Driving Mr. Dead

I’d become familiar with those features on the three- (OK, four-) day drive to pick up Mr. Sutherland. I’d planned to make him familiar with them before we started the drive back to Half-Moon Hollow so he could deliver a parcel to an official with the World Council for the Equal Treatment of the Undead. But clearly, Mr. Sutherland preferred that we just get on the road. I couldn’t blame him, I supposed. We absolutely, positively had to be back on time, or Mr. Sutherland would not be paid … which meant that Iris would not be paid … which meant that I would not be paid … which would be upsetting.



Using the boatload of upper-body strength it took to close the rear door, I slammed it down. I noticed a pale flash out of the corner of my eye at the last minute. The gate came crashing down on Mr. Sutherland’s fingers with a sickening crunch.



This was a hallucination. I could not be looking at a vampire’s hand caught in a car door, crushed like something out of an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon. I clapped my hands over my mouth and let out a horrified shriek.



“Open the bloody gate!” he roared.



I scrambled for the key fob and clicked it, popping the door open. Mr. Sutherland groaned and flexed his mangled fingers, bent at bizarre angles, obviously broken in several places. Sure, they would fix themselves rapidly with his vampire healing, but it would hurt like a bitch.



“I’m sorry!” I cried, rushing forward to help him. He hissed like a cat and turned his back on me. “Shit! I’m so sorry!”



“Language, Miss Puckett,” he growled over his shoulder. “Did you not see that my hand was in the way?” He grunted as his fingers stretched and snapped back into their proper places.



“Not until the last minute,” I said. “Why didn’t you move your hand when you saw I was closing the door?”



“I thought you would stop the door,” he shot back.



“How was I supposed to do that? I don’t have vampire reflexes!”



“From now on, I will keep your limitations in mind,” he seethed, and pivoted on his heel toward the car door.



Mr. Sutherland was already seated in the middle of the backseat when, shaking my wet hair out of my face, I slid into the driver’s seat. He flexed his reformed fingers and glared at me. The case was tucked safely by his feet on the floor boards, as if he was afraid to lose contact with it for even a moment.



What the hell was in the case? I wondered. Huge stacks of cash? Jewels? What if it was nuclear codes or radioactive materials? Iris seemed like a nice lady. I would hope she wouldn’t involve me in international espionage on my first cross-country job. Maybe the second or third but certainly not the first.



“You’re going to sit in the back?” I asked, glancing at him in the rearview.



He looked me over again, that same pinched, confused expression he’d given me before. I couldn’t blame him. I had just destroyed his right hand. And he seemed to spend an awful lot of time alone …



Catching my reflection in the mirror, I cringed. No wonder Mr. Sutherland seemed so … well, unimpressed would be putting it kindly. My heart-shaped face held few charms beyond a pert little nose and a frame of light brown hair that frizzed in humidity and hung limp in every other sort of -idity. I had a weird, top-heavy mouth that made me look as if I’d been thoroughly kissed, which generally wasn’t the case. I’d inherited my dad’s Puckett green eyes, with little flecks of gold around the pupils and a heavy fringe of lashes. Other than that, I was painfully average, which was strange, because I managed to gum up my life in such spectacular ways.



Given my underwhelming attractions, I supposed that at this point, I should have been grateful that Mr. Sutherland wasn’t making me wear one of those little chauffeur caps to hide my face.



It was just as well that he seemed to think I was some sort of disheveled swamp troll. As tempting as Mr. Sutherland was, dreamy insouciance and angular GQ looks were not my thing. Until I’d met Jason, my boyfriends had borne a disturbing resemblance to Criss Angel.



I had just started the engine when my phone buzzed from the console. Speak of the Polo-wearing, microbrew-swilling devil. It was probably another ass-dial. Jason didn’t like to bother with his screen lock on his phone, so he disabled it, which meant that he was sort of notorious for calling people whenever he sat down. Of the dozens of calls he’d made to my phone over the last few days, he was only aware of half of them.



I wasn’t ready to talk to him or his ass cheeks. And I could only be grateful that I’d turned off the Henry Rollins ringtone before Mr. Sutherland could hear it. I reached for the “ignore” button, only to suffer that velvet vampire voice’s further abuse of my goose-bump response.



“Miss Puckett, I faxed a document concerning my transportation requirements to your employer upon the signing of our contract. Did you not read it?”



Sadly, I had read what amounted to a sixteen-page contract rider, which outlined everything from maximum speeds at which I was allowed to change lanes to fragrances I was allowed to wear to which foods I was allowed to eat in his presence. I thought it was a joke. Clearly, I was wrong.



He cleared his throat pointedly and handed me an extra copy, triple-stapled, along with the credit card I was supposed to be using for our travel expenses. “If you read page ten, you’ll see that phone use or texting while driving is strictly prohibited.”



“Oh, no, I wasn’t going to—”



“No excuses, Miss Puckett,” he said in that clipped, vaguely accented voice.



I gritted my teeth, my voice practically whistling through them as I said, “You know, this whole thing might feel a little less awkward if you called me Miranda.”



“I don’t think so.”



“OK, then,” I ground out, “do you have a music preference?”



“Page twelve, Miss Puckett.”



I flipped through the booklet listing tolerable music selections. I sighed and tuned the radio to a classical station. “It’s going to be a long drive.”



