Relentless

hand.
    When he gave it to me, I threw it hard to the ground, stomped it twice, and kicked it away.
    “Imagine there’s a bomb strapped to you,” I said, “and it’s got such a delicate trigger mechanism, any quick move will blow you to Hell.” I backed off a step. “Now get out.”
    He appeared calm, but fury teemed in his maroon eyes.
    I expected him to throw himself at me and try to seize my gun, but maybe he was a guy who took chances only after he had already stacked the deck.
    At any moment, someone could drive into the rest stop and see me apparently robbing a respectable-looking gentleman. The deputies at the roadblock were partially screened from us by the stone pines, but they were within hailing distance.
    When Waxx was out of the Hummer, I said, “Open the back door.”
    He did as he was told—and was surprised again when Penny swung up and into the backseat through the opposite door and pulled it shut behind her.
    As she covered him with her pistol, I pressed mine against his spine and said, “She’s handled guns all her life. She shot Rink from thirty feet and put the first round through his carotid artery.”
    To Waxx, Penny said, “I want to kill you worse than Cubby does. Keep that in mind as you’re getting in.”
    He climbed into the backseat beside her, and I closed the door after him.
    Holstering the .45, I hurried around to the other side of the vehicle, where Milo waited with Lassie.
    I opened the passenger door and boosted the boy into the front seat. Lassie allowed herself to be lifted onto his lap.
    After closing the door, I went around to the back, where Penny had left the suitcase and where Milo had put down the sack of stuff that we took from the Mountaineer before abandoning it. I opened the tailgate and stowed our things.
    The immense cargo space already contained a large black suitcase with stainless-steel fittings. The luggage intrigued me. It did not appear to be a bag that contained only a few clean shirts and changes of underwear, but this wasn’t the time to explore its contents.
    A moment later, I settled into the driver’s seat. The key was in the ignition, and I started the engine.
    The huge wraparound windshield not only provided an excellent view but also made me feel that I was less a driver than a pilot, and king of the road.
    As we headed north, Waxx said, “You’re all as dead as Rink and Shucker.”
    “Shut up, asshole,” Penny said, not as the author of
The Other Side of the Woods
might have said it, not as either the mice or the owl in that story might have said it, but rather like Joe Pesci, playing a sociopath in a movie like
Goodfellas
, would have said it.
    Milo’s eyes were as round and as large as any owl’s when he whispered, “Dad, did you hear that word?”
    I said, “Which word do you mean—
shut
or
up
?”

    The motto of Titus Springs was definitely not “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.” According to the sign at the town limits, the population was 1,500, but that probably included the out-of-towners who had been abducted and locked in the basements of some of the community’s more colorful citizens, to serve as unconventional pets or as blood sacrifices the next time the weather gods withheld rain for too long.
    Because the town served as the commercial hub for a score of even smaller towns and surrounding rural residents, there were more shopping opportunities than I expected, including a large locally owned hardware store that sold everything from horseshoes to nail guns to cattle prods to curling irons, from calendars of scantily clad women holding a variety of tools to forty kinds of hammers.
    They offered numerous styles and gauges of chain, which they sold by the foot off large drum dispensers. I bought twenty feet of a sturdychain, a bolt cutter, eight padlocks keyed the same, a roll of wide duct tape, scissors, a package of cotton rags, and a blanket.
    The clerk at the checkout was a gangly young man with a crane’s neck, a large Adam’s apple, a rat’s-nest beard, yellow teeth, and Charles Manson eyes. After he rang up the items and before he hit the TOTAL key on the register, he said, “You want some chloroform with that?”
    I stared at him a moment and then said, “What?”
    Scratching his beard with long bony fingers, he said, “To make her easier to handle while you’re chaining her down.”
    This time I was speechless.
    He laughed and waved his hand dismissively “Sorry, mister. Don’t