Gun Games - Faye Kellerman [145]
Her own personal Viennese waltz.
Chapter Forty
The asphalt road was nothing but a rutted two-lane stretch of dust that cut a swath through the desert. The streets in the country sucked, Dylan thought, most of them studded with pebbles and potholes that wreaked havoc on the undercarriages of cars as well as the tires. Even in the major cities, the infrastructure was bad. He didn’t spend much time in the cities, though. Not that it was dangerous anymore, but Dylan had lost his taste for congestion. The place where he lived was fairly remote, as was the route he was traveling—almost empty with the occasional passage of a car or two.
It had taken a while, but he felt he was doing okay, adjusting as well as could be expected. Time moved sloooowly. At first, he was so fucking bored he thought he was going to crawl out of his skin. But after a while—with enough meth coursing through the veins and enough whores sucking his dick—well, he kinda got used to it.
It was the springtime, which meant wind and dust and a rise in the heat factor. There were two seasons down here: hot and very hot. Today, it was cool enough to drive with the windows open. The car had AC that worked about as well as everything else did, which was to say it didn’t work well at all. At least it was a step up from the junk heap he had when he first came down here. His current set of wheels still shaked, rattled, and rolled, but it could go a little faster than crawling; and it had a radio.
Dylan planned on staying here through the year—just smoking and whoring and hanging out. After that, his Spanish would be fluent and he’d go south into the bigger cities once again: maybe Buenos Aires or even Rio although he didn’t know much Portuguese. But so what? With his new alias and his new passport, he knew he’d have no trouble starting over.
He’d have to get back into shape, though: take off the extra fifty pounds he packed on from all the starch. He’d eventually enter Universidad and do what he could have done in the old USA if all those fucking idiots hadn’t gotten in his way.
His new car, his gap-year plans to travel the world, his degree from Yale—everything flushed down the toilet because of a few fucking idiots! Next time, he wouldn’t trust anyone. Next time, he’d be a lot, lot smarter: shoot first and ask questions later. Still, an interlude of drugs and whores wasn’t all that horrible.
In the beginning, all he thought about was revenge, sneaking back into the States and finishing them all off. His fantasies took on a sexual pleasure of their own. Every time a whore put her lips to his dick, he thought about the gun going off and exploding faces. To get the true sensation, he thought about Gregory Hesse’s bursting face because that had been for real. Later on, he could extrapolate. First it was Cameron who blew up, then Kyle, then the rest of them. He thought about raping the little brown girl constantly and then shooting her in the face.
But then after a while, the fantasy faded and he discovered he really didn’t give a fuck about any of them . . . except for maybe Gabe. For some odd reason, he still liked the dude.
The dude was cool.
The dude was hot.
Ah well. Time to forget the past and think about the future.
Time to think about nothing, because there was always mañana.
He jumped when he heard the pop and reached for his gun. The roads were constantly trawled by banditos and drug runners, and one couldn’t be too careful about anything. But then the car started to shake and he knew what had happened.
Fuck!
He pulled over by the side of the road, got out, and immediately started sweating. He shielded his eyes as he surveyed the road. Not a car in sight.
He stared upward—a cloudless sky and a searing sun. Then he stared outward—red clay and sand and nothingness. He had a spare in the trunk, but his tire-changing skills weren’t so sharp. Nonetheless, it was either waiting for someone to come around or being self-sufficient.
He’d try self-sufficient