Run, Girl, Run: A Thriller

by Alex C. Franklin

  At the sound of his name, he turned around. The door swung open, slamming into his body and causing cans to tumble to the ground.

  “Jacques, I need to talk with you about the video your uncle gave you. Your life is in danger because of it.”

  I looked him square in the eyes. I could see confusion dancing around in there.

  “Look, lady, my name is Josh, and I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  His body stiffened, as if he became aware of footsteps on the gravel. But by the time he broke our stare, it was too late.

  Parker grabbed him by the collar and jostled him.

  “Get in the camper,” Parker growled.

  Jacques let the grocery bags fall from his hands and threw his weight into Parker.

  The two grappled, but Parker spun out of Jacques’ hold and swung around behind him. He twisted the young man’s right arm behind his back.

  Jacques fell to his knees and Parker slammed down on him, pushing the kid’s face into the gravel and drawing his right arm further up behind his back. Jacques yelped.

  “Are you going to behave, now?” Parker said.

  Jacques’ muffled groans didn’t satisfy Parker. He dug a knee into Jacques’ back and yanked the kid’s right hand even higher. Jacques’ scream made my blood curdle.

  “Well, are you going cooperate?”

  “Yes, yes!”

  Parker eased up off Jacques. He caught him by the scruff, dragged him to his feet and shoved him forward.

  “Get in the camper.”

  Jacques didn’t resist this time.

  He sat across the table from me, while Parker stood outside, filling up the frame of the open door. Jacques’ eyes telegraphed pure terror. I had been stunned by the brute power Parker had released and I, too, was shaking.

  “Are you okay?” I rested my hand lightly on Jacques’ hand.

  He breathed hard, with his mouth open. His head was bent, but he raised his eyelids to look up at me. He nodded.

  “Look, sorry about what happened out there. But we need to talk to you. That’s Detective Sergeant Paul Parker….”

  Jacques lifted his head and looked at Parker with a sneer.

  “And I am Stella Jacob. We’ve never met, but I’m also from Syron Lake and I’ve been fighting to make the company pay for the spill.”

  “I thought you looked familiar. I saw your picture in the Beacon.”

  He rounded his lips and blew out a sharp breath.

  “We know what your uncle did,” I said.

  Jacques blinked. He pursed his lips.

  “And there’s this.” I unzipped the fanny pack I carried and pulled out the two printouts from the Trinidad newspapers that Parker had shown me. I unfolded them and laid them on the table.

  Jacques read just a few lines from each. His jaw fell and he dug a thumb into his chin.

  “Jacques, I was with Benoit Dromel shortly before he died. He told me you have a video your uncle made confessing to causing the spill.”

  Jacques chewed on his lower lip.

  “I saw when he was shot. And I believe I’ve been followed from Trinidad to here. And we believe that the people responsible for Ben’s death will also be searching for you.”

  Jacques pushed the pages back toward me. He rubbed his nose and shifted his gaze between Parker and me.

  “So what now?” he said.

  “Where’s the video?” Parker said.

  “In my truck. I keep it in a bag under my seat that I take with me wherever I go.”

  Parker walked off. When he returned, he was carrying a small, green, army-issue sling bag. He pulled out a small video camera from among a passport, bankbooks and other papers.

  “It’s on there,” Jacques said. “I lost the cord to connect it to a computer, so I never got around to transferring it onto a jump drive.”

  Parker flipped out the screen. “There’s only one recording on here.”

  “I’ve never used it since I filmed my uncle.”

  Parker pressed the play button. Eric Tremblay’s face appeared:

  “My name is Eric Tremblay. I have worked with Syron Lake Resources for seventeen years. Currently, I’m employed as a maintenance worker on the tailings site at the former Syron Lake uranium mine. I’m responsible, among other things, for ensuring the dam is sound. But I breached the dam. This was at the request of persons who said the company wanted this done. On that day….”

  “It’s all there,” Jacques said. “It’s seven minutes or so.”

  Parker shut the screen.

  “Okay, we’ll look at it in the car,” he said. “Right now we need to haul it to the airport and get the hell out of here.”

  “Then what?” Jacques said.

  “We put the story together properly and get it to the authorities. Who or how, we’ll figure out when we’re somewhere safe.”

  Parker stepped aside and I hopped out of the camper. Jacques followed. He grabbed the bag with his papers from Parker. After locking the camper door, he stepped in direction of his truck.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Parker said.

  “I’ll hitch up the trailer and follow you.”

  “You’re coming with us.”

  “I’m not leaving my truck and camper. Do you know how much I paid for them?”

  “Get this concept, kid. We’re going to the airport and we’re gonna get on a plane to somewhere. You can’t take it with you.”

  “I know where we’re going. I’ll pay for long term parking at the airport and pick them back up after we’ve handed over the video to the authorities. It’ll be cheaper than leaving my truck and camper here and having them impounded.”

