Hot Pink Highway

Roxie glanced over her shoulder. The highway remained empty. “I’m not here to rob you.”

“That’s what she said.”

His voice was dry and low. Roxie set her helmet on the nearest table. “Who?”

The man looked at her face, then at the helmet, then back again.

“Ruby.”

The name landed oddly, as if it had been spoken in the room many times before.

Roxie walked to the counter. Her boots made small, sharp sounds against the warped floorboards. “Well, Ruby isn’t here.”

“No.” He placed the glass beneath the bar. “She isn’t.”

“I’ll have bourbon. Whatever’s cheapest.”

His hand hovered over the bottles. “You look exactly like her.”

Roxie laughed once. She had learned, during the long and expensive collapse of her marriage, that laughter could close a door faster than anger. “That’s a strange thing to say to a customer.”

“It’s a strange thing to see.”

He poured bourbon into a short glass and slid it toward her. Roxie took a sip. It burned cleanly down her throat. The bartender continued watching her as though she might change shape under the jaundiced light.

“What did she look like?” Roxie asked.

“Like you.”

“That narrows it down.”

“Forty years ago, maybe I’d have said you were sisters.”

Roxie set down the glass. “I’m forty-four.”

“Ruby was twenty-five years younger than I am now when she disappeared.” He rubbed his thumb over a pale scar along his knuckle. “That would make her about your age.”

The fan clicked overhead. Outside, a truck thundered along the highway, its headlights sweeping across the window before vanishing.

Roxie reached for her bourbon again. “Disappeared how?”

The bartender’s expression tightened. “You said one drink.”

“I’m still on the first.”

“You’re looking for a motel.”

“I am.”

“There’s one twelve miles east. The sign says vacancy even when there isn’t. The owner sleeps with a shotgun.”

“Comforting.”

“It’s safer than staying here.”

That caught her attention. “Is this place dangerous?”

The old man glanced toward the dark window. “Not usually.”

Roxie followed his gaze. Beyond the glass, her motorcycle shone white beneath the failing neon. Its chrome caught the pink light and threw it back in thin, sharp flashes.

“What was Ruby doing here?”

“Drinking. Arguing. Waiting out a storm.” His fingers tightened around the bar rag. “Depends which part you want.”

“All of it.”

He gave her a look that was almost irritated. “You don’t know when to leave.”

“Recently divorced,” Roxie said. “I’m experimenting with poor decisions.”

For the first time, his mouth twitched.

“Ruby rode a black bike,” he said. “Beautiful machine. She came in every Thursday for three months. Never paid for more than two drinks. Never sat with her back to the door.”

“Smart woman.”

“She was trouble.”

“Those things often travel together.”

The bartender leaned closer. His eyes were pale and watery, but nothing about them seemed weak. “The night she vanished, the storm came in from the west. Lightning split the sky right over the highway. Ruby left through that door around midnight.”

“And?”

“Her motorcycle was found beside the road the next morning.”

“Was she on it?”

“No.”

“Was she hurt?”

“No blood. No footprints worth trusting. Just the bike, tipped on its side, and her helmet hanging from the handlebar.”

Roxie’s fingers went still around the glass.

The bartender looked at her as if waiting for the resemblance to become undeniable. “They searched the ditches. The fields. The creek bed. They dragged the old quarry pond. Nothing.”

“Twenty-five years ago,” Roxie said.

“Twenty-five years ago.”

“And nobody found her?”

“People found plenty of theories.” He turned away to stack glasses. “The rich family north of town. A jealous lover. A hitchhiker. A storm drain that ran all the way to Mexico, depending on who was drinking.”

“Which theory do you believe?”

He set down the last glass. “I believe Ruby walked out of here alive.”

The certainty in his voice disturbed her more than the story.

Roxie finished the bourbon. “Then why are you telling me this?”

“Because you came in wearing her face.”

She pushed the glass away. “I don’t wear anyone’s face.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Your left eyebrow lifts when you’re annoyed.”

Roxie felt it happen and hated him for noticing.

“Ruby did that too,” he said.

“Lots of women have eyebrows.”

“Not like yours.”

She slid off the stool. The floor tilted slightly beneath her, though she knew it was the bourbon and not the building. “Thank you for the drink. I’ll take my chances with the shotgun owner.”

The bartender did not move to stop her. That made leaving harder.

At the end of the bar, a narrow hallway disappeared toward the restrooms and what might have been a storeroom. Behind the bottles, old photographs covered a strip of wall in mismatched frames. Most showed fishing tournaments, dusty rodeos, men with sunburned faces. Roxie paused beside them.

A woman in a red leather jacket stood near the bar in one photograph, one boot braced on the rail of a black motorcycle. Her hair was dark, swept over one shoulder. Her mouth had the same slight, defiant curve Roxie had seen in her own reflection for forty-four years.

