American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,150

they got are the kind that get answered, if you see my meaning, Martha.”

She is silent.

“You understand?” he asks.

“I understand.”

“Good.”

She angles her head to look at him over her shoulder. He lopes, strides, saunters. He is a perfectly relaxed creature, enjoying this game, ambling behind his captured quarry.

He hasn’t done this before, she thinks. He doesn’t know a damn bit about what he’s doing. That doesn’t mean she has to get ugly but, if she winds up having to, she’s fairly confident she’ll wind up on top.

She says, “Mister, I… I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong.”

Silence.

“I have a hundred dollars in my wallet. You can take it, if you just leave me be.”

Of course, she has no such thing. She doesn’t even have a wallet. But immediately she feels his hand invading her back pocket, and his fingertips encounter far more of her ass than is necessary for a wallet search. She flexes involuntarily, which makes him grip her buttock a little harder.

He removes his hand and laughs, delighted. “Bullshit. You ain’t got no hundred dollars.”

Mona is quiet.

“You got a lot, though. A whole lot.”

She says nothing.

“And I’m in a pretty good mood today. A damn good mood. But it could get better. You know?”

She doesn’t answer.

“Yeah. You know. You got a lot to give. And I’d let you go. If you were to give it. You see?”

She hears his footsteps getting closer behind her. She peers back over her shoulder a little, looking for the fish-lure silver of that ridiculous gun. He takes this for a positive signal, and moves a little bit closer.

Oh well, she thinks. Might as well get ugly.

There’s a reason why, in real life, folks keep other folks at gunpoint from a distance of over four feet: primarily, if your guy jumps one way or another, you only have to move your aim a little bit to hit him. But if you’re right up close and he jumps, you have to wheel around like an idiot to try to draw a bead.

So when Mona leaps back and to the left, she’s out of the Desert Eagle’s range of fire almost instantly. And, since he’s holding this immensely heavy gun with just one hand, it only takes a firm grasp on his wrist and enough force down on the end of the barrel to pop it free from his grip, like a bar of soap in the shower.

For a moment they just stand there, Mona holding the gun by the barrel, the man staring at her blankly, wondering what just happened.

“Hey…” he says.

Which is when Mona pistol-whips him.

And maybe it’s because she’s still disturbed by what she discovered in this lab, or maybe it’s because he just cupped her ass and suggested she fuck him for her freedom, but Mona puts a lot more weight into it than she normally would. The young man’s cheek practically explodes. He staggers back against the wall, face bleeding freely, eyes wide. But there’s something about hitting someone that makes you want to do it again, so Mona does. Six times more, in fact, each time about as hard as the last, and each time his Attractiveness Integer goes down a notch until he’s nowhere near a 10.

When she’s done she just stands there, breathing hard. It’s dark, but his face looks caved in. She realizes she might have just killed him.

Then he moans. So he’s still got a shot, unless she damaged his brain, but a lot of her work was on the more superficial parts of his face. The world’s loss, she thinks.

She grabs her backpack, puts a boot in the middle of his back, and searches his pockets. She finds a set of keys, a wallet with a ton of money in it, and a piece of paper.

She reads it, squinting in the dark. It’s directions of some kind, like he was sent to find something, and one of them tells him to check here.

So he was never meant to find her. That’s good, she thinks. Then he must have come alone.

But they will be expecting him back, eventually. And since this is the last place on his list, it’s likely it’s the first place they’ll look.

She stares back down the hallway. She wants to go back and grab as many of those old records as she can. Some piece of them, some rambling paragraph or static-smeared voice, must have a kernel of truth in it.

But she knows she can’t risk it. She needs to