IT WAS LIVERMORE’S personal conception of hell.
He was standing in line, in this forgotten little run-down gas station that smelled like the bottom of an old oil drum, after being on the road for seven hours straight. He was somewhere in the middle of New Mexico, trapped in this place, looking it up and down and seeing one horror after another, from the broken linoleum floor to the dust-covered vents on the stand-up cooler to the sagging yellow ceiling tiles. He had passed the bathroom door on the way in, locked up tight. You probably had to ask for the key, and when they handed it to you it would be chained to a urine-stained block of wood. Livermore would go outside and piss against the wall before he did that.
The man behind the register looked like he was eighty years old, an obsolete machine that should have been left out in a field years ago. Livermore had already waited for the man to verify that his hundred-dollar bill was the real thing, taking out his currency pen, drawing a line across the face, then holding it up to the light, the whole operation taking as much time as a U.S. Treasury agent breaking up an international counterfeiting ring. Now he was slowly counting out the change, one crumpled bill at a time, with his old, stained fingers. Livermore’s mind drifted to different ways he could persuade the man to move a little faster, maybe starting with the box cutter hanging in its plastic container on the dusty wall behind him. Start with one ear, see if that motivated the man. Then move to the other. The man was probably already mostly deaf, anyway.
“The reward’s up to two million dollars,” another man said from behind him. “Wouldn’t mind running into him, no matter how dangerous they say he is.”
Livermore came out of his reverie and listened to what the man was saying.
“I’d knock him right out,” the man said, speaking to whoever was standing in line behind him. “Throw him in the back of my truck like a goddamned buck. Go collect my reward.”
Livermore turned around and looked at him, another old man, a foot shorter and starved down to skin, bones, ligaments, and an Adam’s apple that bobbed up and down as he rambled on.
“Better believe I’d give him a taste of his own medicine. Get out my tire iron, you know what I’m saying? Give him a once-over. Make him suffer, like he done to those poor women.”
As Livermore took his change and left, he overheard the same man prepaying on pump number seven.
A minute later, the man came back out to his truck and opened up the front door just long enough for Livermore to pop the gas cap. When he shut the door and turned around, he nearly jumped out of his skin. Livermore was standing right in front of him.
“Let me help you out there, sir,” Livermore said, taking the nozzle from the pump.
The man raised a hand to stop him, but Livermore was already squeezing the handle to start the flow of gasoline.
“I overheard what you were saying in there,” Livermore said.
The man just stood there, still confused.
“You really think you could do that?” Livermore said as the numbers on the ancient pump clicked by slowly. “You think you’re capable?”
“Look here,” the man said, “I don’t need you to pump my gas . . .”
“This man you were talking about . . .” Livermore said. “This man who knows all about pain . . . Who spent his whole life studying it . . . Maybe even turning it into an art form. I’m not sure how impressed he’d be by your little ‘once-over’ with the tire iron.”
The man was shifting his weight back and forth from one foot to the other, scanning the other vehicles at the pumps, as if hoping for a friendly face. Someone who might come to his rescue.
“You think it would be your cold metal against his flesh and bones,” Livermore said. “That you’d be the one in control. But you’re wrong. You’d have to meet this man where he lives. To beat him, you’d have to become just like him.”
Another man walked by then. Livermore smiled to him and gave him a friendly nod.
“I see you work in a shop,” Livermore said, reading the lettering on the side of the truck’s door. “So I’m sure you know the value of picking the right tool for the job. Let’s say you used your acetylene torch . . . Can you even imagine what that would be like? Watching parts of your own body being melted away?”
“Listen, buddy . . .” The man was licking his lips and wavering on his feet like he might get sick. His eyes kept darting to the numbers on the pump, as if willing the gas to flow faster into the tank.
“But be careful,” Livermore said as the nozzle finally hit the automatic shutoff point. “By the time you’re done, you’ll be a different man. You might even find you have a real taste for it. Then maybe it’ll be you with the two-million-dollar reward on your head.”
The man kept standing next to his truck as Livermore returned the nozzle to its place beside the pump. The entire exchange would have been a foolish move for most men. Pure insanity to draw attention to himself, to make this man remember him, here at this gas station in the middle of New Mexico. How easy it would be for him to remember Livermore, to recount all of the things that he’d said and to sit with the sketch artist and re-create the face that had become burned into his mind.
How easy, assuming that the man lived to see the end of this day.
“You have a good afternoon,” Livermore said, taking another look at the name of the business on the door. “Mr. Henderson of Edgewood, New Mexico.”
Livermore watched the man get behind the wheel of his truck and quickly slam the door shut. He gave a long look over his shoulder as he cranked the truck to life and put it in gear.
If you’re going in my direction, Livermore thought, then maybe I’ll make a stop in Edgewood so we can finish your education.
He got in his own vehicle and watched the truck go back to the expressway. It turned west. Livermore was going east. He put the man out of his mind and kept driving.