Driving Mr. Dead (5 page)

“What the hell do you think you’re doing, attacking a vampire in a parking lot? Are you nuts?” I demanded as the redneck coughed and wheezed, clawing at the hands clutching his throat. I gently tapped Mr. Sutherland on the shoulder. He snarled at me, fangs bared. I took a step back, my hands raised. “It’s hard to understand him when he can’t breathe. Damn it, Mr. Sutherland, put him down!”

I kept waiting for him to release his grip on the wayward do-gooder, but he continued to hold him. “Language, Miss Puckett.”

“Mr. Sutherland,” I said, clearing my throat, “I think it would be better if we just sent these men on their way. They didn’t mean any harm … to me.”

“I didn’t see them coming,” Mr. Sutherland seethed.

That … was an odd response.

“Well, it’s been a while since you’ve been out of the house, right?” I told him. “Maybe your instincts are just a little off. I’m sure in a day or so, you’ll be back to your hyperaware, completely paranoid self.”

He growled, squeezing Heavy-Set’s throat until he turned a disturbing shade of puce.

“If you kill him, it’s going to mean calling the police, filing a bunch of paperwork, and missing your deadline with the Council,”
I reminded him.

With a hiss, Mr. Sutherland dropped Heavy-Set to his feet. Heavy-Set sank to his knees, coughing and sputtering. He saw his friend crumpled on the pavement like a battered rag doll. “Damn it, you killed Mel!”

I stepped between Heavy-Set and Mr. Sutherland. “Your friend should be fine in a few minutes. Just make him sit up slowly, and help him get up on his feet. He’s going to be sort of wobbly. And please tell him I’m really sorry about the headache.”

Heavy-Set struggled to his feet. He pulled at Lanky’s arms, dragging his dead weight to the truck and barely missing shutting the door on his leg as it flopped uselessly out of the cab. They screeched out of the parking lot as if their taillights were on fire.

I turned to Mr. Sutherland with as much poise as I could muster and demanded, “What the hell? Why were you following me? What are you even doing out of the room?”

“I wanted to keep an eye on you. I wanted to make sure I could trust you.”

“So I’m
untrustworthy
because I deviated from your precious schedule?” I demanded. “What, you thought I was going to meet a co-conspirator at a diner, so we could plan the kidnapping of the most anal-retentive, fastidious vampire since Freud?
You
have more issues than
National Geographic
.”

Yes, Freud was a vampire, which, when you thought about it, made sense. It was the only plausible explanation for his theories’ maintaining academic credence for so long.

“I can’t see anything coming when I’m with you,” he bit out, his voice frustrated and gravelly. The cords of his neck stood out as he loomed over me. His hands rose as if he was going to grasp my arms.

I stood, teetering on the edge of a choice. Let him touch me, give in to the strange skittering thrill his voice sent up my spine, or move and maintain my sanity.

I grunted, backing away. “What does that even
mean
?”

“I don’t know!” he shouted back.

“Fine!” I huffed, turning on my heel toward the motel. I’d had enough of this crap for one night. What gave him the right to follow me? Spy on me? Let him call Iris. Let him tell her why I had to save his butt from redneck bystanders. Heck, she might hire me full-time. At the moment, I just wanted to shower and get some sleep before we had to get back on the road.

Mr. Sutherland kept pace with me, checking over his shoulder every few seconds to make sure we weren’t being followed. “How exactly did you manage to overpower a man twice your size, if you don’t mind my asking?”

I stopped, tilting my head toward him. “Iris didn’t tell you about my background, did she?”

“Your CV did not include mentions of your amateur cage-fighting career, no,” he said as I unlocked my room door.

“Can you keep a secret?” I asked, giving a sly little grin as I leaned closer.

His lips quirked, and for the first time, I saw what his face looked like without that mocking veneer. His eyes crinkled a bit at the corners, twinkling at me in mischievous pleasure. “I’m a vampire. Of course, I can.”

“So can I.” With a sharp smile, I slammed the door in his face.

