They went up and then down the mountain, heading north rather than continuing in the easterly direction they had been traveling on foot. The bike skittered sideways on wet leaves and unseen rocks and roots so many times that Summer got used to feeling they were going to hit the dirt at any minute. Twice, when they came over a hill, she was treated to beautiful vistas of mountains rolling away into the distance, each crowned with its own halo of clouds. The scenery was straight out of a movie. The dangers were more real. Steep, heavily forested slopes ended without warning in craggy precipices. Sometimes the ground just seemed to stop, falling away in breathtaking drops of hundreds and even thousands of feet.
So far, Steve had managed to avoid taking them over any of those drops. But Summer wasn’t optimistic. Lately, she’d felt like a character on the old television show Hee Haw: If it weren’t for bad luck, she’d have no luck at all.
Beyond fear finally, Summer screwed up her eyes against the wind, held Muffy close, and hung on for dear life as they dodged trees and rocks and roots at speeds she was sure neared seventy miles an hour. Early on, she realized there was nothing she could do to make her precarious perch any safer. Her life, and Muffy’s, were in Steve’s hands. She could only pray that he knew what he was doing—and that they would not zoom over a rise and find themselves sailing over a cliff.
Surprise, surprise.
Around them the world was growing darker. Lengthening shadows lay across the ground like prison bars. They crested another rise. The back tire came off the ground. In the distance, where Summer’s eyes fixed in sheer self-defense, mountains rose out of darkening air.
Without warning the bike shot into the sky like a buck ing bronco. This time, both wheels left the earth. Summer screeched, clamped both arms around Steve’s middle—Muffy, squashed between her stomach and Steve’s back, couldn’t have gotten free if she’d wanted to—and shut her eyes. When the bike landed, bouncing, they were on pavement, racing uphill.
“You’re going to kill us!” she screamed in Steve’s ear.
“This is fun!” he roared back.
Fun. Of course, to him, it would be. I feel the need / the need for speed … He was suffering from Top Gun-itis again.
“Is it even legal to ride this thing on the road?” Summer yelled.
“Hey, this baby swings both ways: on-road or off.”
Whatever that meant. Summer decided not to worry about it. Men and their macho toys were beyond her understanding at the moment.
It was a two-lane highway, and judging from the mist that crept across it, they were very high now in the mountains. Summer shivered, but not from fear, or the eeriness of her surroundings. Her shorts and T-shirt offered scant protection against the rushing air. She was growing thoroughly chilled.
But they seemed to have eluded their pursuers, at least temporarily. There were other vehicles on the road, a few cars, some campers. Vacationers all. No cops. No bad guys. With their helmets on, riding a motorcycle none of their pursuers knew they had, Summer thought—hoped—that she and Steve were to all intents and purposes invisible. Just two more tourists, vacationing in the mountains.
“Where are we going?” Summer screamed. The wind blew her question back in her face.
“I don’t know. Maybe Mexico,” Steve yelled back.
Mexico? She didn’t want to go to Mexico! Anyway, they were heading north, not south!
She opened her mouth to tell him so, and promptly swallowed a bug. Gagging, spitting, she decided to hold her peace until they stopped.
Surely they would stop soon. The constant vibration was making her butt numb. She shifted on her narrow seat, but that brought no relief.
Ridiculous, when one was running for one’s life, to worry about minor discomforts, Summer knew. But she couldn’t seem to help it: her butt was numb and her legs were cramped and her feet were going to sleep and she was freezing. The wind in her face never stopped. Cold and bug-laden, it beat against her skin, numbing that, too.
And she was hungry. Starving, actually. As a diet, running for one’s life was proving drastic but effective. Maybe she could make an infomercial and market it and get rich.
A green sign by the side of the road read APPALACHIAN TRAIL. Below it, a small brown woodchuck stood on its hind legs, sniffing the air. Ahead, as far as the eye could see, stretched miles of blue-green forest and dozens of mountain peaks, rising up out of the mist one after the other. The vista was beautiful, glorious—Summer realized that she was seeing the Smokies in all their natural splendor.
