Giles Blunt - No Such Creature

“I’m thinking of her welfare, Lance. I’ll allow that sometimes I can be selfish, but this is different. My motives are entirely altruistic. Sabrina is a confused person in need of help.”

“Helping a nubile young waitress?” Baxter said. “We all know what that means.”

“No, you don’t.”

“You’ve got a daughter her age, for God’s sake.”

“There you go again.”

“She’s the same age as your daughter, Bill. Admit it.”

“Peggy-Ann is eighteen. Sabrina is a young woman of twenty. Anyway, I don’t see why you got to pitch a conniption about it. All you gotta do is switch a couple of shifts around.”

Baxter spoke in a tone he had almost certainly picked up at a management training seminar. “Believe it or not, Bill, the rest of us at Baxter Secure Solutions get tired of covering for your spiritual retreats and your prayer breakfasts and your emotional crises.” Baxter swept an arm at the bank of monitors on his office wall, as if all the cameras in his arsenal were sick of Bill’s problems too. “Why should we always be making accommodations? I thought God was supposed to be looking after you.”

“He is. He’s looking after you and me and the whole wide world right now. Obviously that don’t mean we up and quit our moral responsibilities.”

Baxter shook his head. His cellphone rang and he picked it up, squinting at the tiny screen. He switched it off and put it back down. He no sooner did that than his land line, a bright red phone designed to imply security at a national level, also began to ring. He punched a button and it went silent.

“You’ve got a real jones for this girl and you can’t even admit it. You’re obsessed, Bill, I can see it a mile away.”

“Think what you want,” Bill said. “I know what’s in my heart.”

“Uh-huh.”

Baxter took out his Mont Blanc and scribbled a note to himself. That was just like him, to make a note on a Post-it with a fountain pen.

“All right, Bill, but you owe me one. And I want you back Monday at the latest. You’ll be doing graveyard.”

“Lance, I’m fifty-five years old. Let the younger guys do graveyard.”

“Are you so tight with the Lord you can’t see when a mere human being is doing you a favour? Get the hell outta here.”

Fifty-five and still taking orders; it was enough to make a grown man cry. Bill always tried to be humble, the way Jesus was, but Jesus was half divine and clearly had an advantage or two.

Now, Bill’s first glance at the hotel room confirmed that Sabrina had not somehow snuck past him. Her jeans were strewn across the end of the bed, which was otherwise unrumpled. Her backpack was on the floor. Her suitcase was open on a fold-out stand, and it squeezed his heart to see how full it was. Bye-bye, Bill, it said, I’ve lit out for good. She had taken almost all her clothes, not that she had a vast wardrobe. You’d think that someone so beautiful would have closets full of the latest fashions, but Sabrina owned almost nothing.

He knelt beside the bed and sniffed the jeans, burying his face in them and breathing deeply. “Don’t go,” he said. “I swear, I will buy you everything you need. I will be your provider and you will be my helpmeet.”

The suitcase contained mostly T-shirts, though she hadn’t packed the yellow one that said Cancun .

He found the dark skirt that he yelled at her for wearing because it showed too much of her legs. Those beautiful legs that sent waves of lust riding through his body. He didn’t want other men lusting after her that way.

“I was yelling more in pain than in anger,” he said to the hotel room now.

But he remembered how the expression on her face had changed. How the muscles in her cheeks had gone slack, her eyes dimming to a darkness that he recognized was fear. Fear, and something worse: contempt.

“Oh, Lord, why did you send me this beautiful creature, if not for me to take under my protection?”

She had used the shower. The bath mat was askew, and a towel was slung over the shower curtain rail. The air smelled of coconut shampoo. Girl things were set out neatly on the glass shelf above the sink: eyeliner, some kind of flesh-coloured stuff in a tube, lip balm. He opened the lip balm and touched it to his bottom lip, then the tip of his tongue. He picked up her hairbrush, put it back.

He went back to the other room and knelt again beside the bed, clasping his hands together until the knuckles whitened.

“Oh, Lord, help me bring Sabrina back, for she done truly lost her way. And woe betide those who led her astray, who made straight the way unto eternal fire.”

He clutched a T-shirt in both hands and brought it to his face. A sob escaped his throat, but he checked the urge to weep. Mostly because he had a pretty good idea where Sabrina was headed next.

Max woke up. Cold metal was pressing against the base of his skull, as if he had fallen asleep with his head resting on a pipe.

He could see the lights from the trailer park, white orbs in the window, which was open. He could smell the faint smells of oil and gas from someone’s badly tuned motor. A dog barked in the distance and, farther off, yobbos guffawed.

He reached behind his head and felt the pipe, palpated the little ridge at the end pressing up against his skull. The sight. He sat up, back pressed against the head of the bed.

Wyatt Earp was sitting on the bed beside him, knee-high boots resting on top of the covers. Doc Holliday was perched sideways at the foot, drinking from a silver flask. They were the animatronic creatures Max had seen the day before.

“New wigs,” Max said. “Is that what you’ve come for?”

“We don’t need no steenking wigs,” Wyatt Earp said. His mouth moved in the most unsettling, jerky motion, out of sync with his words.

“You scared yet, fatso?” Doc Holliday sneered at him from the foot of the bed. “You should be.”

“The wigs,” Max said. “I’ll just get up and fetch them for you.”

Wyatt Earp put an arm around his shoulder. It felt just like you’d expect a robot’s arm to feel, squeezing him so that he could not even squirm. The barrel of the gun pressed against his temple.

“You first,” Doc Holliday said, making a pistol of his fingers. “Then the boy.”

“Oh, no. Not the boy,” Max pleaded. “Not the boy.”

The bang went off in his ears like a cathedral bell. He felt the bullet crash into the bone behind his ear. He would only have a second or two to save Owen. It took all his strength to raise his right hand, bending at the elbow. He grabbed the barrel of the revolver. It was scorching hot, the metal searing his hand. He couldn’t hold on. He pressed his pillow to the back of his skull to staunch the wound and passed out.

Sometime later, he peeled the pillow from his head and opened one eye. The pink fringe of morning glowed in the Rocket’s window, and the room was gunslinger-free.

Max was not a man to cling to a mood, Sabrina had to give him that, and breakfast always seemed to make him positively sprightly. Her storied father had been a spiky bundle of negativity in the morning. Set your juice glass down too hard on the kitchen table and he’d reach across and give you a swipe on the ear. All you usually saw of him were his hands gripping the newspaper, which he snapped and rattled as if it were responsible for the outrages it reported. His moods made mornings a time of trepidation for Sabrina and her mother, and she realized now, sitting in the sunny nook of the Rocket, that they coloured her perception of breakfast to this day.

Max was humming and whistling in the galley, fixing coffee and poached eggs. He commented, cajoled and exclaimed over his cooking in several different accents. Just in the course of cracking eggs he went through Scottish, Irish, Indian and a Southern black bluesman accent that made Sabrina laugh in spite of herself.