Joe Haldeman - Work Done for Hire

If it did come to that, he could move into another level of discourse. He could try to negotiate with them, essentially with a knife to her throat. Inviting a simple head shot from a police sniper.

Or he could cut her up and scatter pieces of her through the woods, hoping to distract them from his avenue of escape by repugnant overkill. Of course that might make it harder on him if they caught him—or maybe not. If you’re brutal enough, they call you insane, and treat you as if you were handicapped. Though it is they who are handicapped, by timidity.

He approached the trailer in a large circle, checking seven suspended threads that crossed every route to the place. He retrieved his shotgun from the bushes and entered the trailer silently without turning on the light. He listened in the darkness to her irregular breathing. Drank in her smell. Then he pulled down the bandana that gagged her.

“Can we talk?” she said to the darkness.

He eased the safety off, and the small click was loud.

“If you’re trying to scare me, you’ve succeeded.” Her tone of voice had told him that. He aimed the shotgun at her voice and touched the light switch.

“So that’s what you look like.” He had grabbed her from her tent in the darkness and tied her up in the trailer without light. “You… you’re even bigger than I thought.”

“Uglier,” he growled, the first word he had spoken in weeks.

“Are you the one they’re looking for?”

He shrugged and stepped closer to her. Her breath was mint-sweet. His made her flinch away. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t cook the last thing I ate. It had been on the road for a while.”

She coughed. “I’ll do… whatever you want. Really.” She took a breath and straightened up her well-toned body. “Anything.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you could see into my mind. Do you think there is nothing worse than death?”

She shook her head slowly.

He wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “What do you think you know about me? If I am the beast that has been on the news?” He smiled, showing too many teeth. “I am a beast, as they say. Not human.”

“So they say.” Her breath caught. “Of course we are all animals.”

“Not in the sense that I am one. I really am not human . I don’t even come from Earth.”

After a pause she said, “So what planet are you from?”—as if that were an ordinary question.

“I don’t know. It was a long time ago. I have memory issues.” He studied his long blunt nails as if the answer might be there. “Thousands of years of memory issues.” His eyes came up. “You think I’m crazy.”

Her voice shook a little. “On the news they say you are.” She tried to stare back at him but looked away.

“Now you’re going to tell me that someone is looking for you. If I let you go, they will be easy on me.”

“That could be true,” she said quietly, looking at the floor.

“Not quite lying. I like that.” He went to a window and peeked through the blinds. “Would you like to offer your body to me?”

“It’s yours, of course. But you don’t seem to want it.”

“What if I wanted you from behind? Rough.”

“That would… be all right. I’ve—”

“From the front?” He took a clasp knife from a deep pocket and shook it open with a snap. The blade was a dagger about eight inches long. “I mean the abdomen, as usual. Have you read about that?”

She shook her head in jerks, staring at the blade.

“Most newspapers haven’t printed that. The fact is, not being a man, I have no particular interest in vaginas.” He sat down on a barstool. “They look like a wound to me, even when they’re not bleeding. I prefer to make my own wounds.”

She started to say something, but just swallowed.

“I enjoy it that you’re scared, as you may know. You will live a little longer for that.”

“But not very long?”

“No.” He tested the blade with his thumb. “Would you like for me to be kind, and end it quickly?”

“I want to live.”

He smiled condescendingly. “I have a news flash for you: The universe doesn’t care. Neither do I. But even if you were to survive this… little meeting, you would die very soon. A half century? That’s nothing to me.”

“How… how old are you?”

“I remember Pompeii. And a flood before that. I may be immortal.”

“Or insane,” she whispered.

He nodded. “Or insane. Maybe both.” He picked up a sharpening stone, and drew the blade over it slowly. “Maybe I was sane, a couple of thousand years ago. And it wore off.”

There was a light on in the motel office, so I went in and printed out the chapter while a black kid about high-school age watched me. Making conversation, I explained about what a pain it was to try to do work on this dime store computer, not being able to just push a button and send it to my agent. He understood, and volunteered that they had a scanner, if I’d like to make an electronic copy and send it.

It felt kind of funny, switching between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I sent copies to myself and my agent, as well as Duquest.

Perversely, writing the nightmarish chapter helped me get to sleep. And when dawn showed through the drapes, Kit kissed me awake and slowly had her way with me, a quiet and dreamy kind of sex.

There was a message slipped under the door, evidently printed on the office computer:

This is fucking fantastic. Keep the girl alive, stretch it out, like the old Silence of the Lambs… maybe a POV shift with some cops who can’t figure out the craziness. You got a fucking movie here, man.

It might be real money. I’ll talk to some people.

We took showers, laughing and chatting over the noise. Celebrate our good fortune and go back up to Bradley Road for breakfast.

But when I braced the door open and started maneuvering the bikes out, a kid, younger than the one who’d helped me, opened the office door and jogged over.

“Mister… guy said not to wake you up, but give this to you ’fore you leave.” He handed me a heavy padded mailing envelope with no address. On the back of it, a crayon scrawl in green block letters: SOMEONE THOT YOU SHD HAVE MORE FUN.

We went back inside and sat on the bed.

I tore open the envelope, causing a blizzard of gray shreds. There was a thick hardcover book inside—Dexter Filkins’s old history of the Gulf War—but most of the text was missing. Someone had hollowed out a large enough volume for two thick packages of hundred-dollar bills, banded $25,000 each, and one big bullet heat-sealed into a plastic bag.

And the key to room 15, next door, and a car key.

We stepped around the bikes and opened the door to 15. On the bed, no surprise, a long rectangular box.

“He was in here,” the boy said from behind us, “the one who give me the envelope. Musta left before the sun come up. Left his car, too.”

“What kind of man was he?”

“Old guy.”

“Old like me?”

“No… way old. Old white guy with a white ’stash.”

I picked up one end of the box and let it fall, heavy. “What exactly did he say?”

“He say give you the thing.”

“Nothing else?”

“Huh–uh. He don’t say nothin’ !”

“Come on. What did he say?”

“Nothin’!” The kid bolted. I got to the door just in time to see him run behind the motel.

“Did he threaten you?” Kit called out. “We could help.” We could hear him crashing through the woods in back.