Her instinctive mental response to that edifying bit of knowledge was, Yippee.
As night descended, the traffic thinned out. Glancing behind her, Summer watched the twin white dots of car lights heading down the mountain. Except for an ancient blue camper just in front of them, they were alone on the mountain top.
Streaking through the dark, clinging like a monkey to a man she hadn’t even met three days before, Summer was assaulted by a sudden pang of homesickness. She missed her mother. She missed her sisters. She missed her nieces and nephews. She even missed her brothers-in-law, with whom she didn’t always see eye to eye. What she wouldn’t give to be safe in her own house, warm and cozy and well fed, with all of this just a terrible nightmare from which she would soon awaken!
She was suddenly, searingly conscious of the man to whom she clung. Would she really wish Steve Calhoun to be nothing more than a figment of her dreams? If she could, with a wave of her hands, make him vanish along with the situation he had gotten her into, would she?
The answer was disturbing: no. She might wish away the circumstances, but not the man.
It occurred to her, in the near meditative state brought on by cold and wind and discomfort and unceasing vibration, to wonder why she wouldn’t wish away a man who had kidnapped her, terrorized her, brutalized her, and exposed her to numerous threats to life and limb, and who might still easily be the death of her. He was not her type at all. She wasn’t one hundred percent positive what her type was, but she was positive that he wasn’t it.
He wasn’t even handsome, for goodness’ sake. Lem, with all his faults, was at least handsome. Steve Calhoun was rude and crude, liked violence and speed and danger, made jokes at her expense, admitted to a (supposedly former) drinking problem, and was hung up on a ghost. He was also notorious, unemployed, wanted by the police, and on the run for his life.
He was, by no stretch of her imagination, her idea of what a Knight in Shining Armor should be. She had always, secretly, hankered after a Knight in Shining Armor.
But he had come back for her, there at the campground. That was something. A very big something.
She couldn’t be falling in love with him.
Could she? If she was, she was putting Heaven on notice right that minute that she would consider it just one more in a long line of life’s little dirty tricks.
By the time night fell so conclusively that Summer was hard put to see her hand in front of her face, the camper had pulled off. Probably to make camp. At least, she assumed that was what campers did. She had never been camping in her life, and if this experience was any example of the pleasures of outdoor life, she didn’t foresee taking it up anytime in the near future.
Would they ever stop? There was a lot to be said for physical misery as a means of taking one’s mind off one’s troubles, she would be the first to agree, but enough was enough. If they didn’t stop soon so she could straighten her cramped muscles, Summer feared she might never walk again.
Except for the beam of the motorcycle’s headlight cutting through the mist that now rolled across the road in great waves, there was no light at all. No moon. No stars. No streetlights. Complete darkness.
Summer wondered about the cliffs that fell away from the roadside to her left, about the complete lack of guardrails, and about how high up they were. One wrong move and they would find themselves hurtling out into nothingness. She had a sudden ridiculous picture of herself, Steve, Muffy, and the motorcycle as
E.T. and Co., soaring into space to cycle in front of a full moon. There were just two things wrong with that vision, she thought: Number one, tonight there was no moon at all, and number two, the motorcycle could not fly. Instead they would crash and die.…
It was an effort, but the ache in all her muscles helped: Summer finally managed to dismiss that last cheering thought from her mind.
Muffy whined, and Summer patted her consolingly. The little dog had actually settled down in her warm bed of tummy and T-shirt with surprising docility. Despite the pat, Muffy whined again, and Summer got the message: Muffy needed to go potty.
She leaned forward to yell in Steve’s ear.
“What?” he yelled back.
“Muffy has to pee!”
“So hold her out over the side!”
Funny. Very funny. “Will you stop?”
“As soon as I find a place.”
They rode on for a bit. Muffy whined, Summer patted, the motorcycle rolled. Talking to Steve was at least something to do, even though hearing and being heard over the roar of the engine and rush of the wind required considerable effort. Summer leaned forward again.
