NIGHT DRIVE

It had been a very bad night. The rain was blasting away and the wipers and lights were hardly worth the trouble. It had been a sudden rain, and I had failed to check the weather report. That had been stupid of me. It should have been a priority.

I was considering this bit of stupidity when I noticed the man.

He was little more than a blur in the night. He stood beside the road with his thumb extended, a sloppy leather hat washed down over his face. For some reason I had a gut urge against it, but I had picked up hitchhikers in the past, and was not overly sensitive to the fears generally associated with them. Not me.

I pulled over just past him and braked. He would have a distance to run because I had hesitated a bit before stopping. I didn’t back up to make it easier for him. I sat and half reconsidered. There was something about this guy that bothered me. Perhaps it was just the surprise of seeing him out in this kind of rain, but then again it had been sudden. It had taken me by surprise, why not him. Nothing mysterious in that.

I put my arm over the backseat and looked through the rear glass. In the fuzzy, pink glow of the brakelights I could see that he was a huge man, made to look all the larger by the blurring effect of rain and light. Rain and light or not, he was larger than I was. If he meant harm...

I had considered too long. The deed was done. In one smooth motion the door was open and he was sliding wetly against the seat on the passenger’s side. Cold wind and rain blew in with him.

The overhead light, the brief instant that it glowed while the door was open, showed him to have a leathery, Indian-type face. Hawk nose, high cheek bones, a full but hard mouth. His age could have been thirty or fifty. He had that kind of face. The coat he wore was thick and ankle length, the wet blanket odor of it carried in with him. His leather hat drooped and dripped water.

Something about him made my skin crawl.

He shut the door. A car went by, tires whining, cast its lights across my Plymouth, winked on and away. The man said, "Thank you."

Simple enough, but I almost went through the roof of the Plymouth. The words were kind, but that voice...

I managed to reply kindly enough—some nonsense about where are you going, the usual chatter, and his answers were civil... but that voice.

Another car went by with its tires singing and threw water against my door with a sound like scuttling claws. I checked the rearview and pulled back onto the highway.

The man sat silent, hands in his pockets... perhaps he was plotting... waiting for the right moment.

Hell, I told myself, and gave that part of my brain that frightens so easily a few mental lashes. Look straight ahead and drive carefully, I thought. Don’t be silly.

But my gaze wandered often to the stranger, and on one of my peripheral glances I saw that he was staring at me.

Just sitting there like a big wooden doll with its head cranked my way. His hands were still buried deep in his pockets. I wondered what those pockets contained. A razor? A knife? A gun?

With as much calm as I could muster, I took my right hand from the wheel and rolled my fingers together in a manner that suggested that I was trying to shake cold or numbness from them. That didn’t keep my hand from trembling as I casually dipped it into my GI jacket, traced my fingers over the fine, bone handle of the razor I kept there.

Now! I told myself.

With one swift motion I brought the razor out, flicked it open as I leaned away from the wheel towards him. Its expertly honed edge caught his throat and passed through, deep. The man fell back against the door.

I closed up the razor and put it away, pulled the car over to the side of the road, got out and rushed around to the passenger’s side. I jerked the door open and drug him out on the roadside. His throat was a scarf of blood now.

I used his hat to clean a few drops of blood off the seat, then checked his pockets. No weapons. Christ! I was getting jumpy as of late. This damn weather.

I got his wallet out and picked the two dollars out of it and slung the wallet as far away into the blackness as I could. I got my camera out of the backseat floorboard and took a few flash shots of him for my collection and put it away. They probably wouldn’t be among my best pictures. I put the camera away and went around to climb in behind the wheel.

Laughing at myself, I started up the Plymouth. He hadn’t been a bit different than the others. A piece of cake. "To hell with your imagination," I said aloud and drove away from there trying to shake the chill of the rain.

© 1980 Joe R. Lansdale.
"Night Drive" was originally published in Skullduggery. It was later published in The Good, the Bad, and the Indifferent, a collection of Lansdale’s short stories published by Subterranean Press.