interstate near Greensboro, and Secrest rolled up all the power windows. When he punched the AC button on the dash, though, nothing happened. The little blue led failed to light. Secrest punched the button over and over, but no cool air came out. He sniffed and rolled down all of the windows again.
He took the next exit and pulled into the parking lot of a large truck stop, stopping far from the swarms of eighteen wheelers. He got out and popped the hood.
“You guys should check out the truck stop,” he said. “Buy a magazine or something.” In the few weeks she’d known Secrest, she’d seen him like this several times. Silent, focused, just like solving a problem in math class. She hated it when he acted this way, and stalked off to find the restroom.
When she returned, he was sitting in the driver’s seat, rubbing his hands with an antiseptic wipe.
“What’s the verdict?”
“Unknown. I checked the fuses, the drive belt to the compressor, the wires to the compressor… nothing looks broken. I’ll have to take it to the shop when we get back to Wilmington. You don’t have a nail brush in your purse, do you?”
“A what?”
“A nail brush, for cleaning under your fingernails. Never mind.”
“Don’t forget me,” the Devil said, throwing open the back door. He had a large plastic bag in his hand. Secrest pulled back onto the road and turned down the entrance ramp. The Devil pulled out a packaged apple pie, a can of lemonade, and a copy of Barely Legal magazine and set them on the seat next to him. Secrest glanced back at the Devil in the rearview as he sped up to enter the stream of traffic.
“What have you got back there?”
“Pie and a drink. Want some?”
“No, I want you to put them away. You’re going to get the back seat all dirty.”
The Devil folded down one of the rear seats to get into the hatch compartment.
“What are you doing?” asked Secrest, staring up into the rearview. The car drifted lazily into the path of a Cadillac in the center lane until Secrest looked down from the mirror and swerved back. She turned to look at what was going on and got a faceful of baggy pink Devil butt.
The Devil didn’t respond; he just continued rummaging. Finally he turned and gave a satisfied sigh. He had a roll of duct tape from Secrest’s emergency kit, and he zipped off a long piece. Starting at the front of the floorboards in the back seat, he fixed the tape to the carpet, rolled it up over the transmission hump and over to the other side, carefully bisecting the cabin. A gleaming silver snake guarding the back seat of the car.
“I get to be dirty on this side,” he said. “You can do whatever you want up there.” Then he picked up his copy of Barely Legal and started thumbing through it, holding the magazine up so it covered his face.
Secrest didn’t argue. She looked over at him and noticed he was preoccupied with other matters. Secrest’s hands, still dirty from poking around in the engine compartment, had stained the pristine blue plastic of the steering wheel, and he rubbed at these stains as he drove along.
She could see the speedometer from her seat, and he was over the speed limit, inching up past 70 steadily. He’d also started hanging out in the middle lane, not returning immediately to the safety of the right lane after he passed someone. Traffic thinned out as the land changed from flat plains to rolling hills, but he still stayed in the middle lane. Plenty of folks drove ten miles over the speed limit. That was standard. Secrest probably attracted more attention the way he normally drove—folks were always zooming up behind him in the right lane, cursing at him because he had the gall to do the speed limit. Now he was acting more like a normal driver—breaking the speed limit, changing lanes.
The Devil sat silently on the hump in the middle of the back seat, concentrating on the road ahead. The pie wrapper and empty can rolled around on the seat next to him. She watched the speedometer inch its way up. At 75 Secrest suddenly started to pull over through the empty right lane into the emergency lane.
“What are you doing?” she asked. Then she craned her head around just in time to catch the first blips of the siren from the trooper’s car. Blue lights