I was going to have to commit one way or the other on Saul’s not being that bad or being a demon from Hell who deserved a thousand agonizing deaths.
But I had scut work to do and that decision would have to wait. While Stefan dragged the deputy off to a safe distance, I blew up the car with the three pipe bombs I had left. It was quicker and more efficient. I also ended up thinking that being a partner wasn’t all chocolate pancakes, sex with a smart girl, and late-night movies. How fair was it that the genius had to be the cleanup crew, too? I continued to bitch to myself. I’d worked too hard for this. I’d ride out this “newbie” thing and then it would be all chocolate pancakes, sex with a smart and pretty girl, and late-night movies. And if I had to build a state-of-the-art smart and pretty Fembot to make that happen, I’d do it. The real thing was difficult to find while being on the run from killers or chasing killers or both. Maybe I’d give her a pink wig, the same color pink as Ariel’s hair.
I’d better stock up on WD-40.
In minutes we were back on the road with yet another explosion in our rearview mirror. I drove several miles until we saw the first opportunity to steal another license plate—Wyoming this time—from an abandoned rust bucket on the side of the road. This time we were headed toward Tucson, Arizona, Wendy’s chip beckoning the way. It wasn’t a tingle that went down my spine this time. It was a chill.
Icy as winter’s first breath and a dying man’s last.
Chapter 9
Tucson was well over twelve hours away, which meant another motel stop in Springerville, Arizona. I could’ve admitted I could go on much less sleep these days and driven on, throughout the night if necessary, but there were other things I needed to do as well. A few hours at a motel to let Stefan and Saul sleep in beds instead of in a car with an increasingly agitated ferret would give me the time to do them. Godzilla wasn’t claustrophobic. As with most ferrets, he liked tight spaces to squeeze his long slithery shape into and wreak havoc. But also as with most ferrets, he became bored easily. A change of scenery would give him new things to sniff out, investigate, and then obliterate like a furry missile of destruction. It would be good for him and good for me as I had something to create rather than destroy.
The motel room was the same as the other motel room. The bedspreads were orange instead of bile green, but the rest was identical. Even the landscape pictures over the beds were the same or similarly bad. One was a full moon with what was supposed to be a coyote but looked more like Tramp from that other Disney cartoon—the cheerful mutt they’d had the dogcatcher drag off to kill. God, I hated that Disney bastard. If I ever found his cryogenically frozen head, I was unplugging that unit pronto. Funny that it was only his nightmare creations that the Institute let us watch, cartoonwise, when we were in the younger group. The other picture was a dusty trail leading up a dusty hill with a dusty man riding a dusty horse. The man didn’t resemble Butch or Sundance or Val Kilmer in Tombstone , so I had zero interest.
“So why the room with a microwave?” Stefan sat in the chair at the small table. He indicated the four bags of cheeseburgers, fries, burritos, refried beans, and two milkshakes—mine, all mine—with the small brush he was using to clean his gun. “If I know you and food, and, Jesus, do I, there won’t be a crumb left to heat up.”
“Think of it as a science project. All those science fairs I missed out on, what I’m going to build would’ve gotten me an A and maybe laid by the hot science teacher.” At least with Saul around, my use of incorrect and sexually inappropriate language was improving in leaps and bounds. I grinned at Stefan’s bemusement, grabbed my bags of food, and spread it out over my bed, sharing with Zilla when he popped out of the bathroom, dragging one end of the toilet paper in his mouth. I could hear it unrolling as he ran. He passed over the carpet and under the low-hanging blanket, out the other side, up and over the bed, under again, and then back up to perch on my knee, turning my bed into a fairly accurate depiction of a M?bius strip. Spitting out the end of the one-ply, he accepted a French fry with a contented mrrrp.