The Sunshine Slayer

The lesson cost forty-eight hours in a box too small to stand, and Marley Crenshaw hasn't forgotten a second of it.

She sits in the cab of her Gospel Express shuttle at the Flying J outside Atlanta, engine off, watching the lot through January twilight. Six months since Alabama. Six months since she woke in Samuel Tidwell's mobile prison and learned what it meant to underestimate your target. She still feels the phantom press of those walls when she sleeps—the darkness, the heat, the realization that she'd walked into a box built specifically for women like her.

Women who thought they were hunters.

Three kills. Three successes. Each one nearly killed her.

Better to watch too long than move too quick. Her mother's voice, quieter since the cage but never gone.

Marley lights a cigarette. Agrees without speaking. The arrogance that carried her through Hutchins and Thibodaux died in Alabama. What survived is patient. What survived knows that every target might be more dangerous than she expects.

The Gospel Express route is new—Atlanta to Tampa, serving the revival circuit. She requested the transfer in November, after the cage, after she could breathe again without feeling Tidwell's plywood against her spine. The job pays the same as her old routes, and the faithful need rides between tent services. Gospel Express specializes in the revival community—tent meetings, prayer gatherings, the whole constellation of temporary congregations that form and dissolve along the southern highways like thunderstorms.

Nobody questions the quiet shuttle driver who keeps to herself. Marley's been doing this work long enough to be furniture. Harmless. Forgettable. The mousy woman in the company windbreaker who shows up on time, drives safe, never complains about the extra miles or the late pickups when services run long.

It's perfect cover. Better than the general freight routes she worked before. The revival circuit gives her access to communities, populations, patterns. She can observe without being observed. Can listen to conversations about troubled souls and special prayers and women who find redemption through private counsel.

Can watch for wolves in shepherd's clothing.

She exhales smoke through the cracked window. Watches the lot.

Near the diesel pumps, a gathering takes shape. Unusual for this time of day—most lot lizards don't start working until full dark, and the truckers are still eating dinner in the plaza. But there's a man in a white suit standing beneath the island lights, and women are kneeling on concrete around him.

Eight of them. Marley recognizes a few faces from previous nights—the hard survivors who work this stretch of I-75, women whose eyes have learned to calculate distance and exits before a man finishes speaking.

The man in white has silver hair that catches the fluorescent glow like a television preacher. His voice carries across the lot, warm and practiced, the rhythm of someone who's delivered this performance a thousand times.

"…grace that waits for all who seek it. Redemption that asks only that you open your heart…"

The women's faces show different things. Some genuine hope, desperate and fragile. Some professional assessment—weighing whether this performance pays better than the truck cabs. Some exhaustion so deep that even free salvation seems like too much work.

Marley watches his eyes. They scan constantly, measuring, cataloging. He identifies the vulnerable the way she identifies exits. The girl in the third position, maybe nineteen, with track marks visible on her forearms. The woman by the pump, older but broken in ways makeup can't hide. The runaway near the edge, ready to bolt but wanting to believe.

The prayer ends. The women stand, brushing grit from their knees.

Two of them stay. Follow the silver-haired man toward a white conversion van parked at the lot's edge. A cross is painted on the side panel, crude but deliberate.

The others disperse. Some toward their usual corners. Some toward the diner. Some simply gone, vanished into the truck rows like smoke.

Marley stamps out her cigarette. Waits.

The two women are climbing into the van when Marley crosses the lot. She's off-shift, just killing time before heading home, and a smoke break near the fuel islands is normal enough. Two lot lizards linger in the shadows—the ones who didn't follow. The hard-faced woman who's been working this truck stop longer than Marley's been driving. The one with track marks who laughed when the silver-haired man spoke of grace.

Marley lights another cigarette. Nods to them. They know her vaguely—the shuttle driver, harmless, occasionally offers rides when the weather's bad.

"That preacher come through often?" Marley asks. Just curious. Just small talk.

"Brother Mitchell. Does the revival circuit. Atlanta down to Tampa."

Marley lets it hang. The silence does the work.

"Seems like a good man," she says finally, the sentence trailing like a question.

The woman with track marks laughs. It's not kind. "He likes the young ones. Private counsel."

"Some of them come back different," the hard-faced woman adds. Her voice is flat, factual. This is survival information, not gossip. "Some don't come back."

Marley takes a slow drag. The diesel fumes mix with tobacco smoke, the scent of a thousand nights like this one. "What do you mean, don't come back?"

"I mean Tammy Rhodes went to his river baptism last spring. Her roommate waited two weeks before giving up." The hard-faced woman watches the van pull onto the highway, taillights shrinking toward the interstate. "I mean Crystal got saved by Brother Mitchell in '78 and her mama's still calling truck stops looking for her."

The woman with track marks shifts, hugging herself against the January cold. "He's creepy as hell under all that Jesus talk. The girls who stay away stay alive."

That's a wolf in shepherd's clothing, baby. Mother's voice, soft but certain.

Marley doesn't argue. She's learned not to argue with the voice. Sometimes it knows things she hasn't seen yet.