Bad Men (2003) by John Connolly Page A

at least he would have been able to figure out where he was in relative silence. Instead—
    “Do you know where we’re at yet?” said Veronica, and there was that bored, whining tone to her voice that just seemed to burrow into Harry’s skull from somewhere right above the bridge of his nose and then keep going until it hit the center of his brain and began picking idly at whatever it found there.
    Well, there it was. Harry wasn’t alone. He had Veronica Berg with him, and while Veronica was pretty much all that a man could wish for in the sack, and a whole lot more (Harry was not an unimaginative man, but the things that Veronica was prepared to do once her back hit the sheets came close to frightening him at times), she could be a righteous pain in the ass outside the bedroom. She sat in the passenger seat, her shades on, an elbow propped up on the open window, a cigarette dangling from her fingers sending hopeless smoke signals up into the winter sky.
    And that was another thing: it was unseasonably warm. Hell, it was January, and January had no business being hot. Harry Rylance was from Burlington, Vermont, and in Burlington, Vermont, January meant skiing and freezing your ass off and shoveling out the driveway. If you were sweating in January in Vermont, then you were indoors and the heat was up too high. The south was no place for a man to be in January, or any other time, if you asked Harry. Harry didn’t do Dixie. He gave up looking at the blue-veined map of the United States in his Rand McNally road atlas, resigned to the fact that his attempt to exchange the trees for the forest had left him no wiser than before, and returned his attention to the local map. Harry wasn’t a great reader of maps, a fact that he tended to keep to himself. A man who admitted publicly that he couldn’t read a map might as well start riding sidesaddle and listening to show tunes. Harry wondered if it was some kind of condition he had, like dyslexia. He just couldn’t connect the map, with its tracery of blues and reds and its smears of green, to the landscape that he saw around him. It was like showing him the interior of a body, all veins and arteries and bloody meat, and asking him if he could tell who it was yet.
    “I said—” Veronica began again.
    Harry felt the pressure building in the center of his forehead. Her voice was drilling away nicely now. If she kept this up, his head would cave in.
    “I heard you. If I knew where we were, we’d be someplace else.”
    “The hell is that supposed to mean?”
    “It means that if you’d give me a damn minute’s peace, then maybe I could figure out where we are and get us where we’re meant to be instead.”
    “You should have stayed on the highway.”
    “I came off the highway because you said you were bored. You wanted to see some scenery.”
    “There is no scenery.”
    “Well, welcome to the south. The Civil War was the best thing that ever happened to this place. At least it brought in some visitors.”
    “You shouldn’t have listened to me.”
    “You didn’t give me much choice.”
    “Don’t take that tone with me.”
    “Hey, I already got a wife back home. I don’t need another one.”
    “Fuck you, Harry.”
    And he could hear the hurt in her voice and knew that he’d have to worm his way back into her affections if he had any hope of expanding his sexual horizons in the company of Veronica Berg. The annual convention of the Insurance Providers of America wasn’t likely to be so riveting that Harry would want to spend the entire weekend sitting in the middle of a bunch of seersuckers, nursing a hard-on. He reached in through the car window and touched her moist skin lightly with the palm of his hand. She pulled her face away from him, sending him a clear signal: if she wasn’t going to let him touch her face with his hand, then there was a pretty good chance that the rest of her skin would remain a covered mystery to him as well unless he started making