American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,149

a sneer) that Coburn never made anything actually worth making. She remembers Parson telling her about the little birds who flew to the top of a mountain from a dying world. And she remembers her mother whispering in her ear that she was not from here, she was from somewhere far, far away, and one day she would come back and take her little girl home…

There’s another loud pop. Mona jumps. She peers at the tape player, puzzled. It isn’t moving. But then, that pop sounded awfully metallic.

She sits back and sees over her shoulder that there’s someone standing in the doorway, pointing something very large and very shiny at her, and she realizes the pop was not the tape player at all.

“Hey there, pretty lady,” says a voice.

Without thinking, she tenses up.

“Ah-ah,” says a voice. “You just hold on there. I would hate to do anything mean, you see. And what I got trained on your back does nothing but mean things.”

Mona sees. She stays still.

“Hands,” says the voice, relaxed. He sounds as if he’s having just a ball of a time.

She raises her hands.

The barrel of the gun jerks up. “Now go on. Stand up.”

Mona stands up. Then she turns her head to see who it is who’s gotten the jump on her.

It is a young, chiseled-featured man wearing one of those not-really cowboy hats (because no real cowboy would be caught dead in that beaten straw thing), a pearl snap that is unsnapped past his sternum, and jeans so tight Mona is surprised he could get up the stairs to here. That is, if he did take the stairs. Despite these ridiculous ornamentations, he is quite attractive, and were this a year ago, when Mona idled her evenings away shithoused in dive bars, he would be the sort to receive from her a very, very forthright invitation to dance.

“Well, now,” he says, and grins. It is a grin of perfect, thoughtless confidence. “What in the world is a cute thing like you doing in a place like this.”

And that just does it. There is something in his cocksure smirk—perhaps its unearned, swaggering bravado—that makes Mona want to put a brick through it.

“Reading,” says Mona.

“I don’t really care,” the man says. “It was one of them, eh. Rhetorical questions. You ain’t supposed to be doing anything in here. This ain’t a place anyone’s supposed to be in.”

“Says who?”

“Says… says me. That’s who.” He looks around at the records room, uncertain. “Now… what the hell is this?”

He looks surprised—so he’s been here a lot, but he’s never seen this. “It is what it looks like, I guess,” she says.

“How’d you find it?”

“By looking.”

“Shit.” He shakes his head, then nods his head down the hallway. “All right, then. Come on.”

“Where are we going?”

“To wherever I say to go. I don’t know how in the hell you got in here, but I know how you’re getting out.”

He steps to the side of the door and gestures with the gun. Mona, arms still raised, slowly walks out. But as she does, she eyes his piece. It’s a Desert Eagle, the Humvee of pistols: ostentatious, impractical, ridiculous.

And he’s holding it one-handed. She starts thinking.

He keeps the gun pointed at her while he enters the records room and picks up her backpack. “The shit?” he says, holding up the pink child’s backpack. “What you got in here, Barbies?”

He starts digging through it. “Oh-ho.” He holds up the Glock. “Goodness. This ain’t no toy.” He looks through the rest, smirking, and tosses the backpack over his shoulder. “Well, this is interesting. This is damn interesting,” he says. “Now go on. Down the hallway.”

They start walking. She listens hard, counting his footsteps. About four feet away, she thinks.

“So how’d you get in here?” he asks.

“I took the back door,” she says.

“Oh, you did, did you?”

“Yes. And the stairs.”

“The… stairs?” Mona can tell he’s not sure if she’s joking anymore. “What’s your name?”

“Martha,” she says, pulling a name out randomly.

“Like hell it is. You don’t look no eighty years old, and that is a name for an eighty-year-old woman. What’s your real name?”

“Martha,” she says again. “What’s yours?”

He laughs. “What the hell are you doing out here, Martha?”

“Reading.”

He laughs again. “I’m going to enjoy you, I got to admit.”

“Mister… what are you going to do to me?”

“Don’t know. For now, we’re just going to walk. Then I’m probably going to wind up taking you to meet some people.”

“What kind of people?”

“The kind with questions. And those questions