Motel showers were always a crapshoot. The temperature always
seemed to hover between “weakly warm” and “human lobster.” And there was always the chance that you could find new friends with more legs than you, scuttling out from under the shower curtain. I really hated that. But the Pine Heights showers seemed bug-free, if lacking water pressure.

The rush of smacking someone around had finally ebbed, and I was drained of all energy. I had to lean against the wall to wash off the road dirt with a washcloth that could have doubled as sandpaper. I slipped into boxers and a wife-beater, enjoying the chance to go braless after more than eighteen hours of being lifted and separated. I towel-dried my thick hair, humming the melody to a Lady Gaga song and reveling in the thought of sleep.

After digging lip balm and a paperback—my nighttime essentials—out of my shoulder bag, I tossed the towel aside. I coated my lips in Burt’s Bees balm and found my place in my
Catch-22.
I’d only read two paragraphs before the door connecting our adjoining rooms rattled under thunderous, rapid knocks from the other side. Forgetting my braless state, I opened the door to find Mr. Sutherland wearing emerald-green monogrammed silk pajamas and a stricken expression.

Had I fallen asleep and woken up in a Rock Hudson movie?

He glanced down, eyes widening at my skimpy sleepwear. I cleared my throat. “Can I help you?”

He grimaced, far more Tony Randall than Rock. “My wallet is missing.”

I laughed. There was no other choice. I could have sworn that Mr. Sutherland had just broken into my room wearing full-on Hefner PJs to tell me his wallet had been stolen. His wallet, which contained the credit card we were using to book hotel rooms and buy my meals, was missing. That was the height of fricking hilarity as far as I was concerned.

“Why are you laughing?” he demanded.

“Y-you’re wearing pajamas.” I giggled. “You’re not even going to sleep. You went to the trouble of packing pajamas, and you don’t—”

He glowered down at me. I realized that I was bent at the waist, hee-hawing like a fool, giving an agitated vampire a full down-to-the-navel view of my cleavage. I sobered and straightened, giving him an apologetic little smile.

“You’re sure it’s not in your room somewhere?” I asked carefully, wiping my eyes. “Or maybe in the car?”

“Do you think I would have knocked if I had not already turned my room upside-down looking for it?” he asked sarcastically.

I thought back to our run-in with Lanky and Heavy-Set. They’d
had more than enough time to snake Mr. Sutherland’s wallet out of his pocket while they were wrestling around with him. Between the silver and the strange overtures, both of us had been pretty distracted. Had the whole “Good Samaritan Stooges” act been just that, an act? Had mugging my client been the point all along? Had they driven off, stunned and scared, only to pull into another parking lot and pretend to care whether another girl was being targeted as an easy mark?

I think that hurt my feelings a little bit.

“I’m sure it was in my jacket pocket when we were … out,” he said vehemently. Suddenly, an expression of indignant shock twisted his features. “I think those ruffians from the parking lot might have taken it!”

“You don’t say!” I groaned, scrubbing my hands over my face.

His expression was grim, and still somehow incredulous, when I tossed him my phone. “Call all of your credit-card companies to report the thefts. My phone has Internet access, so you can look up all of the customer-service numbers. They’ll probably require that you file a police report before they send replacement cards. If you call the police, wake me up, and I’ll give them a statement.”

“You’re going to sleep? Now?” he asked, frowning.

“Yes, unless you want to miss your deadline because I fell asleep at the wheel and crashed the car. You can stay up long enough to make your calls, leave my phone on the nightstand, then sleep through the day. Just make sure you crawl into the car cubby before sunset.”

“You make a surprisingly reasonable argument,” he grumbled. “I assume you’re going to call Miss Scanlon to report this?”

“Mm-hmm,” I said, in the least committal tone one could use
without being struck down by lightning for lying. “Good night.”

I closed the door and bumped my forehead against the cold, unyielding metal. There was no way in hell I was calling Iris. Not only had I allowed a client to get assaulted, but now he’d been mugged, too? This was not how one repaid a favor from an old friend.

