Heir

Chapter 6

6

The world doesn’t stop spinning just because you’re a wanted man.

Under other circumstances, Danny might have smiled at the thought. It sounded like a bad country song. His hands ached, so he consciously loosened his grip on the steering wheel. He felt a peculiar sensation—a kind of itching, just short of painful—under his skull. It was on top of his head, to the right of center. One hand crept over his scalp. In there somewhere. He pushed with two fingers. Nothing. Then he pressed his knuckles against his head and rubbed in circles. His car (purchased for a few hundred cash from an old associate) drifted to the shoulder, and he almost over-corrected with his left hand. But he kept rubbing his head, and gradually the sensation eased.

And people don’t stop wanting to be paid.

The kind of people who don’t bother telling you a second time. Danny wasn’t some piss-ant mule or even a street corner hustler, but he wasn’t a kingpin, either. He fell somewhere in the middle, and that was a dangerous place to be. He had the money. For now. But even though he didn’t have any bad habits (he never sampled the product, for instance) and he always lived in shitholes, his emergency fund wouldn’t last long. Maybe a couple of weeks. It would take a lot longer than that to get established somewhere new, especially somewhere that wasn’t already spoken for. He could speed up the process, but he’d need somebody watching his back. Which meant getting the okay from higher up.

Danny wasn’t worried. He’d been a solid performer for a bunch of years and never caused problems. Things would come together—they always did. Except, he still had to deal with the Rutledges. Especially Adam. He had a plan for that, too. But he couldn’t quite remember it. Probably because the itching, tickling sensation in his head had returned, along with a droning buzz. Really, more of a hiss. And what was a hiss but a whisper?

He turned on the radio, hoping to drown out the sound. Good luck with that. He’d left West Virginia behind, but not the mountains. Well, these mountains were more like rural, rolling hills nobody had gotten around to clearcutting yet, but the end result was the same—shitty reception, whether cell phone or radio. Numbers scrolled by, with nothing but static to show for it. And instead of drowning out the whispers, the radio (hissing, pulsing static) seemed to amplify them. Not enough to make out the words, but enough to make conscious, sensible thought impossible.

“I guess I could sing,” Danny said aloud, just to hear his own voice. Just to confirm that the other one he heard was not his.

“Except I can’t f*****g sing,” he said.

What kind of attitude is that? the voice asked. The one that was not his.

Danny had heard whispers for as long as he could remember. Sometimes louder, more insistent, and sometimes far in the back of his mind. They tended to cycle, depending on what he’d been doing to keep them happy. Lately, the past few months, they were never happy. They—or was it he, a single voice? Voices were harder to recognize when you only heard them in your head—they could never get enough. It wasn’t fair. The whispers swirled and swelled, like a crowd in his head. A crowd he didn’t invite.

“Leave me alone!” Danny screamed, loud enough to make his throat ache.

You know how to make that happen, came the whispered reply.

And that’s when he saw him. Up ahead, on a straight stretch. By the side of the road.

A hitchhiker.

No, Danny thought. I can’t take the risk. Not now.

And yet, he found himself pulling over ahead of the figure. He was a young man, mid-twenties, underdressed for November in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, with a backpack slung over one shoulder. Danny watched him in the rearview mirror shuffling toward his car, not quite running but faster than a walk, as though he didn’t trust a stranger to wait for him otherwise. The man approached the passenger side, and Danny found—to his surprise—that the power window worked on that side. Cold air rushed in.

“Where you headed?” Danny yelled over the roar of the wind.

The man leaned in, head stretching his hood. Dark hair escaped around the edges and his clean-shaven face had—oh, too perfect—a dimple.

“Wherever there’s a roof,” the man replied, grinning.

“All right, then,” Danny said, stretching a hand down the side of his calf to feel the outline of the knife he kept there. He nodded toward the rear seat. “Toss your bag in the back and let’s go.”

“Great—thanks!”

While the man struggled with the rear passenger door in the wind, Danny reached beneath his seat and slipped a cord free, tucking it within range. Danny almost thought he saw snow in the air that blasted inside as the man dropped next to him. An echoing silence filled the car after the door slammed shut. Like a church. Danny stared at his passenger until the man became visibly uncomfortable, looking at the dashboard, the floor, the door handle.

“All right, then,” Danny said brightly, wind buffeting his vehicle as he merged back onto the road. “Let’s see what we can do about getting you somewhere more… hospitable.”