4

I don’t know how “adorable” she was, but she certainly handled like a spaceship. I thought the V8 in Dorothy was powerful, but Dora was at least a couple hundred pounds lighter with an even bigger engine. At five grand, I had gotten a bargain. I drove back to my hotel, loaded up a few extra things into the car, and took off for the vicinity of the lake.

I mostly behaved myself until I got off the Interstate. I had the country road between I-40 and the lake to myself and used the open space to put Dora through her paces. Truth be told, she put my driving skills to the test. She was everything I could handle and then some. I closed the gap between Interstate and gas station in under five minutes.

Rather than going the rest of the way to the lake, I pulled off into a back corner of the honky-tonk bar’s gravel parking lot. I activated the waiting spell I had started earlier on the pendant necklace, then hung it around Dora’s rearview mirror. As expected, the pendant leaned slightly toward the southeast. I took the road going east from the gas station, now at speeds within both reason and law. Every time a side road turned off to the right, I glanced up at the pendant, trying to judge if it was pointing more east or south.

I was driving for a half-hour at least before I decided to head south. I might have taken the turn before that one, but the road was dirt only and I wasn’t eager to get Dora dirty just yet. She was far too pretty for off-road mudding. The one I turned on was gravel, but it looked like fairly well maintained gravel. I followed it for ten minutes before the surrounding woods began to peter out. I stopped at an old hippie commune…or at least, I guessed that’s what it used to be. The man who met me at the entrance said it was a drug rehab center. From the way he talked, he suspected I was either a potential client or a connection trying to supply one of his current patients. I told him my only addiction was Middle Eastern oil and thumbed back at Dora. I think that relaxed him a little bit. I told him I was trying to find an old Native American friend, but had lost the directions she had given me. I don’t know if he completely bought it, but he was helpful enough to point out the way to a place he thought she might be.

When I climbed behind the steering wheel, I thought I knew where I was going. That should have been a warning sign of impending doom, but I figured I was safe—it was still warm and sunny out. As I continued south, if I ever noticed the motorcycle in the distance behind me, I didn’t process that it had been following me for quite a while now.