Nightstalkers

CHAPTER 5

The Courier made it through the Rockies and just past Salt Lake City at dark. He pulled into one of those huge truck stops to get gas, pee, and grab some coffee and something to chow down on. He gassed up, parked away from any other vehicles, got out, then set the three separate locks and alarm systems on the van before heading over to the bright lights of the station.

As he was peeing he noticed the condom machine on the wall, which naturally got him thinking about the tight ass on that student at UC. Daddy probably footing her bill through school, while people like him ended up in the ’Stan. Conveniently forgetting, of course, that his father had paid for his solo year, then yanked the plug when he ended up with four incompletes.

He was still thinking about the student’s ass, and not the realities of his own life’s shortcomings, as he made his way back to the van. He laboriously pushed the codes that disarmed and unlocked the thing, then got in. He perched his cup of coffee on the dashboard. There was no cup holder. The computer that ran through the GPS display took that slot. She’d had a nice rack, too, he remembered as he unwrapped the hoagie he’d bought. He was just about to take a sip of coffee when a rap at the window caused him to slosh some over the side and onto his pants.

“Damn!”

With his free hand — his off hand, as his gun hand was still holding the coffee — he scrambled awkwardly for the Glock. He was a contortionist for a moment, trying to put the coffee back down and trying to get the gun, which was still in his holster and not in his lap, where it was supposed to be as per Protocol when in the vehicle, when he saw that the rappee was a cute young girl with long, dirty-blonde hair hanging out of a knitted wool cap and a lollipop dangling out of the corner of her mouth. If he’d thought it through, he, like anyone else with common sense, could have come up with Nada’s Yada about pretty young hookers at truck stops: They don’t exist.

He didn’t think it through. Not that way, at least.

He ceased all activity and took a deep breath. He placed the coffee carefully on the dash and pulled his other hand out from under his jacket.

“What?” he mouthed.

She indicated for him to roll down the window.

Bulletproof, he thought. Doesn’t roll down. Ever.

He shook his head.

She pouted.

He tapped the window, made a rolling down gesture, and slashed his other hand across that, indicating, he hoped in truck stop language, that the window was indeed incapable of being opened.

She pointed past him and looked over his shoulder, while his hand — the correct one this time — was going for the gun. But he saw no threat behind him. He looked back at her quizzically.

She smiled and slowly pulled the sucker from her mouth. Then she pointed at it at him, and then past him at the passenger seat.

It didn’t even take a year of college to figure that out.

Then she signaled with two fingers and then a zero.

Twenty bucks?

The Courier thought of that smart-assed college girl.

He glanced down at the muted GPS display. Area 51 was 429 miles away and then he’d have to debrief, fill out a shitload of paperwork, and drive two hours to get to Vegas.

Too damn far and too long.

He nodded, and she walked around the front of the van.

As she did so, he pulled the Glock out and placed it on his left side, within ready reach. He took out his wallet, removed a twenty, and shoved the wallet farther down on the left side of the seat. He wasn’t stupid, after all. Hookers were known to rob people. Let her try and she’d be in for a surprise.

Thinking of pulling the Glock on her excited him as much as watching her climb in the door as he shoved it open for her. She tossed the sucker over her shoulder as she squirmed in.

She smiled, didn’t say a word. She took the twenty and leaned over into his lap.

College girl would have still been talking, he thought.

She unzipped him. Her hand was cold, but exciting enough, and he thought once more of the Glock, of putting it against her head as her lips closed on him. He leaned back, fingers closing around the grip of the Glock, eyes half-closed.

She pulled her mouth off him with the same slow movement she’d done with the lollipop.

He looked down. She smiled up at him with wide, innocent eyes as she shoved open the driver’s door.

Stunned, the Courier looked to his left, into the visage of a human monster. The man’s face was terribly scarred, with lateral marks across it as if he’d been flayed. The man smiled as he jammed the icepick into the soft spot on the bottom of the Courier’s jaw, right up into his brain.

He was dead before the Glock hit the floor.

The girl screamed and scrambled back against the passenger door.

“You said you were robbing him! Not killing him!”

“I am robbing him,” Burns said. He had a silenced Beretta in his off hand and he fired a round right between her eyes, following it up with a second bullet, sticking to Nada’s Yada to always double-tap in the head and make sure they’re dead.