with ground beef. Shacket wants to take his knife and fork, slit open the bastard, show him exactly what rare means, but instead he orders two more burgers not one degree more well done than the medium-rare patty they’ve already served him. He eats all three burgers but only one bun, and none of the fries. He pays, but he doesn’t tip.
On the way out, the waitress smiles at him and tells him to have a nice day, and he is reminded of his unbalanced mother, who refused the drugs prescribed for her condition, who could slap him hard enough to split his lip and pull his hair until he cried and then, with apparent sincerity, claim to love him more than life. In this moment, the waitress is Mother, and Shacket has a score to settle with her.
“Has anyone ever told you that you look like that actress, Riley Keough?” he asks.
This woman is twentysomething and shy enough to blush. “Oh, she’s gorgeous. I’m not gonna rush to a mirror and be disappointed.”
“Good for you,” he says. “Because, fact is, that’s a lie. You have a face like a shithouse rat, and any guy who ever humps you will want to commit suicide afterward.”
Her pleased expression collapses into hurt, into bewildered anger.
“Have a nice day,” he says as he walks away.
He has long known that cruelty is a kind of power, but until recently he has not embraced it as a weapon in his arsenal.
Now, hours later, he needs to eat again. There’s a diner associated with the motor inn at which he’s parked, but he doesn’t want to go in there and get bad food, as he did at the other place. Besides, he’s too angry at Megan, the snarky bitch. She thinks she’s too good for him. Furious as he is, if he goes into the diner, he’ll take his anger out on a waitress or on someone else, and the food will stink, and there’ll be a scene. He’s got to remember that in spite of what his driver’s license says, he’s not really Nathan Palmer; he is Lee Shacket, the former CEO of Refine, and he’s on the run from what happened at the facility in Springville, Utah. He has changed his appearance, yes, all right, but it’s nonetheless a mistake to call attention to himself.
He can eat something when he gets to Megan’s place. She’ll cook it the way he wants it. She’ll do everything the way he wants it. He now sees what his mistake was all those years ago. He was too nice to her, too considerate of her feelings. Niceness and consideration get you nowhere with an ice-queen bitch like Megan Grassley Bookman. He’ll give her what she deserves, what she wants but doesn’t know she wants, and when she’s begging for more, he’ll walk the hell out on her, leave her in shitty Pinehaven and go to Costa Rica.
It’s maybe ninety miles to her place. He will be there before nightfall. They’ll have a reunion, talk about the old days, while he does to her what he didn’t have the nerve to do back in the day. I’m afraid our time has passed, Lee. She’ll learn different. He’ll turn back the clock. It’ll be their time again, all right. I’m afraid you underestimate how a special-needs child changes your life. He will show her what she really ought to be afraid of, the bitch. He’ll also show her that her changed life can be changed again, for the better, just by slitting the little mute bastard’s throat.
He starts the engine and pilots the Dodge Demon out of the parking lot, onto I-80, heading west. In twenty-four miles, he will leave the interstate for State Route 20. For his entire life, he has been a target of injustice, used and discarded, set up to take the fall for someone else, set up by everyone from Dorian Purcell, to Jason Bookman, to hot Megan Grassley, but he’s not going to take it anymore. He feels a power growing in himself, a new Lee Shacket. He is becoming someone who cannot be denied, someone who doesn’t need to play by any rules, someone who always gets what he wants, someone unlike the world has ever seen before, something special, something.
15
Because she had not been merely a hired caregiver during the eighteen months that Dorothy had battled cancer, because she had come to love Dorothy almost as if she’d been her daughter,