“Do you have any idea where we are?”
“I know exactly where we are.”
“Well, where?”
“We’re lost!” he yelled back, and laughed like a hyena.
Summer would have punched him in the side if she hadn’t been afraid of those waiting cliffs.
31
Why Steve finally decided to stop where he did, Summer couldn’t tell. He merely pulled off the road onto a pitch-black overlook just like every other pitch-black overlook they had passed.
Far be it from her to question a gift from the gods, though, she thought, and climbed on shaking legs from the back of their metal steed while the climbing was good. She’d ridden horseback a lot in her girlhood. The way she felt now was saddle-sore times ten.
Muffy immediately squatted beside the motorcycle.
Summer had to fight the urge to do the same. Instead, she staggered off into the dark.
The wind blew unceasingly, growing colder with every minute. Summer glanced around at the black shrouded vista of mountains and trees and moonless sky, and shivered. For once, the cicadas were silent. Maybe they had crawled back into the ground for another seventeen years—or maybe they had frozen solid, as she felt she might do. But there were other living creatures in the forest. Summer could hear their rustlings. As she took care of business in the lee of a tree not fifteen feet from where Steve wrestled with the motorcycle, she had the sensation that a million unseen eyes were watching her through the dark.
Probably thinking, Dinner!
Summer nearly broke her neck scrambling to rejoin Steve and (relative) safety. While she had been otherwise occupied, he had put the motorcycle up on its center stand and was, as she returned, unhitching the gym bag from the back. Muffy, her hair bow piteously askew, huddled at his feet.
She’s as afraid of this place as I am, Summer thought, and, not without a few painful twinges, stooped to gather the dog up into her arms.
Muffy rewarded her with a lick on the chin.
“We may as well spend the night here. As dark as it is, it’s too dangerous to go on.”
Hear, hear. But Summer didn’t say it. Instead she followed Steve into the trees.
“I have a question for you,” she said as, at Steve’s direction, she gathered sticks for a fire. “Did your friend Renfro show up like that by accident?”
“Does Michael Jordan have hair?” Kneeling on the ground, Steve was clearing a circle of nature’s debris all the way down to pure earth for the fire.
Summer had to think about that. “No,” she said at last.
“Exactly.”
Her brain was so fried from the events of the day that she had to think about that, too.
“Are you trying to say that Renfro showing up was not an accident?” she asked finally, carrying her pile of sticks over to him and flopping at his side. She was chilled to the bone. Reaching over, she unzipped the gym bag and dragged the sweatshirt from its depths.
“You got it.” While she pulled the sweatshirt on, he examined the sticks carefully, discarded a few, and began to arrange the others in a neat pile. The fleecy sweatshirt did nothing for the twin columns of ice that were her legs. She extracted the quilt from the gym bag and wrapped that around herself, too.
“Did you contact him with smoke signals or ESP?” She couldn’t help it. She felt sarcastic. She also felt like she was coming down with a cold. With her luck, it would probably turn into pneumonia. Not that the prospect concerned her particularly. At this point, pneumonia was way down on her list of things to worry about.
He sent her a sidelong glance. “I used the phone in the manager’s office. After I saw that newspaper, I knew that hiding out at the fishing camp wasn’t a good idea. We needed to put a lot of miles between us and everybody who was hunting for us, fast. I’ve known Renfro since I was a kid. He used to go fishing with me and my dad a lot, and sometimes we’d ride dirt bikes. He’s a motorcycle nut, always has a bunch of them around in various stages of repair. He runs a souvenir shop with his dad on an Indian reservation about twenty-five miles from Hiawatha Village. When I called him and told him where I was and what I needed, he said no problemo. He’d already read the papers, and from what I gathered he wasn’t all that surprised to hear from me. So when we had to run for it, we ran in the direction I knew he’d be coming from. And there, in a nutshell, you have Plan B.”
“It worked,” Summer admitted, inching closer to the cone-shaped pile of sticks as he ignited them with the always useful Bic. She didn’t think she would ever be warm again in her life.
