Waitress Wanted (Kit Tolliver #5) (The Kit Tolliver Stories) (3 page)

Once again she managed to get a seat all to herself, toward the front but not too close to the driver. There was room in the overhead for her suitcase, and for the bag of clothes as well. She could still smell the clothes, even in their new location, but she had the feeling that she’d still be smelling them if she’d chanced leaving them in the trash can. Her nose was full of his scent, and it would take more than distance to clear them. It would take time as well.

She’d bought a novel at the newsstand in the station, but never looked at it again until she was on the bus. Even then she waited until they’d cleared the Phoenix city limits before she switched on the overhead light.

The book was a paperback thriller. Some wild-eyed eco-terrorist, crazy as a bedbug and twice as charming, had raided a secret government laboratory, killed half a dozen scientists, and made off with enough anthrax, plague bacteria, and smallpox virus to depopulate an already troubled planet. And, astonishingly enough, the only person in the world with even a slim chance of stopping this lunatic was a beautiful young FBI agent, the identical twin sister of one of the murdered scientists.

Well, sure,
she thought.
These things happen.

She read for a while, dozed for a while, opened her eyes when the bus pulled to a stop in Sedona. Three people got off, two got on. Next stop, Flagstaff.

She’d had one genuine oh-shit moment in the Phoenix bus station. She’d been sitting there, the suitcase at her feet, the bag of clothes beside her, the paperback unopened on her lap, when the room went dead silent, jarring her out of her reverie.

When she turned her head to find out what everyone was looking at, what she saw was a pair of uniformed police officers striding through the entrance. One had a hand on the butt of his holstered pistol.

Time, which had been crawling to begin with, came to a dead stop. She tried to think of something to do, some action to take, and came up empty.

And then the cops walked straight over to a gaunt and hollow-eyed young man, his jeans out at the knee, his arms and neck and who knew what else heavily tattooed. He evidently couldn’t think of anything to do either. She’d thought earlier that he looked like a fugitive, and evidently he was, and his days on the run were over, because he didn’t even protest, just stood up and turned around to be handcuffed.

After they’d led him out, the silence held for an instant. Then almost everybody started talking at once, and the ones who weren’t talking were hauling out their cell phones. This would make a good story for all of them, she thought. It would make an even better story for her, but one she wasn’t likely to tell.

On the last leg of the trip, she remembered what had taken place in the kitchen, with her cheek against the cutting board and her panties around her ankles. As she’d anticipated, Steve was one of those piledriver types, hammering away at her, thrusting hard and fast, like John Henry determined to beat the steam drill or die trying.

When John Henry was a little baby
Just a settin’ on his mammy’s knee
He picked up a hammer an’ a little piece of steel
Said, Gonna be the death of me
Lord, Lord,
Gonna be the death of me . . .

The John Henry approach had never been a favorite of hers, but she was far too excited to demand finesse. Her response was immediate and unqualified, and she didn’t see how it could have been otherwise. And that would have been the case even if he’d been true to ethnic stereotype and chosen a narrower passage than the conventional one. It might have proved painful, given the thickness of his cock and the lack of foreplay, but that wouldn’t have been enough to keep her from enjoying it.

The hammering continued, and she writhed and twisted in response, and he tightened his grip on her hindquarters, as if any movement on her part was an unwelcome diversion. Her orgasm came on anyway, and it was strong enough but somehow incomplete, as if it was just an interim stop on the way to release.

Then, with a great cry and a final powerful thrust, he finished.

Five
, she thought.

And he tore himself off her and out of her, spun around, collapsed against the stainless steel triple sink. And she couldn’t wait, she just couldn’t, and so what if he didn’t see it coming? So what if she didn’t get to see his face? There were knives everywhere, and the one she grabbed was long enough and heavy enough, and she buried it in his back. And stabbed him again and again and again, five times at least, maybe more, as she was too much in the moment to keep track.

And then he stopped making noises, and stopped moving, and lay on the floor. She was pretty sure he was dead, but she stabbed him one final time, making sure the blade found the heart. She bent down and stepped out of her panties, using them to wipe the handle of the knife, the counter where she’d gripped it, and anything else she thought she might have touched.

And snatched his keys from the peg, and turned off lights, and locked the door once she was through it.

On the way to her hotel, she dropped his keys in a storm drain.

Four.

In Flagstaff she wanted to get a hotel room and bed down for the night. She was tired, and not at all eager to set off on another bus ride. But she weighed that against her desire to get out of Arizona, and decided she ought to cross a state line as soon as possible. She thought about heading north and west to Vegas, but decided to go east instead. There was a bus for Albuquerque in two hours and change, and that would give her more than enough time for a proper meal, her first food since breakfast.

The bus station in Flagstaff wasn’t really a station, just a large gas station and mini-mart where they kept schedules and sold tickets. She used the rest room to freshen up, and wanted to drop her plastic bag full of dirty clothes in the trash can. There wasn’t any risk in that, was there? She was a long ways from Phoenix, and the Phoenix police had already missed one chance at her, choosing instead to grab the crystal freak with all the ink.

But it was the bus station, or as close as Flagstaff came to having a bus station. If they traced her to the bus, mightn’t they check out the trash in the ladies room?

Why take a chance?

So she walked in a direction that struck her as most likely to yield a decent place to eat, and on the way she passed a parking lot, and toward the rear of the lot she spotted a corrugated steel bin the size of a privy, with a sign next to it reading
GOODWILL.
She was a few yards past it when she realized what it was—a collection box for Goodwill Industries.

She lowered the little door and emptied her plastic bag into the bin, then tossed the bag in after it. And hoisted her suitcase and walked on.

The restaurant she found was Mexican. She had salsa and chips and a combination plate with a taco and two enchiladas and something else she couldn’t identify. The food and service were good, and the only aggravation was the three-piece mariachi band, which insisted on serenading her. They probably knew another song in addition to
Cielito Lindo
, but you couldn’t prove it by her.

She made her bus with time to spare. In Albuquerque she stayed the night in an inexpensive downtown hotel. She took a shower when she got there and another before she went to bed. In the morning she took another shower, then walked around the corner for a bowl of red at an unprepossessing café on Gold Street. She wiped the bowl with the last tortilla, finished her coffee, and took a cab to the airport.

She caught a direct flight to O’Hare and let public transportation convey her to the Near North Side, where she’d spent enough time over the years to know her way around. She picked a mostly residential hotel on North Wells and took a shower right away, because she always preferred to sluice away that stale airplane energy once she was off a flight. But this shower felt less urgent than the others she’d taken recently, because somewhere between Albuquerque and Chicago she’d stopped smelling Steve. His reek had outlived him, but only for a little while.

A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

L
AWRENCE
B
LOCK
published his first novel in 1958. He has been designated a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, and has received Lifetime Achievement awards from the Crime Writers’ Association (UK), the Private Eye Writers of America, and the Short Mystery Fiction Society. He has won the Nero, Philip Marlowe, Societe 813, and Anthony awards, and is a multiple recipient of the Edgar, the Shamus, and the Japanese Maltese Falcon awards. He and his wife, Lynne, are devout New Yorkers and relentless world travelers.

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