Ta-Daaah!!

Hey, Look at this!  It's the first time I've exposed my work to public view.  That means No Reservation is for sale as an ebook on Amazon.  You can put it on your Kindle or just download it to your PC.  There's a chapter from it down below, in which the heroine gets her revenge against the Mad Scientist when he kidnaps her.  Then Coyote comes along to show who's really in charge. 

I think it's a great cover.  It's the work of Olivia Hamilton-Montgomery, who runs about a jillion websites and writes how-to books.  She makes things for me because she's my daughter.  I dedicated the book to her.

So in confirmation that this is a good book to read or buy on Amazon, here's one chapter.  It comes somewhere in the middle. 

P.S.:  I fell in love with northern Arizona when I took the kids to see the Grand Canyon.  When they grew up, I moved there.  The place is all kinds of magical.  

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No Reservation
by
Margaret Raymond

twenty-seven 

The Winslow cop shop had an asphalted parking lot at its side that blended to dirt at its margins.  It heaved clouds of dust as she rounded the little building and parked.  The air was so still that the dust clouds had only lowered to ankle height when she emerged later.  She had asked the officer at the desk her questions and been handed off to the Officer of the Day.  The O.D. had referred her to the Deputy Sheriff in charge, then had begun murmuring into his telephone and following her with his eyes before she even got to the deputy's station.  She hadn't learned a thing new about Dr. E. James Bayer, his brother, or his son beyond the fact that there was "the Bayer spread" across the highway.  The deputy was sorry and took a long time to say so, but the O.D. was soon off the phone.

So the law was shielding both Bayer and Sean.  She understood local enforcement protecting the interests of a rancher’s large spread.  But why Sean?  Were he and Bayer...no; Sean loathed the little chemist's work.  But was Sean really...  Head down, thinking hard, she headed for her car and decided she must call in Dustin and his contacts after all-slash-again.

Arms strong as a giant’s grabbed her from behind.  Before she could yell, before her outraged feet could kick or her writhing body could bite or scratch, the arms threw her headlong over the folded passenger seat of a Volvo coupe and into the back of the car.  Her throat hit the lowered arm rest of the back seat and suffocating pain dazed her; her right hip and ankle ground against the hinge of the front seat.  Her wrists were jerked behind her from above and tied with something silky.  Her legs were folded into the car and the door was slammed.  The car moved.  Whoever got her hadn't made a sound, but he stank like dead flowers.

She was kneeling on the carpeted floor and staring at caramel-colored leather seats, being thrown from side to side as the car sped around corners.  The bindings on her wrists bit hard. 

She was not frightened, and didn't wonder why.  She howled.  It was a true howl that came from deep in her throat and scraped hard as it escaped, and it was satisfying.  She decided to do it again.  The second howl came out just as hard and felt just as good, long and loud and feral and blood-curdling. 

"Shut up!  Just shut yoah mouf!"

Her animal eyes flew wide open.  She pivoted and stared between the front seats.  Bayer was hunched wild-eyed over the steering wheel.

"Bastard!" 

"Get back down!  Oah..."  He flailed at her between and over the seats as he drove.  Naomi shoved herself onto the back seat and squirmed into the corner behind him so his fists couldn't reach her. 

The road rose to cross a little bridge and flattened.  The tires whisked on sandy bedrock; she strained to see.  Ahead were streaked mounds of the Painted Desert, gray and yellow, a backdrop to arid desolation. 

"Or what?" she asked, "Fool!  That deputy is expecting me right back!"

"No, he's not!  Sahjunt Cwisp told me...!"  He flailed at her again.  The rear-view mirror reflected his face. 

Apart from his eyepatch, Bayer was the same; young, unlined, dewy-fleshed.  He glared from her to the road and back.  "...You destwoyed my wife, Naomi Bessemew!  Fiwst my chemical, and then you poked out my eye just like an animoh.  You wuined my mawwaige and my career.  You took evewything pweshus to me!"  Something occurred to him so wonderful that he tittered.  "Now it's yoah tuhn." 

That thing, feral and potent and flaming with hate, had risen from her bowels and set fire to her veins.  It felt good.  It felt as good as her howl.  She squirmed back on the floor until she faced front.  Level-voiced she said, “Your wife left because your balls couldn't even measure up to another woman’s!"

