Big Driver Read Online Free PDF Page A

at the mouth of the culvert made it more powerful. In a suspense novel, this would be the moment of false relaxation before the big climax. Or in a scary movie. The white hand emerging from the lake in Deliverance . Alan Arkin springing out at Audrey Hepburn in Wait Until Dark . She didn’t like scary books and movies, but being raped and almost murdered seemed to have unlocked a whole vault of scary-movie memories, all the same. As if they were just there, in the air.
    He could be waiting. If, for instance, he’d had an accomplice drive his truck away. He could be squatting on his hunkers beyond the mouth of the pipe in that patient way country men had.
    â€œGet those panties down,” she whispered, then covered her mouth. What if he heard her?
    Five minutes passed. It might have been five. The water was cold and she began to shiver. Soon her teeth would begin to chatter. If he was out there, he would hear.
    He drove away. You heard him.
    Maybe. Maybe not.
    And maybe she didn’t need to leave the pipe theway she’d gone in. It was a culvert, it would go all the way under the road, and since she could feel water running under her, it wasn’t blocked. She could crawl the length of it and look out into the deserted store’s parking lot. Make sure his old truck was gone. She still wouldn’t be safe if there was an accomplice, but Tess felt sure, deep down where her rational mind had gone to hide, that there was no accomplice. An accomplice would have insisted on taking his turn at her. Besides, giants worked alone.
    And if he is gone? What then?
    She didn’t know. She couldn’t imagine her life after her afternoon in the deserted store and her evening in the pipe with rotting leaves smooshed up into the hollow of her back, but maybe she didn’t have to. Maybe she could concentrate on getting home to Fritzy and feeding him a packet of Fancy Feast. She could see the Fancy Feast box very clearly. It was sitting on a shelf in her peaceful pantry.
    She turned over on her belly and started to get up on her elbows, meaning to crawl the length of the pipe. Then she saw what was sharing the culvert with her. One of the corpses was not much more than a skeleton (stretching out bony hands as if in supplication), but there was still enough hair left on its head to make Tess all but certain it was the corpse of a woman. The other might have been a badly defaced department store mannequin, except for the bulging eyes and protruding tongue. This body was fresher, but the animals had been atit and even in the dark Tess could see the grin of the dead woman’s teeth.
    A beetle came lumbering out of the mannequin’s hair and trundled down the bridge of her nose.
    Screaming hoarsely, Tess backed out of the culvert and bolted to her feet, her clothes soaked to her body from the waist up. She was naked from the waist down. And although she did not pass out (at least she didn’t think she did), for a little while her consciousness was a queerly broken thing. Looking back on it, she would think of the next hour as a darkened stage lit by occasional spotlights. Every now and then a battered woman with a broken nose and blood on her thighs would walk into one of these spotlights. Then she would disappear back into darkness again.

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    She was walking behind the store in the moonlight. She had a carpet remnant wrapped around her shivering shoulders, but couldn’t remember where she had gotten it. It was filthy but it was warm, and she pulled it tighter. It came to her that she was actually circling the store, and this might be her second, third, or even fourth go-round. It came to her that she was looking for her Expedition, but each time she didn’t find it behind the store, she forgot that she had looked and went around again. She forgot because she had been thumped on the head and raped and choked and was in shock. It came to her that her brain might be bleeding—how could you