start.
“There,” she said, pointing. “There’s Garden Stop. Oh, and there’s Dave’s Meats.”
It was a normal-looking gas station and convenience store with old-fashioned pumps out front but modern neon advertisements in the spotless plate glass window in the front. It also came complete with the obligatory sexless, ancient person in a rocking chair, smoking on a pipe. Max looked at the gas gauge and figured it was better to be safe than sorry. He pulled up to the pumps, but the sign said he had to prepay inside.
“No credit card payment,” he said ruefully with a glance at Jessie who was peering around him at the front of the store. “We’re really in the boonies.”
She laughed and unbuckled her seat belt. The click of it reminded him of how she’d slid across the seat to him before, which reminded him of the way her mouth had felt on his and how she’d smelled and sounded, and then his dick was starting to stir and he had to concentrate on something else so he didn’t embarrass himself.
“I hope they have a restroom,” she said as she got out. “And that it’s not too gross.”
They had more than a restroom—they had a full set of showers, available for only five bucks, according to the sign. HUNTERS WELCOME was hand-lettered on the faded sign. Jessie looked at it, her mouth quirked in the half smile that drove him a little too crazy for comfort.
“I’m sort of afraid to see what kind of shower they have in there.”
“I’ll go inside, pay for the gas. You need anything else?” he asked, thinking about the crash of glass from the back of the truck. He should check it out, see what had broken and what they might need to replace.
Ten minutes later, he’d paid for the gas inside. And while it pumped, he’d opened up the truck’s double back doors to assess the damage. The plastic crate he’d packed with a couple bottles of wine had tipped, and the rich earthy smell of the good Bordeaux he’d picked because Jessie liked red better than white hit him in a wave. Shit.
The damage got a little worse when he tried to pick up the glass and promptly sliced his thumb at the base. Bright blood welled to the surface, just a bead at first but then a rapid gush as he cradled it to his chest. Jessie came around the back of the truck just then, her mouth open to say something that she stifled at the sight.
“Max, what happened?”
“It’s nothing. Just a flesh wound,” he joked, knowing she’d get the reference to Monty Python. They’d watched it on one of their first dates.
She took his hand and looked at it, not even wincing at the sight of blood. She frowned. “No, it’s not. That’s pretty deep. What did you cut it on?”
“Wine bottle.” He used his chin to show her the broken bottles inside, the dark wine splashed all over the rest of the groceries.
“Well,” she said with a grin, “that’s too bad, isn’t it?”
A second later, though, she was frowning again in concern, his hand cupped in hers, her thumb pressing the wound to stanch the blood. “You need stitches. Or at least a bandage. C’mon, I’m sure they have something inside. Go wash your hands in the bathroom. I’ll see what’s in the store.”
He wanted to protest, reassure her that he was fine. Manly enough to handle just a little flesh wound. The truth was, the cut was already throbbing, the blood flow slowing but caked into his skin, and the way the skin gaped was making his stomach hurt.
Jessie closed her hands over his, gently cupping his wounded thumb. “Go.”
In the restroom, he used a paper towel to turn the hot water faucet until a trickle of first lukewarm, then scalding water shot out and splashed his front. Max did the best he could to clean it, but it was starting to hurt a lot more and he muttered a particularly creative string of curses.
Turning from the sink, he caught sight of the advertised shower, a narrow stall with a sagging, mildewed curtain shielding what looked like equally moldy tiles behind it and a steadily dripping showerhead. You’d have to pay him a helluva lot more than the five bucks they wanted to charge to get naked in that thing. On impulse, he twitched the curtain aside and stepped back at once with a stifled shout.
It looked like an abattoir.
Summers growing up as a kid, Max had spent a lot of time on his uncle’s farm. Uncle Rick and Aunt Lori had raised a few dairy cows, kept a bull, a coop of chickens, one or two pigs. They kept animals for food, not profit, and definitely not for pets. Max had learned that the hard way after he’d adopted a spindle-legged calf named Doey. Years later, when he watched the film version of The Silence of the Lambs, the scene in which Clarice described the sound of the lambs screaming had sent him from the theater faster than any of Hannibal Lecter’s tooth-sucking comments about fava beans. To this day, he couldn’t eat veal.
The barn had looked like this shower stall the day he’d found them slaughtering Doey.
Max backed up so fast that the heel of his boot caught on a ridge of tile. To catch himself from falling, he flung out his injured hand. Fresh pain, bright and wide and thick, covered him, and he let out a yelp that echoed in the dimly lit room. He could smell it now, he thought. The stink of old, dried blood. And hear the soft buzz of flies battering themselves against the small window set high in the wall.
Shit and blood, that’s what Uncle Rick had always said brought flies. Shit and blood.
Outside in the late-afternoon sunshine, the scene in the restroom seemed surreal. When he came around the corner, he found Jessie talking to the old woman/man sitting in the rocker on the front porch. Rather, the ancient lump of wrinkles and raggedy clothes was talking. Jessie seemed to be just listening.
“Stay out of the woods,” the old person was saying.
Jessie glanced up at him, her expression so carefully neutral that he could tell she was trying hard not to laugh. “Thanks, Mrs. Romero.”
“Who this?”
Jessie reached for Max’s good hand to pull him closer. “This is Max, my boyfriend.”
It wasn’t the first time she’d called him that, but it was still so new the word tied knots in his gut. “Hi.”
Mrs. Romero tipped her wizened face toward his, her eyes asquint, mouth still sucking greedily on the pipe. “You bleeding?”
“He cut his hand,” Jessie explained, pulling out a package of gauze bandages and first aid supplies from a cheerfully bright yellow plastic bag. “I’m going to fix him up, though. He’ll be okay.”
This set Mrs. Romero cackling so much that she pulled the pipe from her lips to point it at Jessie. “Oh, I betcha. He’ll be perfect.”
Another burst of cackling laughter sent the old woman into a spate of thick, congested coughing that bent her forward so far that Max was sure she was going to tip right out of the rocker. The door behind Jessie opened and a blonde woman wearing jeans and a denim shirt came out to grab Mrs. Romero by the shoulders and keep her upright. It took Max a second or two to figure out what seemed so off about the woman: Just like the guy back on the road, the blonde woman was extremely tall.
She shot them both an apologetic look. “Sorry. Mom, Mom! Mom, you got