  “You’ll slow us down hitching this rust bucket.”

  “I’m not leaving my truck and camper.”

  I could just see the testosterone swirling.

  I held up my hands and made a time-out sign.

  “Okay, you guys need to compromise if we’re going to get anywhere. How about if Jacques took just the truck?”

  Jacques eyed the rusted trailer as Parker approached him with a puffed out chest. I cringed at the thought that there’d be a repeat of the scuffle. Apparently, so did Jacques.

  “Alright then,” he said.

  Chapter 98

  Quinn ordered Young and Williams to stay in the car and walked alone to the trailer with the “Office” sign out front.

  He was getting tired of Young and his hotheadedness. Young was proving a liability.

  He was angry with Young for being stupid enough to let the Trinidad incident happen. That could have scuttled the whole job. It would have been a first for him. Quinn wasn’t in the business of taking down non-targets and forfeiting his pay.

  They were supposed to have only frightened the man. But, somehow, it all went haywire. What the hell had Young been thinking when he approached the man with a loaded gun? The moron clearly hadn’t been thinking at all.

  Luckily, though, Quinn thought to himself, Daniel Greene was in too deep to pull out. He was the best kind of client, so compromised that he was forced to extend the job.

  Young had made the right call with the old man in that isolated shack in Daytona, Quinn thought. But he was getting too trigger-happy, and seemed ready to take careless chances by mowing down anyone unlucky enough to cross their path, even if that person was in a very public place. Wasting that punk in that first campground office would have been just plain stupid.

  They would finish up this job together, Quinn decided. Each
would take his share of the payment, though Quinn was tempted to deduct half of Young’s as a lesson to him. Then he would lay low for a while, probably make off to Thailand or Cambodia for a few months to cool his heels. If he was lucky, he would probably run into old Army buddies out there; he knew the spots where the US vets hung out because there was cheap beer and cheap women. Maybe he could assemble a new team out there, a smarter bunch.

  Whatever, he thought. What he knew for sure was that after this job, he would have to be damned near desperate to even think of calling on Young ever again.

  He stepped into the trailer and saw a girl with wild, red curls behind a counter drinking from a plastic cup. People stood in two lines, and others sat on the floor among camping gear.

  He joined the shorter line, which filled up behind him as he waited his turn.

  “Trailer or tent?” the woman said when he eventually got to the counter.

  “Look, I realize you’re busy so I’m not going to waste your time.” Quinn put on his broadest smile and leaned in toward her. “I don’t plan on staying. I just came to find a friend. He’s driving a green Ford pickup.”

  He pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket and handed it to her. “That’s his registration number.”

  She frowned at him, looked at the line behind him, but still took the paper.

  “Oh, I know who you’re talking about.”

  “You do?”

  “Sure. That’s the guy who bought the camouflage camper. The old owner passed away in it and his daughter sold it off. Sleeping in that thing after someone died in it sounds kinda creepy, if you ask me.”

  Quinn nodded. “Well, my friend isn’t just your average kind of guy.”

  “Funny thing is, you just missed him,” the woman said.

  “What?”

  “Yeah, when I was taking my water break just a while ago. God, I needed that drink. My throat’s dry as sandpaper. I’ve been talking non-stop all morning.”

  “You’re saying I just missed him?”

  “Yeah, he drove past at a clip, just as you walked in. I saw him bolt down the road and turn left onto the highway.”

  Chapter 99

  The sky grew black with low clouds that stretched on forever. There was not an inch of blue above, and the sun was completely shut out.

  Even though we were barreling down the highway and everything went by in a blur, I saw how the trees swayed and bowed in the steady gusts that came in from the sea. Not a good sign, I thought.

  I closed the video camera after viewing Eric Tremblay’s confession.

  “Explosive stuff,” I said as I tucked the device into my fanny pack.

  Parker kept his eyes peeled to the road, and to Jacques’ truck, which was going way too fast up ahead.

  “That’ll more than bury that company,” he said. “Talk about being caught red-handed.”

  “Who do you say we should give it to? The CNRA?”

  Parker shook his head. “I’ve got some contacts in the RCMP. I’ll call them up when we get somewhere safe. This goes way beyond the CNRA. Besides, one of their own is implicated in all of this.”

  His words sent a spear right through my heart.

  Any investigation was sure to include Parker’s theory that Dromel was taking a bribe to go easy on the company after the spill; and then the investigation would come to the fact that he was shot while he was in Trinidad — with me.

  For Dromel, violating the Integrity Act was a crime. And I was tied up in it.

  As a private citizen I was blameless; the law didn’t apply to me. But as a public official, Dromel had been obligated to comply with the Act by recusing himself from the Syron Lake matter the minute he and I had become involved.

