like. Then the big guy smiled and Tess told herself she was being silly.
“Spare under the cargo compartment floor, I suppose?”
“Yes. That is, I think so. All you have to do is-”
“Pull up on the handle, yep, yep. Been there, done that.”
As he ambled around to the back of her Expedition with his hands tucked deep into the pockets of his overalls, Tess saw that the door of his truck hadn’t shut all the way and the dome light was on. Thinking that the F-150’s battery might be as battered as the truck it was powering, she opened the door (the hinge screamed almost as loudly as the brakes) and then slammed it closed. As she did, she looked through the cab’s back window and into the pickup’s bed. There were several pieces of wood scattered across the ribbed and rusty metal. They were painted white and had nails sticking out of them.
For a moment, Tess felt as if she were having an out-of-body experience. The ticking sign, YOU LIKE IT IT LIKES YOU, now sounded not like an old-fashioned alarm clock but a ticking bomb.
She tried to tell herself the scraps of wood meant nothing, stuff like that only meant something in the kind of books she didn’t write and the kind of movies she rarely watched: the nasty, bloody kind. It didn’t work. Which left her with two choices. She could either go on trying to pretend because to do otherwise was terrifying, or she could take off ru