Without Mercy Read Online Free

souped-up car—or shooting giant guns, or acting supermacho—to compensate for a sense of manly inadequacy. Mind you,” she added, “I doubt that Waylon actually suffers from SPS.”
    â€œ Stop ,” I said, my face scrunching into an involuntary grimace. “I’m sorry I asked.” If I hadn’t been driving, I’d have put my hands over my ears. “I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.”
    â€œWe’re anthropologists,” she said matter-of-factly. “We study humans—their civilizations, their rites, their rituals, their behaviors.”
    â€œCultural anthropologists study that stuff. We’re physical anthropologists, remember?”
    â€œWe were also talking about physical attributes,” she said, way too cheerfully.
    â€œYou were, not me,” I pointed out. “ Were . Past tense. End of discussion.”
    â€œNo problem,” she said. “Didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. Or . . . insecure.” She snickered as soon she said the last word.
    â€œHa ha. Very funny, Miss Smarty-Pants. You should do stand-up comedy, after your dissertation gets blown out of the water.”
    â€œNot gonna happen,” she said. “Did I mention that harsh grading is a surefire sign of SPS?” She was grinning now, I noticed out of the corner of my eye. She was a smarty-pants, and she was funny, and she did know how to bait me, no doubt about it. Mercifully, she changed topics. “So what’s that pipe sticking up above the cab of the WaylonMobile? Not the two chrome ones—even I recognize those as exhaust pipes—but that weird black one, on the right?”
    I glanced at the truck’s roofline. “I think that’s a snorkel.”
    â€œA snorkel ? Like, for scuba diving?”
    â€œBasically, yeah,” I said. “So the truck can ford streams—hell, probably rivers and lakes, tall as that thing is—without the engine drowning.”
    â€œSo Waylon’s truck is also a submarine? Does it have a periscope, too?”
    I shrugged. “Knowing Waylon, I wouldn’t be surprised.”
    She was silent for a moment—I fervently hoped she wasn’t considering turning “periscope” into a bad joke—then she said, “You know how people and their dogs resemble each other?”
    â€œSure. My high school chemistry teacher, Miss Walpole? She had an English bulldog—short, fat, wrinkly, snuffly. Damned thing looked exactly like her, except for the strings of drool. Walked just like her, too.”
    â€œThat truck is Waylon on wheels. Almost like a vehicular reincarnation.”
    â€œDon’t you have to be dead to be reincarnated?”
    â€œCorrect as usual, Professor Pedant,” she said. “Okay, let me rephrase that. Waylon’s truck is like a vehicular, parallel-universe avatar of him. Is that better?”
    â€œMuch,” I said. I wasn’t quite sure what an “avatar” was, but given our previous conversation, I was too skittish to ask.
    We followed the French Broad past Del Rio, former site of the massive cockfighting arena, then continued along the river for another five miles or so. At that point, the asphalt and the water parted company, the road turning uphill away from the river. A few miles later, we turned off the highway and onto a woodsy gravel route marked Wolf Creek Road. It began promisingly enough, a lane and a half wide, but over the next few miles it gradually narrowed to a single lane, then became nothing but a pair of tracks, sometimes surfaced in gravel, sometimes in dirt, mostly in leaves. Trees crowded in from both sides and overhead, the branches slapping and clawing at Waylon’s supersized truck, whose massive cab and bulging rear-wheel fenders bulked it up to a full two feet wider and at least a foot higher than the UT pickup Miranda and I were in. But if Waylon was bothered by the damage to his