I snatched up my own bag and found that my wallet was intact. Beeline employees weren’t allowed to use our company “fleet” cards for anything except gas. A digital lock on the cards allowed use only at service stations. Iris said it kept clients from bulldozing us into covering our own meals and hotel fees with company funds. She’d been stiffed too many times by clients who welched once the receipts were submitted for reimbursement. Vampires hated receipts.

Mr. Sutherland and I would just have to survive on my meager plastic until we reached the Hollow. I had just enough room on my MasterCard to make it work. I could only hope that Iris would be so impressed with my creatively overcoming the obstacle that she didn’t offer me up to the vampires as a party snack.

I flopped down on the lumpy motel mattress and buried my face in the flat, flaccid pillow. “Why couldn’t he have just taken the train?”

Six
A.M.
came far too quickly. And I woke to find that any commiserating camaraderie I might have built with Mr. Sutherland the night before had evaporated with the sunrise. A note, neatly folded under my phone on the nightstand, managed to insult me in an impressively elegant script.

Dear Miss Puckett,

When you manage to rouse yourself, you will find that I am safely tucked away in the car.

I spoke to the police last night to file an incident report. There was no problem with the credibility of my statement, as the blundering duo we encountered have perpetrated this scheme before on couples undead and living—pretending to protect the female from assault while picking the male’s pocket.

“I knew it,” I muttered to myself.

Security video shows the rogues following you from what can loosely be termed a restaurant, so the police know whom they must take into custody. The officers need affidavits from both of us to prosecute the charges after we leave town. I gave mine last night. I took the liberty of writing a statement from your perspective, which will reflect the information given in my own. You will find that the handwriting matches the rather unique penmanship I found on a grocery list in your purse.

“What the—boundaries!” I gasped, hopping out of bed to retrieve my shoulder bag. The list in question was tucked under the purse strap. Apparently, I’d needed “tampons, Fiber One bars, and depilatory cream.”

“Kill me now.”

I glanced at the bottom of my bag and saw that my photo journal had been disturbed. The white ribbon I usually kept around it, a castoff from one of my mother’s Tiffany gift boxes, was tied into a pristine square knot that I couldn’t manage if my life depended on
it.

“You asshole!” I hissed at the offending piece of paper. “You presumptuous, invasive vampire asshole!”

Sutherland had rifled through my stuff. He’d looked through the album of photos that I kept just for me, remembrances of moments in my life that I wanted to keep with me forever. He’d touched my things, touched my memories, without asking, because he thought being undead or being the client gave him the right.

I was going to be hitting the brakes without warning a lot today.

I gritted my teeth and continued to read, all the while muttering curses under my breath.

The officers asked that you sign the statement and bring it by the department offices before we leave town. Please make this a priority before any other errands.

To maintain our schedule, I expect that we will reach the Idaho state line by the time I rise. According to my almanac, the sun will set at 6:03
P.M.
I expect the car to be stopped and a bottled Type A to be ready at that time.

We must reach Bozeman by the time we retire this evening, Miss Puckett. I will not accept excuses.

Drive safely.

CS

The initials were written with a pretty little flourish, which, after staring at it for a moment or two, I realized was an arrow, indicating I should flip the page over.

P.S. Please remember that the car is not to be driven faster than 65
miles per hour, as outlined on page 5 of the contract rider.

P.P.S. Please remember that you are not to open to the transport cubby at any time before sunset, as outlined on page 2 of the contract rider. The cubby door should not open unless the car comes to a complete stop.

P.P.P.S. Please remember that the car is to remain free of litter, crumbs, and extraneous personal items, as outlined on page 4 of the contract rider.

I would consider the wisdom of leaving the adjoining-room door unlocked—and exactly how long he had been in the room while I was sleeping—at a later time.

I rolled back onto the mattress, pressing my face into the pillow and groaning like a zombie on crank. Murdering a client while he slept was immoral, I supposed. But I didn’t like my chances if I tried while he was awake.