Page 24 of Hero on the Road
More fool, I.
Connor waved his phone at me. “I had Danny email it to me, so I do. The next town is even smaller than this one. Like, Arberry-sized. So we’d better stock up on everything we need here, while we can.”
I nodded. “So Walmart it is. And then we’re bunking down in the Mystery Mobile.”
“Pretty sure it was called Mystery Van,” he noted.
“Mystery Mobile sounds better.”
He laughed and ushered me into the passenger seat—which was, surprisingly, made out of leather rather than vinyl—and then hustled over to the driver’s seat. “Walmart, here we come. Hope you’re ready for Connor and Olivia’s Mystery Tour.”
I laughed at that. We’d started without a real name for the tour. Too small, I’d guessed, for Atomic to bother naming it.
And now, it seemed, we had our name. Mystery, indeed.
In every way possible.
* * *
I had to admit, I had doubts about the next step in our plan. According to Connor the next town—Cascade—consisted of a main street and some spokes, with one bar and one theater, where we were going to be playing. He’d thought we couldn’t count on them having any big box stores and from what he told me, he was right.
The placedidsound like Arberry.
But that left us shopping at Walmart in Great Falls in the middle of the night, and with nowhere to go afterward. So when we walked through the sliding doors and into the fluorescent lighting of the store, with no plans to leave any time soon, I was feeling distinctly...
Well, like we were going to be loitering there for as long as we could manage.
Which wasn’t far from the truth.
“So we’re going to get some clothes, get some sleeping bags, and some food, and then...”
“Hang out?” I asked, giving him a sidelong glance. “Just walk the aisles browsing?”
He shrugged, looking more than a little bit bashful. “Until we get tired enough to go find someplace to park and get some sleep.”
I wanted to laugh at how ridiculous that sounded. I also sort of wanted to cry. “This is definitely not how I expected my first real tour to go.”
He nudged my shoulder with his elbow. “Hey, it’s the Mystery Tour. You never know what you’re going to find out there on the road.”
“Finding a hotel with clean sheets and fluffy pillows would be nice. Also a credit card with unlimited credit.”
He just chuckled, grabbed a basket, and gestured for me to follow him.
We went through the sporting goods section first, grabbing the best sleeping bags we could find—his blue and mine red—and then made our way to the home goods for pillows and extra blankets.
“Food next?” he asked.
“Obviously not. Food last. If we’re getting cold stuff or warm stuff, we won’t want it melting before we get it to... Oh, we should get an ice chest,” I added, starting to actually think ahead. If we were lucky enough to get already-cooked food and wanted to keep it, and if we wanted to keep drinks or anything else cold, we needed a way to do it.
One could not survive on bags of chips alone. And now that my brain was coming around to the idea that we were going to be on the road, I was beginning to see how this was going to have to go. Starting with Connor not being in charge of the food. He probably lived on licorice and beef jerky at home.
I would not be living on things like that.
Seconds later we were back in the camping section finding the cheapest cooler we could get and making sure we had the biggest size. The van was lacking in a lot of things—God only knew if it had a heater or a/c that worked—but there was a lot of room in the back, so we’d have space for things like sleeping bags and coolers.
“And bodies,” Connor said when I told him about all the space.
I tipped my head at him. “Are you planning on transporting bodies? Because I might have a problem with that.”
