Title: What Goes Around

Authors: elspethdixon
Rating: PG-13
Pairings/Characters: John Constantine
Warnings: None
A/N: Request drabble written for dallin_dae, comics canon, set shortly after the "All His Engines" arc.
Disclaimer: The characters and situations in this story belong to DC/Vertigo Comics. No profit is being made off this fan-written work.

Most people would not have been able to successfully hitch-hike all the way from Los Angeles to Chicago. Most people were not John Constantine. When you were riding the synchronicity highway, there was always someone willing to stop and give you a lift.

Only one of them had turned out to be a serial killer.

John had known something wasn't right with the man as soon as he climbed out of the cab of his truck and spoke to him. He smiled too widely, for one, and his eyes stayed focused on John's just a little too long.

Truck drivers were, John had learned by this point, not technically allowed to give random, disreputable-looking strangers from nowhere lifts. Truck drivers who were obviously dishonest and probably engaged in some form of criminal activity, on the other hand, were a little more likely to say yes when you held out what looked like a fifty-dollar bill -- American money all looked the same; useful, that -- and asked for a ride.

It wasn't until John was in the truck, ignoring the seatbelt and searching through the pockets of his coat for a pack of cigarettes -- it was pissing down rain outside, and even offering the laws of nature a little otherwordly assistance hadn't been enough to get a cigarette to light and stay lit -- that he slowly began to realize that he might have made a very stupid decision.

The truck's diesel engine rumbled to life with a coughing noise, then settled down to the chugging growl that had grown familiar over the past two days, and the air in the cab began to feel... wrong.

Violent death leaves a mark, a sort of stain on the places where it's happened, and after spending so much time recently getting cozy with Mictlantecuhtli, John couldn't miss it.

It wasn't any of his business, however, so John lit a cigarette, cracking the truck's window a hair when the driver shot him a disapproving look, and settled back to enjoy the ride. He'd get out the next time they stopped for gas.

Of course, it didn't work that way. He was John bloody Constantine, and nothing could ever be that easy.

Two hours into the drive, after John had been subjected to enough whining tirades about American politics on A.M. radio to begin actively looking forwards to finding a new ride, the driver pulled off onto a slip road and drove them down a short stretch of road and into a camping area that in summer would be full of middle class Americans on holiday. This time of year, it was as empty and lifeless as the moon.

When the driver pulled out a gun, John was expecting it. He threw himself sideways while the bullet smashed through the side window behind him, and then called in a few recent debts owed. The atmosphere inside the vehicle was perfect for it, the old blood soaked between the seat cushions crying out for vengeance.

Hitch-hiking by the side of the interstate was a nerve-wracking experience compared to waiting around to beg a ride at a rest station. After the first dozen or so cars whipped past him at lethal speed, John decided to stack the odds a little in his own favor.

A whispered incantation, a few symbols on the asphalt that would later be obliterated with the scrape of a boot, and he was both irresistible and harmless. A family in a minivan picked him up, and he rode to the next rest station sharing a back seat with a pair of squalling brats who were entirely too wide awake for two in the morning.

"Cheers," he told the tired-looking female driver an hour or so later, as he handed over a twenty to cover part of her petrol expenses. He waved back at her over his shoulder as he walked away toward the light of the rest station, where a brightly colored sign over the door welcomed him to Illinois.

The Missouri state highway patrol found the empty truck still parked at the camping grounds three days later, when John was on a British Airways flight to London and currently midway over the Atlantic. There was a bullet hole in the passenger-side window and a single, bloody handprint on the inside of the windshield, the shape of the fingers bizarrely long and thin. The keys were still in the ignition, and the entire cab smelled like sulfur and rot.

The driver's body was never found.