Full dark,no stars

She clipped her phone to the waistband of her dress slacks, went out to the road, and began picking up the mess herself. She did it slowly and carefully, because up close it became obvious that all the pieces of wood (which were painted white and looked as if they had been stripped away by someone in the throes of a home renovation project) had nails in them. Big ugly ones. She worked slowly because she didn’t want to cut herself, but she also hoped to be out here, observably doing A Good Work of Christian Charity, when the next car came along. But by the time she’d finished picking up everything but a few harmless splinters and casting the big pieces into the ditch below the shoulder of the road, no other cars had come along. Perhaps, she thought, the Zombie Bakers had eaten everyone in this immediate vicinity and were now hurrying back to their kitchen to put the leftovers into the always-popular People Pies.

She walked back to the defunct store’s weedy parking lot and looked moodily at her leaning car. Thirty thousand dollars’ worth of rolling iron, four-wheel drive, independent disc brakes, Tom the Talking Tomtom… and all it took to leave you stranded was a piece of wood with a nail in it.

But of course they all had nails, she thought. In a mystery-or a horror movie-that wouldn’t constitute carelessness; that would constitute a plan. A trap, in fact.

“Too much imagination, Tessa Jean,” she said, quoting her mother… and that was ironic, of course, since it was her imagination that had ended up providing her with her daily bread. Not to mention the Daytona Beach home where her mother had spent the last six years of her life.

In the big silence she again became aware of that tinny ticking sound. The abandoned store was of a kind you didn’t see much in the twenty-first century: it had a porch. The lefthand corner had collapsed and the railing was broken in a couple of places, but yes, it was an actual porch, charming even in its dilapidation. Maybe because of its dilapidation. Tess supposed general store porches had become obsolete because they encouraged you to sit a spell and chat about baseball or the weather instead of just paying up and hustling your credit cards on down the road to some other place where you could swipe them at the checkout. A tin sign hung askew from the porch roof. It was more faded than the Esso sign. She took a few steps closer, raising a hand to her forehead to shade her eyes. YOU LIKE IT IT LIKES YOU. Which was a slogan for what, exactly?

She had almost plucked the answer from her mental junkheap when her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of an engine. As she turned toward it, sure that the Zombie Bakers had come back after all, the sound of the motor was joined by the scream of ancient brakes. It wasn’t the white van but an old Ford F-150 pickup with a bad blue paintjob and Bondo around the headlights. A man in bib overalls and a gimme cap sat behind the wheel. He was looking at the litter of wood scraps in the ditch.

“Hello?” Tess called. “Pardon me, sir?”

He turned his head, saw her standing in the overgrown parking lot, flicked a hand in salute, pulled in beside her Expedition, and turned off his engine. Given the sound of it, Tess thought that an act tantamount to mercy killing.

“Hey, there,” he said. “Did you pick that happy crappy up off the road?”

“Yes, all but the piece that got my left front tire. And-” And my phone doesn’t work out here, she almost added, then didn’t. She was a woman in her late thirties who went one-twenty soaking wet, and this was a strange man. A big one. “-and here I am,” she finished, a bit lamely.

“I’ll change it forya if you got a spare,” he said, working his way out of his truck. “Do you?”

For a moment she couldn’t reply. The guy wasn’t big, she’d been wrong about that. The guy was a giant. He had to go six-six, but head-to-foot was only part of it. He was deep in the belly, thick in the thighs, and as wide as a doorway. She knew it was impolite to stare (another of the world’s facts learned at her mother’s knee), but it was hard not to. Ramona Norville had been a healthy chunk of woman, but standing next to this guy, she would have looked like a ballerina.

“I know, I know,” he said, sounding amused. “You didn’t think you were going to meet the Jolly Green Giant out here in the williwags, didja?” Only he wasn’t green; he was tanned a deep brown. His eyes were also brown. Even his cap was brown, although faded almost white in several places, as if it had been splattered with bleach at some point in its long life.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that I was thinking you don’t ride in that truck of yours, you wear it.”

He put his hands on his hips and guffawed at the sky. “Never heard it put like that before, but you’re sort of right. When I win the lottery, I’m going to buy myself a Hummer.”

“Well, I can’t buy you one of those, but if you change my tire, I’d be happy to pay you fifty dollars.”