Page 83 of Forever Dark
A woman laughed near the lot, then hushed herself.
A child ran ahead of his parents and got called back.
Near the bus door, Leon lit a cigarette and smoked with his shoulders squared to the dark as if expecting it to come at him.
Selena settled deeper into the shadows and kept her eyes on the bus while the trees above shifted and whispered over her head, telling secrets she would never understand.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The bus had not moved.
That was the problem.
At first Selena had taken comfort in the stillness.A quiet camp could mean routine.Routine meant patterns.Things to be understood and picked apart.But by the time her watch crept toward two in the morning, the lack of movement had started to feel like mockery.
Five to two.
The glow of the numbers looked pale against the dark.She lowered her wrist and flexed her fingers inside her coat pocket.Cold had worked its way in a while ago.Steady enough to settle in her joints and make every shift of her weight feel slightly older than it should.
From the cover of the trees, she kept her eyes on the fairgrounds.
Most of the crowd had gone home hours earlier.The tent still stood in a pool of generator light, white canvas gone dull and gray now that the revival energy had burned off.The bus sat beyond it, windows dark.Leon had smoked two cigarettes and traded places once with the other security man.Marlene had stepped off the bus around midnight to empty something into a trash barrel, then gone back in.Since then, almost nothing.
No furtive meetings.No shadow slipping from the bus and into the dark.No late-night visitor moving with guilty purpose.
Only the low drone of the generator, the distant flapping of canvas in the breeze, and the low complaint of branches above her head.
Another gust moved through the copse.Wood rubbed wood with a slow, dry creak.
Selena tucked her chin deeper into her collar.
Three years earlier, she had spent sixteen hours at a dock in Boston waiting for a man who trafficked guns through seafood shipments.Rain that day had been worse than this cold.Wind off the water had cut through every layer she wore.By hour twelve her knees had started barking every time she shifted position.By hour sixteen she had still been standing when the target stepped onto the pier, smug and unsuspecting, and she had taken him down with saltwater in her shoes and a cramp in one calf.
That was the work.Endure.Wait.Persist longer than the other person expected any sane human being to wait.
Stubbornness would only get a person so far, though.
Forty did not feel old to her.Not really.Forty felt capable.Focused.Better in many important ways than twenty-five.Yet the edges had started to show in places she could no longer pretend not to notice.Long flights hit harder.Cold settled quicker.Bad motel mattresses announced themselves for a full day afterward.None of it changed the job.None of it changed what she could do.It only changed the price.
Headlights appeared in the distance.
Selena stilled.
The beams slid along the road beyond the fairgrounds, pale and brief through the trees, keeping its distance.She narrowed her eyes, trying to get the shape of the vehicle, but the angle was wrong and the darkness swallowed detail.A sedan maybe.Maybe not.The lights slowed, then broke away onto a side road she had barely noticed earlier, one that curved off behind a line of brush and vanished.
No approach to the bus.No sign of anyone turning into the main lot.
She kept watching until the lights disappeared completely.
A few minutes passed.
The cold found her again.
Far off, something metallic clanged once, then settled.Selena looked from the bus to the tent and back again.No movement.One of the security men had gone inside the bus.The other remained posted outside, arms folded, a heavy shape under the floodlight.
Then came footsteps.
Not from the fairgrounds.
