Joe Haldeman - Work Done for Hire

“You told me they never got the guy.”

“No, shit, he was in some dunes in the middle of nowhere. We’d used up all the drones, the rubber-band guys, and he had ten minutes to get lost before we had air support.”

“And before you were medivaced.”

“More like fifteen. But our medic was cool. Some superglue spray kept the lung from deflating, pneumothorax. But the hand, that was bad.”

“Yeah.” She knew that one; they’d bound my hand up tight to stop the bleeding, and hadn’t seen that the little finger was only hanging on with a little skin. By the time they got around to it, it might as well have been blown off and lost. Rather lose a finger than a lung, though.

“It was brave of you to relearn the guitar, the new fingerings.”

“Not much else to do in rehab.” Actually, after a year, I was playing better than I ever had with all my fingers. A thousand hours of compulsive repetition.

Losing that finger didn’t affect my writing because I could never type worth a shit anyhow.

“You’d sit and think,” she said.

“Yeah, too much of that.” That was when the PTSD first crawled into bed with me, and I started to get the high-octane drugs. I try to remember what that felt like and I can’t, quite. Just a fog and a memory of a memory of nightmares. While the guitar sort of learned how to play itself.

I dozed for a while. “Over the state line,” she said, waking me. “How does the Oak Grove Motel sound?”

“Sounds like Indiana. Or is it Kentucky?”

It was Indiana; Hoosiers not horses. The eponymous grove only had one tree, but it was an oak—a pin oak, the only leaf I remembered from freshman botany. It has a pin on the end. Like a grenade.

While Kit was showering (definitely a one-person stall) I went down the road for a six-pack and a bag of ice, and on impulse snagged a homemade bag of red-hot pork rinds. She ate a bite of one and made a face. I scarfed down most of a bag, leaving a little room for dinner. Can’t get them in Iowa.

We went back across the state line to a pizza place that had a 2-for-1 special and a rear parking lot, where the car couldn’t be spotted from the road. The second pizza we’d keep for breakfast.

It wasn’t exactly a relaxing place, all bright primary colors and loud music. But the benches were comfortable and the guy turned the music down to a whisper when I asked him to. He also politely wiped the crumbs off the table, onto the floor.

I asked for wine and got a half carafe of ice-cold Chianti. Kit unfolded a large-scale roadmap and studied it.

“We want to go south,” she said.

“Down to the Gulf? And over to Florida.”

“I don’t know. We’re not exactly on vacation.”

“Nothing wrong with Florida.”

“Except that it’s an obvious destination. If the bad guys know we’re headed south.”

“Maybe so,” I said. “But if they go looking for us in Florida, they have to find us in the middle of a million tourists. If we’re in Pigsty, Arkansas, we’ll stand out.”

“That’s ‘Piggott.’ Didn’t Hemingway write there?”

“Another reason to go somewhere else. I’d start doing short declarative sentences.”

She smiled and lowered her voice. “My instinct is to look for run-down small places that might not be on the Net. Once the car’s registered somewhere, we’re vulnerable.”

“Well, we don’t really need a motel. We could just pull over on a back road and catch some Zs, then move on.”

“No way.” She laughed. “I read that book. Some homicidal alien’ll cut us up and eat the pieces.”

“I bet he made that up.” A cockroach came out of a crack in the wall and skipped toward the pizza. I slapped at it and it scuttled back. “Yuck. Kind of glad I missed.” More than an inch long.

“They’re bigger in Florida,” she said.

“Maybe slower, too. Pity I left the gun behind.”

She was staring at the crack. “Maybe we should get one.”

“What?”

“Just a thought. Stupid, I guess.”

It had crossed my mind, too, of course. “Not stupid. But not a rifle. I can’t imagine any scenario where that would work. Maybe a concealable pistol, like a Derringer, if we get cornered.”

“But you can’t just buy one in a store, can you? Without showing ID? The guy in your book, Steve, he had a permit and everything.”

“Yeah, he needed a concealed-weapon permit, which was true down in Florida… but when I went down there as a kid, my uncle kept a handgun in his tackle box, and it wasn’t a big deal that he didn’t have a permit; he joked about it with my dad. But I remember he hadn’t bought the gun; it was an old thing he got from his own father.”

“So the trick is to choose your grandparents wisely?”

“Always. There used to be a used-gun section in the want ads. I remember when they stopped doing that, ran a sanctimonious notice for weeks.”

“So it will have to be a back-alley deal,” she said.

“Yeah, and Oak Grove doesn’t even have any front alleys.” I snagged her a glass from the counter and we finished the last of the wine.

It had gotten dark, crickets chirping. Maybe one car a minute went by outside. A quarter moon shone down.

“Glad to be off the road,” she said. “Quiet here.”

She looked good, girlish, just-washed hair back in a ponytail. The neon sign in the window made her skin look warm.

“We could go make some noise.”

It took her a second to react. If she blushed, I couldn’t tell. “Sure. I’d like that.”

We got back to the motel in about two minutes, breaking two states’ speed limits. We parked in the back, where we’d been before, and rushed around to the door, my arm around her waist.

While she was wiggling the key in the lock, I started to get a bad feeling.

The key had worked fine earlier.

Had we left a light on?

She pushed the door open and suddenly gasped. “Oh, shit.”

In the center of the bed, the long cardboard box with my name and address on it. Beside it, a fresh box of ammunition.

The phone rang.

Ipicked up the phone and didn’t say anything. “Are you done wasting gasoline?” the female voice said. I turned on the recorder in my shirt pocket.

“Who are you?”

“You asked that before. I can’t tell you.”

“Then I can’t do anything for you.”

“Not to wax philosophical, but for whom were you working when you killed all those people in the desert?”

“I’m not going to go there.”

“You were killing people in order to stabilize the price of a barrel of oil. To use your own words.”

“I was drafted.”

“Yes, and as you’ve said, you could have gone to jail instead. You don’t have that option now.”

“Why don’t you just do the job yourself? You threaten me and Kit with murder. Why not just kill this poor schlub yourself?”

“That may be clear later.”

Kit had written a note: PLAY ALONG SEE WHAT THEY WANT.

I nodded, but could feel a slippery slope under my feet. “Maybe if you told me something about who the target is.”

“That’s progress. But not yet.”

“So at least tell me why you’re using me . There must be a thousand guys who would do it for pocket change.”

“You already know part of the reason. The rest will become clear.”

“Maybe if I knew who you were…”

“You will never know that.”

I took a deep breath. “So okay. Tell me what to do.” Kit’s eyes widened but she nodded, lips pursed.

“The first thing is to take that recorder out of your pocket and leave it on the end table. Second, put the rifle in the trunk of Ms. Majors’s car. Third, get a good night’s sleep. Finally, in the morning, keep driving south, toward the Gulf of Mexico.” She hung up.