Blood Debt - By Tanya Huff Page 0,11

by nearly every other car on the highway.

"Get your picture taken," he muttered as an old and rusty K-car buzzed by him. Unfortunately, the new Ontario government had recently pulled the photo radar vans, insisting they'd shown no positive effects. Celluci had no idea where the idiots at Queen's Park had gathered their information, but in his personal experience, the threat of the vans had kept paranoid drivers actually traveling at slightly less than the limit.

He stopped at Barrie for breakfast and a chance to stretch his legs. A tractor trailer accident held him for an hour just outside Waubaushene and by the time he stopped for lunch at the Centennial Diner in Bigwood, he'd heard Sonny and Cher sing "I Got You Babe" on three different oldies stations and was wondering why he was putting himself through rock-and-roll hell for Henry-fucking-Fitzroy.

"I should've tried harder to talk her out of it." He yanked a tasseled toothpick out of his club sandwich. So what if there were no PI's on the West Coast Fitzroy could trust. "How's he supposed to make new friends if he never talks to strangers."

"Is anything wrong?"

Celluci manufactured a smile and tossed it up to his teenage waitress. "No. Nothing's wrong." Watching her watch him on her way back to the kitchen, he sighed. Great. Not only does he expect Vicki to risk her life traveling across three quarters of the country, but now he's got me talking to myself.

On the flyspecked radio above the pie rack, Sonny Bono once again declared his love in the face of every?thing they said.

"WaWa?" Knuckles on her hips, Vicki rolled the kinks out of her shoulders. "Why WaWa?"

Celluci shrugged, eyes appreciatively following her movements. "Why not WaWa? I thought you might want to see the goose."

"The goose?" Slowly, she turned and peered up at the nine-meter-high steel sculpture silhouetted against a gray sky streaked with orange. "Okay. I've seen it. I hope we're not sharing the high point of your day."

"Close," he admitted. "How're you feeling?"

"Like my body spent the day bouncing around in?side a padded box. Other than that, fine."

"Are you, uh... " He broke off in embarrassment as a car pulled into the small parking lot and a pair of children exploded out of the back and raced up the path toward the bathrooms.

"Hungry?" Stepping into the circle of his body heat, she grinned. "Mike, you can say hungry in front of kids-they'll assume I'll be having a Big Mac, not Ronald MacDonald."

"That's disgusting."

"Actually, it's given me an appetite."

He grabbed her upper arms, halting her advance. "Forget it, Vicki, I'm too old for a quickie in the back of a van." But his protest had little force, and after the kids and the car disappeared, he allowed himself to be convinced.

It didn't take much.

Twenty minutes later, as they climbed up into the front seats, Vicki reached out and caught a mosquito about to land on his back. "Forget it, sister," she mut?tered, squashing the bug between thumb and forefin?ger. "He gave at the office."

"We're just past Portage la Prairie?" Celluci looked up from the map of Manitoba with a scowl. He hadn't slept well, and the thermos of coffee Vicki'd handed him when he'd staggered out of the van could peel the residue off a garbage truck. He drank it anyway- after fifteen years drinking police coffee, he could drink anything-but he wasn't happy. The last thing he needed to be told was that they'd gone consider?ably past the point where he'd expected to take over. . "You must've been doing between a hundred and twenty-five and a hundred and thirty kilometers an hour!"

"What's your point?"

"Let's start with the speed limit being a hundred kilometers an hour and take it from there. It's not just a good idea," he added sarcastically, fighting to refold the map. "It's the law."

Vicki clamped her teeth down on a complaint that a hundred K to someone with her reaction time was ridiculously slow, and merely shrugged. Her opinions didn't make the speed limit any less the law. If he'd suggested she'd been driving unsafely, then she could've given him an argument.

Leaning back against the van, she stared out at the farmland surrounding the gas station parking lot. With the station closed and the only illumination coming from the stars and Celluci's flashlight, it seemed as though they were the last people alive in the world. She hated that feeling and she'd felt it for most of the night as she'd sped away