Page 129 of Antihero

Anca began to shift in her seat with discomfort.

“What are you reading?” Evan finally asked, trying to get her to loosen her nervous system.

Her gaze remained forward. “The Gulag Archipelago.”

Of course.

He stayed on high alert, cycling his gaze between side and rearview mirrors, keeping an eye out for tails. His trust in official channels went only as far as Naomi Templeton, extending less confidently to those colleagues she’d necessarily looped in. He’d been taken down once already by a Service-orchestrated manhunt, bound, gagged, and hooded, and was not eager to repeat the experience.

Candy’s possible sighting of one of Anca’s attackers outside a grocery store added another reason to keep his attention at high simmer. The First Commandment: Assume nothing.

Anca’s squirming intensified. She excavated a trio of pills from various prescription bottles in her purse and swallowed them dry. Closing her eyes, she rubbed her temples. The bruising around her left eye, though faded, had feathered down through her cheek in jaundiced streaks.

“Would you mind stopping? I have to use a restroom.”

Her purse, a roomy tote, shifted between her feet. He made out a few pairs of absorbent briefs inside.

“Of course.”

He eased into a gas station, parked by the air dispenser, and walked her inside the convenience store. He safed the single-occupancy bathroom before holding the door for her to enter. Then he waited by a stand of powdered mini-doughnuts, offering a nod to the clerk who glanced up at him before returning to a sudoku book.

Evan spent a minute clicking through websites for transradial prosthetics, then put the RoamZone away and watched the gas pumps and passing traffic. An East Asian woman in her sixties was struggling with the credit-card reader, poking at the tiny keypad. A guy in the truck behind her bleated his horn at her. “C’mon, lady!” His friend in the passenger seat rolled down his window and pounded the side panel. “Fucking move it already!”

The woman grew flustered, waving an apology, jabbing hurriedly at the keypad.

The truck had license plates and a roofing-company decal on the side with the phone number blatantly presented. The men were early thirties, out of the dangerous twenties, and they looked aggravated but not menacing.

Anca emerged.

Holding her arm gently, Evan hustled her out past the pumps, heading to the Mercedes.

“Come on, lady! Learn to read English!”

Anca halted.

Evan said, “No.”

But she pulled her arm free and walked back to the pumps, stopping before the truck’s grille. Evan hustled up behind her.

“You two!” she said.

The men’s eyebrows rose, their heads retracting barely but in concert, an inadvertently comedic effect. The driver lifted his trucker cap, scratched his head, put it back on.

Evan wanted them in the truck.

“Out of the truck,” Anca said.

They got out of the truck.

Evan wanted them far.

“Come here,” Anca said.

They came here.

“You,” Anca said to the driver. “Do you have a wife?”

“Not anymore.”