Work Done for Hire by Joe Haldeman Read Free Book Online Page A

fat rubber band, that rode in his left front pocket. Faded torn jeans, to go with his faded flannel shirt and well-worn tennis shoes.
    The bicycle was a marvel of camouflage, or misdirection; a sturdy ancient Schwinn with a flaking paint job and a touch of rust. But the running gear and brakes were brand-new Campy and Shimano, the tires were Gators, and the seat cost more than the frame. It was comfortable and stopped on a dime and got forty miles to the gallon of Heineken.
    It had two big reed baskets, one of which held his travel bag, carefully chosen after a couple of hours’ browsing in pawn shops and thrift stores. It was beat-up khaki nylon, scuffed but strong, with lots of compartments and a lock. The middle part held a week’s worth of clothes and dehydrated meals, and side pockets held wallet and change and a notebook, along with hardware like a bottle opener and flashlight and Swiss Army knife. What had really sold him on this one was a side pocket under a Velcro flap, large enough for a Glock 9-mm and two spare clips.
    Under his shirt he carried a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special .38 Airweight—the kind of gun a private eye always had in the movies. But Steve knew too much about guns to rely on it alone. And Hunter was doubtless a big man. In Alabama he’d left three footprints in mud while he was carrying a two-hundred-pound victim. A police lab report said that it would take at least five hundred pounds to drive his size fourteens that deep. To kill him with a .38, you’d have to hit him in the eye or right down the ear, and Steve didn’t want to get that close while the beast was still alive.
    He recited the LAPD mantra: “Two in the chest, one in the head.” The first would get his attention, the second would kill him, and the third would kill him again. If he were human.
    At Mr. Steinhart’s insistence, he had a radio beacon Superglued to the underside of the seat. It used two hearing-aid batteries and would run for more than a year. If he were killed and the bike tossed somewhere, the cops could track it from fifty miles away. They might even find his body nearby.
    If he were actually following the Southern Tier Trail, he’d start in the middle of St. Augustine. But Hunter wasn’t going to nab anyone off a city street, so he studied the bus route and had the Greyhound drop him and his bike off at Molasses Junction.
    It was like a scene out of
The Grapes of Wrath
. Bare dirt from horizon to horizon, a steady north wind, cold in the bleak sunshine, blowing needle-sharp sand into his face. He’d be headed west, so only his right ear would fill up with dirt.
    The only building at the Molasses Junction crossroads was a general store. He locked his bike up, feeling foolishly urban, and carried his bag inside the dark dusty place. Mostly bare shelves. With the dust storm rattling the windows, it all felt like a set from a Woody Guthrie movie. With himself a fugitive from a Humphrey Bogart
noir
flick, armed to the teeth with no target in sight.
    A tired old woman came out of a back room, wiping her hands on a bloody rag. Actually tomato guts. Behind her he could see a canning setup boiling, and a case of empty catsup bottles.
    â€œWhat you want, somethin’?” She wasn’t really that old. Her face was creased with fatigue, the lines stark in deep sunburn, maybe kitchen heat. Her body was not old, curves and muscle straining tight jeans and tank top. She turned halfway to adjust a Slim Jims display and not incidentally reveal that she was wearing a snub-nosed pistol in a butt holster. Probably smart in an isolated place like this. But the opposite of sexy.
    He considered buying a box of .38 Special rounds to establish fellow-feeling, but decided against it. “Just a Coke, um, and a Slim Jim.”
    â€œIn the machine there.”
    It was the kind of cooler he hadn’t seen since he was a little boy, a big red icebox with a sliding top;