Roxie stepped closer.

The photograph was faded, but the woman’s eyes remained clear.

“Ruby,” the bartender said behind her.

Roxie reached toward the frame, then stopped before touching it. The woman was not merely similar. She had Roxie’s narrow chin, her high cheekbones, the tiny pale mark beside her right eye.

For one impossible second, Roxie saw herself standing in red leather instead of white silk, young instead of forty-four, waiting for someone who had failed to arrive.

“Where did you get this?” she asked.

“It was taken here.”

“When?”

“Summer of ’98.”

Roxie turned. “You said she disappeared twenty-five years ago.”

“Storm came in October.”

“Who took the picture?”

“Cole Mercer, I think.”

The name lodged between them.

“Who is Cole Mercer?”

The bartender’s gaze moved to the photograph. “The last man known to see Ruby alive.”

Roxie looked again at the woman in the frame. The cheap bourbon had left heat in her chest, but the rest of her had gone cold.

“Is he still around?”

“Sometimes.”

“Where?”

“You’re leaving.”

“I changed my mind.”

The old man’s face hardened. “That’s what Ruby did too.”

Roxie turned toward the door. Her helmet waited on the table, its black visor reflecting the pink neon. Outside, clouds had rolled over the stars. A low rumble moved across the plains.

She could leave. She had left better things for less compelling reasons. Her ex-husband’s penthouse. The lawyer’s careful warnings. The life arranged around her like a locked room. She had bought the motorcycle, packed two shirts and a lipstick case, and pointed west because no one had been able to tell her what came next.

Now a stranger had placed a missing woman’s face over hers.

Roxie picked up her helmet.

“You said her motorcycle was found,” she said. “Where?”

“By Mile Marker 117.”

“Which direction?”

“East.”

“And the motel?”

“East.”

The bartender’s eyes narrowed. “You’re not going to the motel.”

“I might.”

“You’re going to look for a road that isn’t there anymore.”

Roxie slipped the helmet over her arm. “Do you always make predictions about women who order bourbon?”

“Only the ones who resemble ghosts.”

She held his gaze. “What was Ruby’s last name?”

The old man went silent.

The building seemed to contract around them. The fan clicked once, twice. Rain began tapping against the front window, delicate at first, then harder.

“Ruby what?” Roxie asked.

He looked past her at the photograph. “Lane.”

The name struck with the force of a slammed door.

Roxie’s mother had been a Lane. Not a name she used often now, not after the divorce, not after years of being known as someone else’s wife. But it was printed on her birth certificate, stitched into every school record, buried in the bottom drawer of the house she had left behind.

Lane.

She set the helmet down again.

“My mother’s name was Lane,” Roxie said.

The bartender did not blink.

“Was?” he asked.

“She died six years ago.”

“Then Ruby was your mother’s - ”

“Don’t finish that.”

He raised both hands, palms out. “I didn’t say anything.”

“You were about to.”

“I was about to tell you Ruby had family once.”

“Where?”

He glanced toward the door. Rain streaked the glass, turning the neon sign into trembling pink smears.

“Ruby never talked about family,” he said. “Not after Cole came around.”

“Cole Mercer?”

“Don’t go looking for him tonight.”

“Why?”

“Because he’ll know why you’re here before you do.”

Roxie pulled her phone from her jacket. No service. The screen showed one thin bar, then none. She tried the motel anyway. The call failed before it rang.

The bartender watched her pocket the phone.

“You can sleep in the back room,” he said. “There’s a cot. Door locks from the inside.”

“That sounds less like hospitality than witness protection.”

“It’s dry.”

Lightning flashed beyond the window, bleaching the room white. In that instant, Ruby’s photograph appeared almost alive, her eyes fixed on Roxie with an accusation twenty-five years old.

Thunder followed, close enough to rattle the bottles.

Roxie walked back to the counter and placed both hands on its scarred wood. “Tell me everything you remember.”

The bartender studied her for a long moment. Then he reached beneath the bar and brought out a ring of keys.

“You’ll stay until morning?”

Roxie looked at the rain swallowing the highway, at her white motorcycle waiting under the broken neon, at the photograph of a woman with her face and her mother’s name.

“One night,” she said.

The bartender selected a brass key and set it beside her empty glass.

“That’s what Ruby said.”

Roxie closed her fingers around the key. It was cold enough to hurt.

Behind her, somewhere in the darkened hall, a floorboard creaked.

She turned sharply.

Nothing moved.

When she looked back, the bartender was no longer watching the door. He was watching her, and the old man’s expression had changed from recognition to fear.

End of chapter one. 15 more chapters in the full book.