On flat ground the Suzuki topped out around forty miles per hour, but downhill a man could really get moving. Denny’s hair whipped wildly from the back of his helmet and the smell of smoke in the air made him believe he was just shy of catching fire, everything burning off as the headlight sailed down the mountain like a comet.
When he’d made up his mind, he hid the scooter in a stand of sumac off Whitewater Drive. He’d driven by the Exxon four times, scoping the place out. The plan was to hit the gas station, tear off through the woods, and be back to the Suzuki in under a minute. The sound of the river would conceal the motor’s high-pitched whine. He’d shoot down Whitewater, hang a left by the bear zoo, and slip off for the island park. There was a big grove of bamboo where he could hide for an hour till things calmed down before making his way up Big Cove.
A bell rang on the back side of the door when he entered. There was an old white woman working the register. She lifted her head and pushed her glasses up her nose with the tip of her finger. She sized him up, then turned back to the crossword puzzle spread on the counter. It was still a few weeks shy of Thanksgiving but there was Christmas music playing from the ceiling. The old woman was humming “Silent Night” in that beautiful vibrato tone that only old people seemed capable of.
He hung an immediate left along pallets of two-for-five twelve-packs and crept past the motor oil and fuel additives, being sure to keep his back to her. Head down so the cameras couldn’t get a clear shot of his face, he turned around the end cap and made his way up the candy aisle. It had only ever come to this once before and that time he’d had a shirt that was worn so thin that the clerk could read the candy bar label through the fabric. He’d sworn it was a gun but she laughed as she dug through her purse and pulled out a key chain pepper spray and damn near melted his face off.
The knockoff Tommy T-shirt was navy blue and there wasn’t a chance in hell that old woman had passed an eye exam in decades. Denny grabbed a Snickers bar and situated it in his hand so that the shape mimicked the slide on a pistol. He slipped the rig under his shirt and started for the front of the store.
The clerk looked up from her crossword puzzle and eyed him through cloudy bifocal lenses. A cough drop ticked against the front of her teeth as she smiled and greeted him. Denny was coming forward fast and he was just about to start screaming for her to give him the money when all of a sudden the thought came over him that he just might scare her to death, that he might honest to God make that woman have a heart attack and stroke out right there on the floor. He pulled the Snickers bar out from under his shirt and slapped it down hard on the counter.
He tried to talk, but at first the words stuttered out in some indecipherable garble. He sounded like he was out of breath. “Can you tell me how much that cost?”
“Are you okay?” she asked. She reached for the candy bar on the counter. Her left hand was in a cast that ran halfway up her forearm. There was a sincere look of concern in her eyes. She looked like she should’ve been sitting in a rocking chair someplace crocheting an afghan. She looked like somebody’s grandmother.
“Yeah,” Denny said. “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine.”
“That’ll be ninety-six cents, hon.”
“I don’t think I’ve got that.”
“Well . . . all right.” Her face scrunched in confusion. “You sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah,” Denny said. “I’m fine. I hope you have a good night.”
When he was outside, he felt like he was about to faint. There was sweat on his forehead and the night air hit him cold. He turned and looked through the window and she was studying him curiously. A middle-aged woman in a Jeep Wrangler pulled up to the pumps. There were two kids in the backseat about the same age, a little boy and girl that could’ve easily been twins, and they hopped out in unison, fighting over who would get to pump the gas. The mother handed some cash to the little boy and he shot by Denny in a cowlicked flash. His sister lifted the nozzle off the pump.
A light blue Oldsmobile Eighty-Eight was parked in front of the ice machine at the corner of the building. There was a seashell necklace hanging around the rearview mirror. Denny slipped away from the store window and leaned with his back against the wall between a newspaper box and a bin of overpriced firewood. The little boy ran out of the store, his sister pumped the gas, and in a minute they were gone.
When the coast was clear, he walked around to the passenger side of the Oldsmobile. She hadn’t even bothered to lock the doors. The inside smelled like hand cream and cigarettes. He hit all the primary places first—the glove box, the console, the visors, the side pockets on the doors. Aside from some spare change in a cup holder, the car was empty. A pack of Kool 100s was thrown on the dash with a lighter tucked into the cellophane. He took the cigarettes and leaned back out of the car and that’s when he saw a CVS pharmacy bag sitting in the backseat.
Denny snatched the bag and eased the door closed without even bothering to check the ’script until he was halfway back to his scooter. Some moron doctor had prescribed the old woman Roxi for pain, five milligrams every four hours up to three times daily. The dosage was low, but the bag was still stapled and there were thirty pills prescribed.
Kneeling in the moonlight on the bank of the Oconaluftee, Denny Rattler popped five Roxis and chewed them up like Pez. He emptied the pills into his hand, then threw the bag and bottle into the river. Slipping the cellophane off the cigarettes, he dropped the other twenty-five pills inside. If the law stopped him, he didn’t want to have anything with the old woman’s name on it because that would catch him a separate charge. He lit one of her cigarettes, rolled the cellophane up, and held the lighter to the plastic to dab it sealed. When he was finished and the plastic was cooled, he hid the pills along his ankle inside his sock and smoked the cigarette down to its filter.
Though he’d planned on running, he didn’t have to now, and there really wasn’t anyplace to go. He flicked his cigarette butt into the current, picked up a stone from the water’s edge, and skipped the rock across the surface like a kid killing time. All there was in this world was waiting. He hoped it wouldn’t take long for those Roxis to hit.