MORE ISSUES THAN NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC



2



We did not manage to become bosom companions in those first few hours on the road. Mr. Sutherland sat in the backseat, silent and taciturn, alternately glaring out the window and checking our progress against an atlas. Did he give me information from the atlas while I struggled to find our way back to civilization? No, he just grimaced every time I made a turn, which was super-helpful.



The plan for this excursion to Half-Moon Hollow, Kentucky, was that I would drive as far as I could each day and well past sunset, letting Mr. Sutherland sleep during the day in the little car cubby. We would pull over at carefully chosen roadside motels at a “reasonable stopping time” so I could eat and rest. Mr. Sutherland didn’t have a driver’s license, so he would not help out with the wheel time.



As I said, that was the plan. But, as in most cases where I was involved, that plan went awry. Terribly, terribly awry. Thanks to our late start and my accidentally looping around Tacoma twice, we reached a motel at 2 A.M. It could not come soon enough. After nearly twenty-eight hours without sleep, I was getting a little punchy. Falling asleep at the wheel and killing myself would be a really bad way to finish up my maiden voyage.



We had not reached the vicinity of the approved first-night motel choices. We weren’t within fifty miles of those choices. There was not a Ramada or a Holiday Inn in sight. Now, the one-story, nondescript-beyond-the-dripping-rust-stains-on-the-exterior-walls Pine Heights Motel? That we had.



I pulled the car to a stop and jumped out without a word to Mr. Sutherland. I didn’t feel obligated, since he hadn’t spared one for me since we’d pulled out of his driveway. I walked into the office to book two rooms, studiously ignoring the fact that the rooms were only thirty-two dollars per night and that the clerk gave me keys—real, old-fashioned, metal keys on honest-to-goodness plastic tags. Also, his emphasis on the “pay-perv-view” channels as an amenity really creeped me out.



When I emerged from the office, feeling significantly less confident in the accommodations than when I’d walked in, Mr. Sutherland was leaning against the car, glowering at any object that crossed his field of vision.



“This motel, if you can even call it that, is unacceptable. Miss Puckett, if you will review the preapproved itinerary—”



“I did read it, all sixteen pages,” I told him. “And unfortunately, we weren’t able to make it as far as planned—”



“Unacceptable!”



“Whether you accept it or not, that’s the way it is!” I shouted back.



Mr. Sutherland squinted at me again, which was either his idea of intimidation or he had some strange facial tic when he was angry. He snatched the key from my hand. “And my credit card, if you please. I don’t believe I can trust you with purchasing decisions.”



I slapped the card into his outstretched palm, then yanked the rear door open and dropped his overnight bag at his feet. Counting down from ten, I cleared my throat, hoping that I sounded the least bit contrite. “Look, we are on the road. Traveling is unpredictable. There will be contingencies. You are just going to have to accept that the days will not go completely according to plan.”



Mr. Sutherland smiled nastily. “I’ll be sure to tell your supervisor you said so.” He spun in the direction of his room, without a glance back at me. “Good night, Miss Puckett.”



I pressed the heel of my hand against my sternum, hoping to quell the tension building there as he walked away. Mr. Sutherland slipped the key into the door to 6C, pointedly ignoring my presence. I glared at his back, praying that I could keep my mouth shut and get my ass into my room before I chucked a loose cement block at his head. Calm, I told myself. Stay cool. Do not concuss the client.



And then I remembered the disdainful little sneer he’d given me when my shoes dripped on his precious floor. And the snotty way he’d informed me that I wasn’t responsible enough to be trusted with his credit card. No, he was not going to get away with talking to me that way. I would not put up with that bullshit for three more nights.



“You know what, you are a real piece of work.”



He turned to give me an incredulous look.



I cleared my throat and tried for a more respectful tone. Not because I was working for him but because, you know, he had fangs. “If you feel the need to contact Ms. Scanlon, I don’t suppose there’s anything I can do to stop you.” He smirked slightly, before I added, “But if you plan to call now, I think you should consider how you’re going to get home.”



He didn’t offer me another glance as he slammed his room door shut.



I opened my door and shut it behind me, whacking my head against the state room-tax notice. A familiar rise of panic burned my throat at the idea of returning home early, of seeing Jason before I was ready. But if Mr. Sutherland was going to tattle on me, there wasn’t anything I could do to stop him, so I might as well get a good night’s sleep. Sighing, I dropped my bag onto the bed and scanned the dismal little room. It was too dirty to be considered Spartan, too outdated to be considered retro. The carpet may have been a sort of burnt orange at some point, but it was now more of a knotty brownish gray. The bedspread was the same paper-thin synthetic fiber used in all cheap motels. I had no doubt that long after the nuclear winter, future civilizations would visit our planet and find scratchy motel bedspreads flapping across the earth’s wasted landscape. I made a mental note to toss that particular specimen to the floor and avoid touching it for the remainder of my stay. I was not sleeping on that thing.



I checked my phone again, finding that Jason was down two calls to my mother, who had called a total of ten times that day. Pulling my phone out of my pocket, I calculated the time difference. It was 5:30 A.M. in Kentucky, which meant Mom would be up and on her treadmill already—just another way in which I wasn’t living up to her high standards. She picked up on the first ring.