The sky was beginning to darken, so he stopped to poke around in her bag. There might be something useful for when he reached that town she'd mentioned. There was a hand-written note -- a list of names, including his.
"Son of a b*tch," he breathed. "She wasn't out sightseeing. She'd come looking for me. But why?"
And then he found it: an old picture. His. It was clipped to a news story about the soured deal that had lost him his plum job, the incident that had landed him in Lingman in the first place.
He stood beside the bike, lost in thought. He glanced back towards Lingman, and the hill where he'd stranded Ellie, and then ahead, to whatever fate she was bringing him to.
"No," he told himself. "She wasn't planning on taking me anywhere. She said that engine of hers was only good for one person. But then...?"
He reached into the bag and pulled everything out, scattering debris across the pavement, until he reached the bottom. There was just one thing left in her bag, and it told him everything he needed to know about why she'd come. It was a gun, the sort of "Saturday night special' the government had long outlawed, the kind that Los Angeles was famous for.
She'd come to kill him.
He pulled the pistol out and stared at it. The means. She'd brought him the means to do what he'd been struggling with for days now. He'd been praying for the courage to take his life, but hadn't thought much about the means. Now that he had it, though, he was more of a mind to use it on someone else.
Except that now, there wasn't much of a point. With the economy dead, what was there to be gained?
"Well," he told the darkening sky, "I guess this is as good a place as any."
But on closer examination, he realized there was still a problem. She had the ammo.
THE END
Copyright 2008 by P. Orin Zack
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