Sins of the Assassin

Chapter 21

“I wish we could have stayed longer,” said Leo.

Rakkim kept driving. They had barely left Annabelle’s cousin’s house and Leo was already lovesick.

“What would it have hurt to stay another night?” said Leo. “No telling what they might have told us about Gravenholtz.”

“Yeah, you’re really interested in Gravenholtz,” said Rakkim. He had heard Leo creep down the hall from his room last night around midnight, heard him sneak back in around dawn. “Annabelle doesn’t know any more than she’s already told us. It’s time to get moving.”

“Why do you always get to decide where we go and when we leave?”

Rakkim didn’t bother answering.

Annabelle had assured Rakkim that no one would think to come looking for her at her cousin’s house. Her daddy’s side of the family had cut off all contact after she married Moseby. Racial attitudes in the Belt had softened greatly since the war, but there were still folks who didn’t take to mixing things up. She hadn’t seen her cousin in a long time, but she and Mary Thurston had been close once. Almost like sisters. Her cousin had been startled to see Annabelle at her front door, but invited her in, then hugged her, the two of them crying like kids over a broken doll. Rakkim and Leo stood around, watching Mary Thurston cry some more over how beautiful Leanne was, and is this your son-in-law? Leo blushed so hard it looked like his cheeks were about to catch fire.

“Mary Thurston said Leanne and I made a fine couple,” said Leo. “She does astrology, which is totally ridiculous, I know, but still, she said our signs were a good match.”

“Uh-huh.”

Rakkim drove on through northern Arkansas, speeding along a fancy strip of eight-lane freeway. Good work too, some sort of computer-assisted roadbed the Japanese had put in to speed goods between their fertilizer-processing plants in Arkadelphia and Little Rock, a ninety-mile stretch that tapered off to the cracked and uneven blacktop that formed most of the roads in the Belt.

“I love Leanne,” Leo said quietly. “I love her and she loves me.”

“I’m touched. I’m moved. What, you’ve known her almost twenty-four hours.”

“You think you’re the only one allowed to fall in love?”

“Why don’t you make yourself useful? Check the phone for bugs and tracers.”

“I already did.”

“Check it again.”

“I already did.” Leo turned around, looked behind them. Leanne was twenty miles away, but you would have thought she was right there, standing beside a white picket fence, waving a lace hanky. “There were two tracers, both of them now disabled.” He pulled out the phone, turned it on, and popped open the case.

“I told you not to do that. You were supposed to disconnect the power source until we needed it.”

“This is some very sweet tech,” said Leo, his tongue probing the corner of his mouth as he adjusted the innards of the phone with a piece of bent wire. “Oscillating frequency…at least fifty million possible permutations…but if you know what you’re doing-”

“Leo.”

A burst of static from the phone, then, “…never found a damned thing, but somebody must be certain. Logged in fifteen dumploads by noon.” A man’s voice, Tennessee cadence. Leo dragged the wire lightly across an etched circuit within the phone. More static. A different voice now: “…chicken for dinner again. Like to tear my guts out. Case you didn’t hear, Gravenholtz is on the warpath, so keep your head down.”

Leo closed the phone case. Removed the battery.

“They can’t hear us, can they?” said Rakkim. “When we’re monitoring their calls, they can’t hear us?”

Leo snorted. “God, it must be weird to be so dumb.”

A caravan of rusted National Guard trucks rolled slowly past, soldiers in the open bed hunkered down, eyeing them from under their helmets. The men looked sleepy and unshaven, their uniforms caked with mud, but their weapons were clean and well maintained.

“I got a question,” said Leo, after the caravan passed. “Don’t laugh, though.”

“Okay.”

“I mean it.” Leo cleared his throat. “Leanne and I made love last night.”

“No kidding?”

Leo bobbed his head, eyes half closed. “Four times.

“Last night…well, it was my first time,” he continued, “but it wasn’t the first time for Leanne.” He looked straight ahead through the windshield. “So…what I wanted to know is, how can you tell if it’s as good for the woman as it is for yourself?”

“You mean…was she faking it?”

“Not exactly. Just…was it incredibly beyond-belief astounding for her too, even though she had done it before?” Leo stared at him. “Don’t laugh, I’m serious.”

“I’m not laughing.” He wasn’t. “Did Leanne seem like she was having a good time?”

“Yes. I think so.”

“So leave it alone. You don’t need any more proof than that.”

A triple-rig Matsushita trailer truck loaded with tanks of fertilizer blew past them, had to be doing a hundred.

“The first time…” Leo hesitated. “The first time we made love…it didn’t last very long.”

“That’s pretty normal.”

Leo shifted in his seat. “I went off as soon as I got inside her.”

“First time…a woman’s a scary thing. Wonderful, but scary.”

“You’re not scared anymore, though, right?”

“Oh, I’m still scared a little bit.” Rakkim laughed. “That’s part of the wonderfulness.”

An abandoned shopping center loomed off the side of the road, a gigantic Wal-Mart store with the windows broken, the roof caved in. There were ruined Wal-Marts all over the Belt, stripped of their goods, covered in graffiti.

“Is there a secret trick?” said Leo. “So I don’t…so I don’t lose it so quick?”

“You should ask your father. I’m not really-”

“My father’s not here and I couldn’t ask him anyway. You’re my friend, aren’t you?”

Rakkim glanced over at him. Leo’s eyes were bugged out waiting for an answer. “Yeah, Leo, I’m your friend.”

“Well?”

“I don’t know what to tell you. Just…try to line up with the woman. Feel like you’re part of her. No, like you’re each part of something new…Or maybe just have fun and let things work themselves out. Come on, the fourth time had to take longer than the first.”

“I was calculating the value of pi in my head. That’s how come I lasted longer.”

“Pi? Like part of a circle or something?”

“The ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.”

“So you were doing geometry while you were making love?”

“I calculated pi to two hundred and fifty-eight decimal places, then I…then I lost my place. Hey! It’s not funny.”

“I’m sorry.” Rakkim shook his head, trying not to laugh. “Really. It’s just…losing your place?”

“Okay…I get it.”

“Give yourself a break, Leo. Sex doesn’t have to be perfect. Sometimes it is funny.”

“I want it to be perfect.”

“Sorry, kid, welcome to the monkey house. Ain’t no perfect here.”

They rode in silence for a few miles, going with the flow of traffic, a few car lengths behind a chromed-out blue sedan with a ONE NATION UNDER JESUS bumper sticker. The Jesus on the sticker carried an assault rifle.

“Thanks…for before.” Leo raised his window up and down, up and down. “How long until we get to your friend’s farm?”

“If we’re lucky, we’ll get there in time for dinner. You haven’t lived until you’ve tasted one of Florence Tigard’s buttermilk biscuits.”

Leo pulled out the phone. Stared at it.

“When things are over, we’ll bring Moseby back to join them,” said Rakkim. “Imagine the reception you’ll get from Leanne. You’ll be the guy who kept his promise.”

“I wish I could talk to her, that’s all.” Leo slipped the phone back in his pocket. “I miss her. Is that dumb?”

“No.”

“You miss your wife too, sometimes. I can tell. You get quiet. Not your normal quiet, but more of a deeper thing where you hardly move but your eyes are happy. Like when we saw that couple holding hands at the little grocery store, the guy carrying the kid on his shoulders…you were thinking of Sarah, weren’t you?”

Rakkim nodded. Impressed.

“Do you worry about Sarah too? ’Cause I worry about Leanne. She’s smart, but we both know that’s not much protection. There’s too many morons out there.”

“More of them than you can imagine, Leo.”