“My plans always work,” Steve said with a smirk.
“Oh, yeah? Then what’s your plan for getting us out of this? I don’t think Mexico is such a great idea.”
Steve dug in the gym bag and came up with what was left of their food. He zipped the bag up again, and leaned back against the convenient trunk of a tall pine. “I don’t think so either,” he said, threading limp-looking hot dogs on a stick and passing it to Summer to hold. Summer tried not to think about the various kinds of food poisoning that could lurk in meat that had gone unrefrigerated for at least a day, and held the stick out over the fire. Dangerous or not, she was going to eat those hot dogs. She was starving.
In her fur rug mode again between the two humans, Muffy yapped. Summer and Steve exchanged glances. Steve passed Muffy a slightly-the-worse-for-wear peanut butter cracker.
“I’ve been thinking about it,” he continued, arranging buns on a rock, which he shoved close to the fire. “Running is not the solution here. Now that they’ve set it up so that we’re wanted for murder, every police force in the whole U.S. is going to be looking for us. If they think we’ve crossed state lines, the FBI will be after us. If they think we’ve left the country, Interpol will be after us. The way our luck is running, we’ll probably be featured on next week’s America’s Most Wanted. The good cops—and they outnumber the bad by a wide margin, believe meare now our enemies just as much as the bad cops—and the bad guys who are not cops. The good cops will either arrest us and send us back to where the bad cops can get to us, or, if we resist, shoot to kill. That’s what I would do in their case. That’s what any cop would do.”
“Shoot to kill?” Summer echoed faintly. Steve nodded and began to thread marshmallows onto a stick.
“You’ve got to realize, we’re the bad guys now,” he said. “We’re criminals, wanted by the police.”
“Oh, my God!” Summer was appalled. “Maybe we better call a lawyer. My sister’s one; then there’s the guy who handled my divorce. He didn’t do such a good job, to tell you the truth, but maybe he could recommend …”
Steve was shaking his head. “We don’t need a lawyer. One thing we don’t have to worry about is beating criminal charges. If we’re caught, we won’t ever make it to trial. Depending on who catches us, we might or w
e might not even make it to jail.”
“Oh,” Summer said in a small voice. The reality of their situation was scary.
“Pay attention; you’re burning the hot dogs.”
Her thoughts recalled to the demands of the present, Summer quickly turned the hot dogs. Steve was right, the side that was now on top was black and bubbly. Good thing she liked her hot dogs that way. Heck, at this point she liked her hot dogs any way at all.
“So what do we do?” Summer couldn’t see a whole lot of options. But maybe, she consoled herself hopefully, she was just tired.
“I think our best bet is to go back to the boat warehouse. We need to find out what is in that van that everybody wants so much. If it’s what I think it is, we contact the media with our story. If we can get the media behind us—and we have a good shot at it, they seem to love police-scandal stories—then we should be reasonably safe.” He glanced at the hot dogs, shook his head, and removed the stick from her hands. “I think they’re done.” The dryness in his voice was probably due to the fact that their dinner was as black as a cinder.
“But we know what’s in the van. Dead bodies are in the van.” Summer accepted a hot dog, wrapped in a slightly stale-feeling but warm bun, that he passed her.
“Baby, believe me, they’re not chasing us to hell and back just so they can pay their respects to the dead.” Steve bit into his own hot dog. Muffy whined. Summer absentmindedly broke off a bit of bun and fed it to her. “If there wasn’t something that they want very badly in that van, we’d already be dead. And it’s not those bodies.”
“What do you think it is, then?” Summer tried to remember the interior of the van. She hadn’t seen anything besides the coffins and their contents, but then she hadn’t really looked.
“Drugs, probably. It could be any number of things, but drugs would be my guess. Coke or smack, maybe. Not grass, it takes up too much room.” He removed a marshmallow from its stick and put it in his mouth whole. Then he popped open one of their two remaining cans of beer, and passed it to her. The other can, she saw, rested on the ground beside his leg. It was already open. Summer eyed it askance.
Walking After Midnight Page 23