  But who would pay attention to such details? I would be cast as the other half in what was sure to be played up in the press as a salacious scandal. My name would be dragged through the mud. And if the novel-writing experiment went nowhere, I would be up the proverbial creek. It would be impossible for me to get a job with any reputable organization after gaining such notoriety.

  Parker’s voice pulled me out of my thoughts.

  “You hear about big business getting away with all sorts of dubious behavior,” he said. “But I’m sure this is something that’ll stick.”

  I looked up and shook my head. It took an even more grim prospect to drive away the heavy thoughts that had filled my mind.

  “Only if we make it alive to tell the tale,” I said.

  “Look, I know you’re still reeling from what you saw happen to Dromel, but–”

  “I’m not talking about that.” I gripped the armrest on my door. “It’s the speed that could get us killed first.”

  “Got to keep up with the kid,” Parker said. “I should’ve known he’d drive like a maniac, given half a reason.”

  Parker suddenly swerved to the right to make way for a black sedan that came out of nowhere, zipped too close on his left, then cut back in front of him.

  “Idiot!” Parker shouted and slammed the horn.

  I had watched as the car raced by and my heart suddenly pounded fiercely.

  “Like a bat out of hell,” Parker said. “They must have some crazy emergency to be overtaking us at the rate we’re going.”

  Thunder boomed in the distance and I watched as the car careened toward Jacques’ truck.

  “Oh my God,” I shouted, and my jaw dropped.

  “What?”

  “It’s them!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The men who shot Ben.”

  “What? You’re sure?”

  “It was quick, but the one in the passenger seat, the one with the long hair. I’m cert–”

  I didn’t have to finish.

  The black sedan raced up behind Jacques’ truck and rammed it. The pickup zig-zagged briefly and then took off like a jackrabbit.

  Parker floored the gas pedal.

  “Hang on,” he said.

  I gripped the armrest harder, now clutching it with both hands.

  The sedan swung into the left lane and was pushing to ride up alongside the pickup. Blaring horns of oncoming traffic forced it back into the right lane.

  Parker gained on them, but as he attempted to run into their bumper, the left lane cleared and they swung out, racing to get alongside Jacques.

  “They couldn’t get him from the back, so now they want to push him off the road from the side,” he said. “Well, two can play this game.”

  He sped up alongside the sedan, the nose of our rental coming up just to the seal of the back door. The gas pedal was touching the floor and there was no possible way he could get further up alongside them.

  He slammed his fist on the horn and held it there.

  His trick worked. The noise distracted the driver of the sedan. He slowed down just a fraction. It was enough that Parker was now cutting it nose to nose with them.

  “Hold on tight,” he shouted.

  He pulled the steering wheel sharply to the left, but the sedan swerved away.

  Parker swung further toward them, and the sedan came on the offensive, veering right. Parker screeched back into his lane and my shoulder slammed into my window.

  “It’s gonna get nasty,” he said.

  He suddenly made a big arc with the steering wheel. The rental hurtled left. It slammed into the side of the sedan with an unholy bang.

  The impact sent both vehicles careening.

  The sedan slid right off the road. It bounced off the shoulder, and the front wheels got ca
ught in a reed-lined ditch.

  Our rental spun off in the opposite direction. Parker gripped the steering wheel and tried to force it left. But the impact had been too great. The car spun out of control, screeching as it veered off the road and plowed into the bushes.

  Our bodies were flung forward into the seat belts and exploding airbags. The front of the car jumped and we came to a sudden halt.

  Just inches behind me, a long branch poked through the rear right window. Splintered glass covered the backseat. I shuddered at the sight. Had the car come in just inches at an angle, the branch would have shot through my window.

  Parker put the gear into reverse, but the engine screamed. The wheels did nothing but kick up pebbles and dust.

  He flung open his door and I realized the front wheels were hung up on a fallen tree trunk. There was no way the rental was getting out of there.

  Parker leaned over to the glove compartment and fished out the gun, which he shoved into his waistband. He pulled Dromel’s cigar box from under my seat.

  “Secure this,” he said, handing it to me before jumping out the car.

  My door didn’t budge. I crawled out through the driver’s side, clutching the cigar box against my fanny pack.

  Up on the road, a vehicle screeched to a stop near us.

  “Get in,” a voice called out.

  It was Jacques, with the passenger door of his pickup flung open.

  I darted into the vehicle.

  Parker ran to the other side of the truck and yanked open the door. Grabbing the steering wheel with one hand, he pulled himself into the cab, and shoved Jacques’ shoulder with the other.

  “Move over!” Parker shouted.

  Jacques had just enough time to unbuckle and shift into the middle, when Parker slammed the door and sped off.

  In the rear view mirror, I saw two of the men pushing the front of the black sedan, trying to rock it out of the ditch.

  Nobody wanted to say anything about the chances of the sedan getting back on the road.