Page 7 of The Midnight Knock

Ethan had never heard such a scream.

The grease seethed and hissed as it cooked Cleveland’s flesh. The cook started to fight. Hunter struck him with the butt of the shotgun and stepped away. Cleveland fell, stunned, to the floor. Curled around his hissing hand. Watched the steam rising off his red fingers. Cleveland made a noise somewhere between a sob and a scream.

Hunter knelt down, very close to his ear. He spoke in a tone that was almost loving.

“Now every time you touch yourself, you’ll think of me.”

Ethan didn’t think. Didn’t breathe. They piled into the truck and tore out of the parking lot, heading south. Headed down the route the gabardine man had called the Dust Road.

They didn’t have a choice. When Hunter had stepped out of the diner’s kitchen and the older waitress fell straight on her ass, scrambling to get away from him, and Ethan followed his man outside, the fry cook had shouted after them.

“Frank is going to kill you faggots! He’s going to fucking butcher you!”

According to Jack Allen, the man Ethan had met in the gabardine suit, the road to the north led to Fort Stockton, base of operations for a bad man named Frank O’Shea. According to the same Jack Allen, the fry cook at the dinerworkedfor Frank. If Frank was as bad as Jack Allen said, logic dictated that Ethan and Hunter had just made a dangerous enemy to the north. No going that way.

It went without saying they couldn’t head east either. That would just take them back toward Ellersby and all the problems they’d left burning there.

No choice, then. The southern road. The Dust Road. Fast as the truck could carry them.

Too fast, as it turned out. A few miles outside of Turner, Ethan heard a faint high whine from the engine that he realized, later, was the fuel line cracking. Hunter probably didn’t understand the sound, but it must have triggered alarm bells. He laid a hand on Ethan’s shoulder. “Easy there. Easy.”

As if he were talking to a horse.

Ethan shot a glance at Hunter. The black fire in his eyes was gone, but a dangerous tremor remained in the man’s voice. A vein pulsed dangerously along the jaw. “Do you think what I did was wrong?”

Oh, son. You have no idea what you’re dealing with, do you?

After a long, long silence, Ethan said, “No. That guy had it coming.”

“Good answer.”

Mark my words—

Ethan tightened his grip on the wheel.

This man is going to get you into the sort of trouble—

Ethan didn’t slow down. He drove.

Almost two hours later the road hadn’t changed at all. Same gold-brown desert. Same weathered blacktop. A kingdom of sky and air, empty of everything but them.

No animals. No birds. No sound but the rumble of the old Ford’s engine.

The longer this went on, the more Ethan had to fight memories of the gabardine man back at the diner.

They say that sometimes the road just goes on forever.

Why worry about old stories? There was more immediate danger inside the truck. The fuel line had indeed cracked when they’d sped out of Turner. Ethan could see a thin ribbon of gasoline in the rearview mirror, dribbling behind them like a blood trail. They’d reached that town with most of a tank. Even with the old truck’s awful mileage, the needle should not be this low.

Ethan had spent most of the last hour debating whether to tell Hunter. What to say. Hunter himself hadn’t said a word in ages, but he’d watched their mirrors plenty. Surely, he saw that black line on the asphalt. Surely, he knew what it meant.

The road goes on until your car runs out of gas and the cold creeps in.

The fuel gauge sank into the red. Ethan would have to say something. But what?

Outside, something finally changed. A hand-painted sign appeared on the side of the road.

BRAKE INN MOTEL