Soldier laughs, then goes back to staring out the window. “That was a mouthful, Sheldon. Were you rehearsing that little speech all the way up from Providence?”
Sheldon frowns and wipes condensation off the inside of the windshield with his bare hand.
“You know that’s gonna streak,” she says. “And you know how the Bailiff feels about hand prints and streaky windshields.”
“Yeah, well, I can’t fucking
see
.”
Soldier shrugs and folds down the passenger-side sun visor. There’s a little mirror mounted there, and she stares for a moment at her reflection, stares at the disheveled woman staring back at her—the puffy, dark half circles beneath her bloodshot eyes, half circles that may as well be bruises, her unkempt, mouse-colored hair that needed a good cutting two or three months ago. There’s an angry red welt bisecting the bridge of her nose that’ll probably leave a scar, but that’s what she gets for picking a fight with one of the ghouls. She sticks her tongue out at herself, then folds the visor up again.
“You look like shit,” Sheldon Vale says, “in case you need a second opinion.”
“You’re a damned helpful cunt, Shelly.”
“Shit,” he hisses, glancing at the rearview. “I think I missed the turnoff.”
“Yep,” Soldier says, pointing at a green street sign. “That’s the fucking Argilla right there. You missed it. Guess that’ll teach you to keep your eyes on where you’re going, instead of letting yourself get distracted by my pretty face.”
Sheldon curses himself and Jesus and a few of the nameless gods, slows down and turns around in a church parking lot, slinging mud and gravel, and then the hearse’s wheels are back on blacktop, rolling along with the rubber-against-wet-asphalt sound that’s always reminded Soldier of frying meat. Soon they’re on the other side of the river again, retracing the way they’ve just come, left turns become rights, and there’s the cemetery once more.
“What’s on your mind, old man?” Soldier asks, because he might be an asshole, and he might have shitty taste in music, but Sheldon Vale can usually be counted on to get you where you’re going without a lot of jiggery-pokery and switchbacks.
“You think they’re gonna kill that kid?” he asks her and turns off the highway onto a road leading away towards the salt-marshes and the sea.
“Don’t you think she’s kind of got it coming?” Soldier asks him back, and then she has to stop herself from reaching for the bottle again. “I mean, she knew the fucking rules. This isn’t some first-year squeaker. She’s one moon away from confirmation. She should have known better.”
“She’s a kid,” Sheldon says, as if maybe Soldier hasn’t quite entirely understood that part, and he slows down to check a road sign by the glow of the headlights. “Town Farm Road,” he says, reading it aloud. “Man, just
once
I wish someone else would pull this route.”
“Kids screw up,” Soldier says. “Kids screw up all the time, just like the rest of us. Kids screw up, and it gets them killed, just exactly like the rest of us.”
“So you think they’re gonna do her?”
“No, I didn’t say that. But this is some pretty serious shit, Shelly. If we’re real damn lucky, it’s not so serious that we can’t put it to rest by visiting Mr. Ass-for-brains Joey Bittern and—”
“She’s just a kid,” Sheldon says again.
“Some rules, nobody gets to break.” Soldier says, watching the half-glimpsed houses and marshy fields and the trees that seem to appear out of nowhere, rush past the hearse, and vanish in the night behind them. “Some rules you don’t even bend. I ain’t telling you anything you don’t already know.”
The Beatles make way for Jefferson Airplane, and Sheldon looks at the radio in disgust, but makes no move to reach for the knob.
“Grace Slick is a fat cow,” he says.
“Not in 1967, she wasn’t.”
Sheldon mutters something under his breath and stares straight ahead at the rain-slick road, the yellow dividing line, the stingy bits of the night revealed in the headlights. And Soldier’s starting to wish she’d asked for another driver, beginning to wonder if Sheldon’s up to this run.
“Someone does something like this,” she says, “I don’t care if its just some kid or one of us, Madam Terpsichore or the goddamn Bailiff himself—”
“You’ve made your point,” Sheldon says, interrupting her, and then he turns the wheel as the road carries them deeper into the marshes leading away to the Eagle Hill River and the Atlantic.
“You just don’t mess around with shit like that,” Soldier says, knowing it’s time to shut the fuck up about the kid and let him drive, time to start thinking about the shotgun in the back and exactly what she’s going to say to Joey Bittern when they reach the old honky-tonk at the end of Town Farm Road.
“I just don’t think it’s right,” Sheldon Vale mumbles so softly that she barely catches the words over the radio and the storm and the whir of the tires on the road.
“Whole lot of crazy shit ain’t
right
,” she replies, then begins singing along with “Don’t You Want Somebody To Love?” while Sheldon drives the hearse, and Soldier tries hard not to think about whatever is or isn’t happening to Sparrow Spooner back in Providence.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Caitlín R. Kiernan
has published six novels and more than sixty short stories and is a three-time winner of the International Horror Guild Award. Her short fiction has been collected in three volumes—
Tales of Pain and Wonder, From Weird and Distant Shores,
and
To Charles Fort, With Love
—and has been selected for
The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror,
and
The Year’s Best Science Fiction.
She lives in Atlanta, Georgia. Visit her Web site at
www.caitlinrkiernan.com
.