His Bible was well-thumbed, because he read it every day. He loved all the stories in it, but the one he loved the best — the one he meditated on most often — was the parable of the Good Samaritan. He had preached on that passage from the Gospel of Luke several times, and the Redeemer congregation had always been generous with their praise afterward, God bless them.
Doug supposed it was because the story was so personal to him. A priest had passed by the robbed and beaten traveler lying at the side of the road; so had a Levite. Then who comes along? A nasty, Jew-hating Samaritan. But that’s the one who helps, nasty Jew-hater or not. He cleanses the traveler’s cuts and scrapes, then binds them up. He loads the traveler on his donkey, and fronts him a room at the nearest inn.
“So which of these three do you think was a neighbor to him who fell among thieves?” Jesus inquires of the hotshot young lawyer who asked him about the requirements for eternal life. And the hotshot, clearly not stupid, replies: “The one who shewed mercy.”
If Doug Clayton had a horror of anything, it was of being like the Levite in that story. Of refusing to help when help was needed. Of passing by on the other side. So when he saw the muddy station wagon parked a little way up the entrance ramp of the deserted rest area — the downed orange barrier-barrels in front of it, the driver’s door hanging ajar — he hesitated only a moment before flicking on his turn signal and pulling in.
He parked behind the wagon, put on his four-ways, and started to get out. Then he noticed that there appeared to be no license plate on the back of the station wagon. although there was so much damn mud it was hard to tell for sure. Doug took his cell phone out of the Prius’s center console and made sure it was on. Being a good Samaritan was one thing; approaching a plateless dog of a car without caution was just plain stupid.
He walked toward the wagon with the phone clasped loosely in his left hand. Nope, no plate, he was right about that. He tried to peer through the back window and could see nothing. Too much mud. He walked toward the driver’s side door, then paused, looking at the car as a whole, frowning. Was it a Ford or a Chevy? Darned if he could tell, and that was strange, because he had to’ve insured thousands of station wagons in his career.
Customized? he asked himself. Well, maybe. but who would bother to customize a station wagon into something so anonymous?
“Hi, hello? Everything okay?”
He walked toward the door, squeezing the phone a little tighter without being aware of it. He found himself thinking of some movie that had scared heck out of him as a kid, some haunted house thing. A bunch of teenagers had approached the old deserted house, and when one of them saw the door standing ajar, he’d whispered “Look, it’s open!” to his buddies. You wanted to tell them not to go in there, but of course they had.
That’s stupid. If there’s someone in that car, he could be hurt.
Of course the guy might have gone up to the restaurant, maybe looking for a pay phone, but if he was really hurt —
“Hello?”
Doug reached for the door handle, then thought better of it and stooped to peer through the opening. What he saw was dismaying. The bench seat was covered with mud; so were the dashboard and the steering wheel. Dark goo dripped from the old-fashioned knobs of the radio, and on the wheel were prints that didn’t look exactly as if hands had made them. The palm prints were awfully big, for one thing, but the finger marks were as narrow as pencils.
“Is someone in there?” He shifted his cell phone to his right hand and took hold of the driver’s door with his left, meaning to swing it wide so he could look into the backseat. “Is someone hur—”
There was a moment to register an ungodly stink, and then his left hand exploded into pain so great it seemed to leap through his entire body, trailing fire and filling all his hollow spaces with agony. Doug didn’t, couldn’t, scream. His throat locked shut with the sudden shock of it. He looked down and saw that the door handle appeared to have impaled the pad of his palm.