need to pull it out.”
“Try rubbing the muscle,” he said. “Like I had a cramp.”
She rubbed. His thigh was cold and wet and slippery. Thick with blood. He groaned and gasped and whimpered. She squeezed both sides of the wound, inching the web of her thumb closer and closer to the arrowhead, and then she pressed a little harder, both sides, gaping the wound, opening it like a mouth. Blood welled up, and spilled out in little green rivers, some one way, some the other.
“Tell me where we’re going,” she said.
“Florida,” he said.
“What will we do when we get there?”
“Windsurfers.”
“What else?”
“T-shirts,” he said. “Where the money is.”
“What kind of design?”
He paused a moment, thinking, maybe something elaborate, and she gripped the arrow’s shaft, and jerked it as sharp and hard as she would getting a stuck two-by-four out of a rack at work. The arrow came out and Shorty shrieked between grinding teeth, with pain and outrage and betrayal.
“Sorry,” she said.
He gasped and he panted.
She slipped off her jacket and used the clean arrowhead to cut off the sleeves. She tied them together, end to end, with a generous knot. She folded the body of the jacket into a tight little pad, as small as she could get it. She pressed it down on the wound. She tied it on with the double sleeves. As good as she could get right then. A pressure dressing on the front, to stop the bleeding, and a splint of sorts on the back. The big knot would hold things steady. At least for a while. She hoped.
“Wait there,” she said.
She ran back to the first nightmare figure. The one Shorty had hit. The crack behind the ear. She pulled off his night vision device. Its rubber straps were slick with blood. She took another arrow from the quiver. She ran back to Shorty. She gave him the headset to wear, and the arrow to hold. For security. As a last-ditch defense.
“Now I’m going to find us a quad-bike,” she said.
She took the working flashlight in one hand, and the clean arrow in the other. She ran back to Shorty’s guy. She stood where she had stood before. She replayed the scene in her mind. The guy had loomed up ahead of her. The nightmare vision. Face to face. In other words, he had been walking in a southerly direction. Coming from the north. From somewhere near the mouth of the track.
She stepped over the guy, and moved on to where the voice from the dark had spun them around. Damn right about that, little girl. They had turned and seen him. Face to face. He had been walking in a southerly direction, too. Also coming from the north. From near the mouth of the track. They were a pair. Working together. Common sense said they would have left their bikes behind them. They would have parked way back, surely, and then ranged ahead on foot.
She stepped over her guy and set out walking, north.
* * *
—
Mark saw her go. He was all set to follow, but then at the last second in the corner of his eye he saw what she was stepping over. A dead man. Two dead men. Which put things in a whole different perspective. Burning the motel was bad enough. It was insured, ironically. But obviously he wouldn’t risk a claim. Even a cursory inspection would call it arson. Because it was. At the time Steven hadn’t understood what he was watching. To be fair, none of them had. At that point the radio was still working, and Steven had described the pads of towels, and he had described Shorty’s mysterious mechanical work, under the rear end of each of the vehicles in turn, but the camera angles were bad and he couldn’t see exactly what the hell he was doing, and no one else had any suggestions either, until suddenly the towels were all on fire, and he was throwing them around.
It had never happened in any of their brainstorming sessions, or simulations, or war games. Now he saw it should have. It was inevitable. If customers pushed for better specimens, this was bound to happen. Sooner or later. A really bold move would come about.
But still, no insurance claim. The cops would come, and they would sift through the wreckage, and they would find all kinds of weird shit. But rebuilding with cash would eat up half of what they were making that night. Which