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Cora glanced again towards the small hotel she’d found on her phone. She didn’t know where to go from here. A bunch of others were dead. This one somehow still alive.
Cora shook her head. “Look, I don’t know what to tell you...”
“I don’t believe you.”
Cora trailed off. “Excuse me?”
“When you say you’d be scared too.” The woman twisted at her sleeve. Her eyes were downcast. “You didn’t look scared. When you chained him to the wall, you didn’t seem to care.”
Cora paused. “You know not to go back there, right? Whatever you’re thinking—don’t go back.”
“No! No, that’s not what I meant.”
Cora nodded slowly. “So what?”
“So—I just. I don’t think you’d be scared.”
Cora snorted. “I’ve been scared plenty. Look, here...I’ll write down my number, okay? People like us...we gotta stick together.”
Cora thought of that image in her mind. A boat on dark waters, waves rising all around her. In that image, she’d always considered herself a lone traveler. She wasn’t sure what to make of it...inviting a second passenger. Or perhaps just someone in her flotilla. A couple of small, dinky boats in the same dark.
She shook her head. She was starting to be sentimental. This was her mother’s influence rubbing off on her. Maybe the kind-eyed prostitute’s murmured prayers had simply reminded Cora of her own mother.
She couldn’t be sure. Giving her number to a stranger who’d seen her chain a man to his own wall was the same as leaving a trail of evidence. It wasn’t the most advisable thing.
Then again...It wasn’t like Cora was doing any of this by referencing a manual.
So, she quickly snatched a small pen from the front dashboard, glanced around the car for a moment, but went still as the woman extended the back of her right hand. Her palm was trembling but went still as she rested it on Cora’s knee, nodding.
“Thanks,” Cora muttered, then quickly wrote the number for her phone. “I’ll give you a promise, okay?”
The woman looked up.
Cora wasn’t even surewhyshe was saying any of it. But it felt like the right thing to do at the time. “Rose, just—”
“Rain.”
“Sorry, what?”
“My name is Rain.”
“Yeah...Yeah that’s what I said. Rain, I give you my word. If you call this number, and you are in arealbind. And I mean arealbind, okay? I’ll show up. I’ll drop whatever I’m doing, and I’ll show up. Sound good?”
Rain stared at the number, nodding slowly. There was an intelligence in her eyes as she studied the number, and Cora wondered if the woman even needed it written down. But then Rain inhaled shakily, clutched the plastic debit card, and flashed a sweet, dimpled smile. “Thank you,” she whispered. “What should I call you, again?”
Cora sighed. First a number, then a name? “You can call me Cora.”
Rain smiled and then with a final shaky nod, and an inhalation, she pushed out of the taxicab. She paused as if wanting to thank the driver, but as she turned to address him, her fingers started trembling horribly. She clutched her hand tightly, frowned down at the number, closed her eyes, and then moved quickly towards the hotel’s front doors, no longer looking back.
Cora waited for her to disappear completely, before leaning back in the taxi’s seat. “Hey—I got another stop!” she called out the open front door.
***
Cora’s phone kept buzzing, and it jarred her awake.
She jerked up, blinking sleep from her eyes, and frowning towards the front seat. “I thought I told you to keep going,” she snapped.
The driver scowled at her. He was eating a sandwich, which, by the look of things, he had purchased from a nearby kiosk. They were settled in a small parking lot near a beachside boulevard. The scent of reheated caramel and old hotdogs wafted through the window, along with the background sound of whirring bicycle wheels and the calls of sandy frisbee players in the surf.
