Strange Highways

"Remington too. My dad's partial to the brand. Twelve-gauge. Pretty walnut stock, isn't it? I didn't ask you what everyone else says. What do you think? Is he any good as a novelist - in this future of yours?"
     "He's successful."
     "So what. Doesn't necessarily mean he's good."
     "He's won a lot of awards, and I've always pretended to think he's good. But ... I've really never felt he was much good at all."
     Crouching, pulling open a drawer in the bottom of the cabinet, quickly pawing through the contents, she said, "So tonight you take your future back - and you will be good."
     In one corner stood a gray metal box the size of a briefcase. It was ticking.
     "What's that thing in the corner?" Joey asked.
     "It monitors carbon monoxide and other toxic gases seeping up from the mine fires. There's one in the basement. This room isn't over the basement, it's an add-on, so it has a monitor of its own."
     "An alarm goes off?"
     "Yeah, if there's too many fumes." In the drawer she found two boxes of ammunition. She put them on the desk. "Every house in Coal Valley was equipped with them years ago."
     "It's like living on a bomb."
     "Yeah. But with a long, slow fuse."
     "Why haven't you moved out?"
     "Bureaucrats. Paperwork. Processing delays. If you move out before the government has the papers ready to sign, then they declare the house abandoned, a public danger, and they aren't willing to pay as much for it. You have to live here, take the risk, let it happen at their pace if you want to get a halfway fair price."
     Opening one of the boxes of shells as Celeste opened the other, Joey said, "You know how to use these guns?"
     "I've been going skeet-shooting and hunting with my dad since I was thirteen."
     "You don't seem like a hunter to me," he said as he loaded the 20-gauge.
     "Never killed anything. Always aim to miss."
     "Your dad never noticed that?"
     "Funny thing is - whether it's shotguns or rifles, whether it's small game or deer, he always aims to miss too. Though he doesn't think I know it."
     "Then what's the point?"
     As she finished loading the 12-gauge, she smiled with affection at the thought of her father. "He likes just being in the woods, walking in the woods on a crisp morning, the clean smell of the pines - and having some private time with me. He's never said, but I've always sensed he would've liked a son. Mom had complications with me, couldn't carry another baby. So I've always tried to give Dad a little of the son stuff. He thinks I'm a real tomboy."
     "You're amazing," he said.
     Hastily dropping spare shells into the various pockets of her black raincoat, she said, "I'm only what I'm here to be."
     The strangeness of that statement harked back to other enigmatic things that she had said earlier in the night. He met her eyes, and once again he saw those mysterious depths, which seemed too profound for her years, too deep to be plumbed. She was the most interesting girl that he had ever known, and he hoped that she saw something appealing in his eyes.
     As Joey finished stuffing spare shells into the pockets of his sheepskin-lined denim jacket, Celeste said, "Do you think Beverly is the first?"
     "The first?"
     "That he's ever killed."
     "I hope so ... but I don't know."
     "I think there've been others," she said solemnly.
     " After that night, after Beverly, when I let him go ... I know there must've been others. That's why he was a gypsy. Poet of the highway, my ass. He liked the life of a drifter 'cause he could keep moving through one police jurisdiction after another. Hell, I never realized it before, didn't want to realize it, but it's the classic sociopathic pattern
the loner on the road, the outsider, a stranger everywhere he goes, the next thing to invisible. Easier for a man like that to get caught if the bodies keep piling up in the same place. P.J.'s brilliance was to make a profession out of drifting, to become rich and famous for it, to have the unstructured lifestyle of a rootless serial killer but with the perfect cover - a respectable occupation that all but required rootlessness, and a reputation for writing uplifting stories about love and courage and compassion."
     "But all that's in the future, as far as I'm concerned," Celeste