The car screeched to a stop and slewed.  Red-faced, Bayer spun around to hit her.  Naomi dodged forward against the passenger seat.  The catch gave, the seat folded, and her weight carried her under his blow.  It would have been a terrific one; it brought Bayer sidewise and on top of her.  He grabbed her hair, scrambled to his knees on his seat, and yanked her backward with all his weight.  She screamed.

The scream completed Naomi's animal transformation.  Her knees rested on the rear of the front seat, tucked and trapped under the half-folded seat back.  Bayer's grip in her hair had her arched backward.  The pain in her wrists became nothing; the pain in her back and head threatened to knock her out.  And with Bayer bent on breaking her spine she stilled and collected herself.

"Take me," she gasped.

Bayer paused. 

"Go ahead!  Fuck me.  Fuck me blind.  Now."

Confusion, then speculation dawned in Bayer's yellow eyes. 

It was all the break Naomi needed.  She roared.  Ignoring the torment in her spine she heaved backward, pulling him off balance.  She butted him.  The second time she did it, his nose crunched and his teeth split his lips.  She scrambled and butted and roared, pursued his pulpy face with her blood-spattered head.  The whole world was a roar and the smell, the taste, of blood. 

When she came to herself she was kneeling on him with her chest inside his flailing arms, her rear wedged against the steering wheel and her knees straddling him.  He had no face.  She burst the door open and they fell sidewise to the sand, Naomi underneath.  He reared as though to butt her in return.  Her kicking boot found his kneecap, then as he writhed sideways, his crotch.  He scrambled away wide-legged as a spider.  She leapt up raging and howling, always off-balance, kicking and stomping whatever part of him she found; his side, his arm and hand, his head. 

Coyote intervened.  He came streaking and foam-mouthed, rabid.  Bayer balled himself and folded his arms over his face.  Yellow-tan, small and slavering, the coyote slashed at the back of the man's neck.  It caught shoulder padding.  Bayer screamed.  The coyote whirled and slashed again.  Except for its foaming mouth, it was almost playful; its tail was up, its ears forward like an eager pup's.  Bayer, hurt and by now entirely mad, froze.  The coyote's third quick pass took more Harris tweed and left a track of slime.  Its fourth nipped directly into Bayer's shoulder muscle. 

Naomi squatted and stepped onto the tail of her bindings, watching.  Yanking, toppling, she struggled and the ties brought blood from her wrists, but she would lose a hand rather than remain tied.  So while the rabid coyote savaged Bayer’s arm, Naomi strained and willed her binding to rip.  And after minutes, it did.  She charged the coyote.  It stopped; she stopped; she stamped the ground.  "Git!"  It took a step closer.  She stomped closer still.  Blood dripped from her wrist and tickled the heel of her hand.  Watching the coyote with one shoulder hunched against it, she lifted her hand to lick her wound.  The coyote stepped nearer.  Naomi roared and charged.  The coyote hesitated, then dodged, paused and stumbled away across the desert floor.  Naomi watched until distance made him small. 

She prodded Bayer with her toe.  He was curled onto his side, his arms still over his head.  He watched her through torn eyelids. 

"Stand up now," she told him.  She waited.  After a while she pulled his arm upward.  There was neither resistance nor cooperation; the arm stayed up.  "Stand up," she repeated, and pulled again.  He rose.  Naomi opened the car door and folded the driver's seat forward.  "Get in."  Then, "Sit down." 

She fastened the seat belt across his lap.  "Can't take it, can you, Jimmy?  You've gone clean cataleptic."  Blood seeped over his chin and collar.  More came through the tear in his jacket.  He oozed sidewise until he was curled onto the seat.  The over-refined mind was gone to a kinder world. 

She drove the half-mile across the bridge and into Winslow, wiping blood from her face.  By the time she found the hospital, her wrists were licked clean and healed.  She parked Bayer's car at the emergency entrance, pinned a note to him saying "RABID", wedged the horn so it blared, and trotted to her own car at the sheriff's station.  At the Dairy Queen she had a chili dog and orange soda.  She felt no pain, and no remorse. 

But as she drove toward Flagstaff she stopped at Two Guns and poured tepid espresso from her thermos.  Heat pressing through the closed windows overcame the air conditioning.  Sweat dripped from her earlobes onto her shirt. 

The stench took her by surprise after all.  A coyote stepped from behind the billboard and ignoring her yells and the blare of her horn marked her front tires, then went to the back and marked there too, nonchalant, pissing, and finally crossing the highway to disappeared between bunch grass.  It left a trail of incandescence about a foot from the ground.