I hesitated, instincts wavering. The basic instinct, the one born of all those warnings I’d both received and given about strangers in cars, told me to run and hide. A vehicle crammed with murderers, rapists, or terrorists! Although the terrorists might be disappointed, because there was only me to terrorize, and I was a little short on nuclear secrets.
But another instinct told me to jump out and wave like a maniac, that this was my only chance for rescue tonight.
While I wavered, the headlights rounded a bend and targeted me. After so much darkness, I had to duck my head and cover my eyes against the light.
“Hey!” a woman’s voice yelled. The sedan pulled up beside me. “You lost? We are! We’re trying to find a family reunion at a campground.”
“You have one of Bob’s maps?”
“How’d you know?”
Just a lucky guess. “I was up there earlier, but I took some wrong turns coming down. My vehicle got stuck.”
“You’re one of the family?”
“No, just an acquaintance.” Although I felt as if by now I was surely qualified for honorary redneck membership.
“You want a ride to the campground, if we can find it?”
Well, yes, now that you mention it, I did want a ride. I hastily jumped to the back door of the sedan and yanked it open. The dome light showed two women in front, two kids in back. I figured they might be frightened of a strange figure emerging out of the night, but the boy just looked at my muddy chauffeur’s uniform and soggy cap and said, “Hey, cool.”
I studied their map under the dome light, recognized Bob’s squiggles, and pointed in what I thought was the right direction. Along the way I gave them a condensed version of my predicament.
And then, there we were, at the campground! In spite of the rain, the campfire still blazed, and a sturdy handful of people in rain gear clustered around it. Lights shone in the motor homes and travel trailers, and a couple of generators rumbled. Civilization! I was out of the belly of the whale. The woman driving the car jumped out.
“Hey, Bob, don’t give up your day job for map-making!” she yelled.
“You’re here, aren’t you?”
“Only thanks to her.” She jerked her thumb at me as I climbed out of the rear seat.
Bob looked at me in amazement. “What’re you doing here?”
“Wrong turn.”
“Where’s the limo?”
“Limo?” the woman repeated. “Who in their right mind would bring a limo up here?”
Good question.
I pointed back the way we’d come and described where I thought the limo was stuck. I barely had time to warm my hands at the fire and drink half a cup of coffee someone thrust at me before Bob had organized a brigade of 4-wheel drives and big guys to drive them. I rode in Bob’s king cab and, with no more than a couple of wrong turns, we were soon plowing down Limo Lane.
Bob’s headlights hit the limo, rear bumper jammed deep in the mud. “Wow, when you get something stuck, you get it stuck.” He sounded admiring.
One of the pickups had a winch mounted on front, and before I had time to worry that my limo might wind up yanked to pieces in the rescue process, it was out.
Thank you, Lord. Thank you for 4-wheel drives and winches and guys who know how to use them!
Two pickups accompanied me down to the main paved road, tooted me off with horns that sounded like braying donkeys with head colds, and from there I made it safely on home.
I pulled into the driveway and dropped my head to the wheel, too exhausted to do more than that for the moment. But not too exhausted to give thanks for what God had done for me tonight, something far more important than rescuing me from a mudhole. He’d rescued me from a spiritual wrong turn, rescued me from miring down in the crowd of flawed humans instead of looking beyond to the solid rock that was him. Given me a real map.
I hadn’t looked at my watch for a long time, but I supposed it must be midnight or after. So I was surprised when India’s Harley roared up right next to me.
I got out as she dismounted and pulled off her helmet. “What in the world are you doing riding around at this time of night?” I asked.
“Checking to make sure the lights work okay?”
“You just wanted an excuse to ride around in the dark on your new bike!”
Guilt tinged her smile. “Well, yeah, I did.”
“Didn’t you get caught in the rain?”
“What rain?”
“You mean it didn’t—” Oh, hey, Lord, c’mon, you didn’t pull that deluge out there just for me, did you? “Never mind.”
I looked at my watch. Not midnight, only a little past ten. Time flies when you’re having fun?
“How come you look like you’ve been mud wrestling?” India eyed the mud-caked limo. “The limo too. And you both came out losers?”
No, not a loser. Tonight I was definitely a winner! With mud as my gold star. Thanks again, God. I owe you one.
“You look like you need hot coffee. Come on over after you get a shower. I’ve got something to tell you.” She looked from me to the limo again. “And you must have something to tell me.”
I put the uniform under the shower to sluice off the mud, then did the same to myself. Phreddie complained about a lack of the attention to which royalty was entitled, and I opened a can of tuna for him. I wrapped a towel around my wet head and took Phreddie with me when I ran over to India’s. A few raindrops were falling, the storm that had stalled over Blue Creek Road perhaps churning on into Vigland now.
I settled on India’s sofa, my hands wrapped around the comforting warmth of the coffee cup. Phreddie wandered over to bat at the silver studs on India’s jacket, tossed on a chair. “Okay, what do you have to tell me?” I asked.
“You first. What’s with you and the mud?”
What to say? I had a limousine job that took me into a wooded wilderness. I got the limo stuck in the mud. I had an imaginary confrontation with a hitchhiking Bigfoot. Some guys with 4-wheel drives rescued me.
I’d also had an . . . what was that fancy word? Epiphany! I’d had an epiphany from God.
Yet somehow I doubted that simply telling India what had become so clear to me tonight . . . that she was judging God by the flaws of her ex-husband, that Fitz was judging God by the hypocritical actions of some Christians he’d known, that I was losing my way looking at the imperfections of people rather than the holiness of God . . . would also make it clear to her.
Lord, If I drag her out in the woods, will you bring another rainstorm, another mudhole, to open her eyes? Do it Lord, would you, please? Well, maybe not the storm and the mudhole, but help her somehow to look beyond the flaws of people and look to you. And include Fitz in there too.
So for now I just left it at a sketch of the physical aspects of what had happened to me and the limo today.
“So, where’d you go this evening?” I asked.
“I rode down toward Olympia and got on I-5. I wanted to, umm. . .”
“See what the Harley could do out on the freeway?”
She didn’t say yes or no, but this smile held another hint of guilt. The speed limit is 70 out there on the freeway. I suspected anyone doing 70 was just a blur in India’s rear view mirror.
“Anyway, I got cold on the way back, so I stopped at the casino to warm up and get a cup of coffee. And who do you suppose I happened to see in there?”
“Elvis?”
“Well, sure. But, more importantly, Sloan Delaney!”
“Did he see you?”
“He was playing blackjack and concentrating so hard on the cards I doubt he’d have noticed if I waltzed by in a King Kong outfit. I watched him for close to an hour. I think he quit playing when he ran out of money. Anyway, I followed him outside—”
“He still has the Buick?”
“No, this was an old Ford pickup. Green. Beat-up. Made my old pickup look like a showroom model. I figure he must have needed money and traded the Buick on that pickup, and gotten
some cash in the deal. The way it clanked and rattled, I wasn’t sure he’d make it out of the parking lot, but he did, and I followed him.”
“To where?”
“Up north to the highway that runs along Hood Canal.” She thumped her thigh in a gesture of frustration. “And then I lost him.”
“Lost him how?”
“There were several cars between me and his pickup. I was staying back a ways, so he wouldn’t spot me. And then he just disappeared. He must have turned off on a side road. It had to be one of three or four in the vicinity, but I don’t know which one. I didn’t want to go wandering down them—”
“A good thing you didn’t. If he suspected he was being followed he may have been just lying in wait for someone to show up.” Which could have been much more disastrous than my mudhole.
“Right. So what I’m thinking is that we go back up there in daylight.”
“I’m not sure I want to try to run down a killer while riding on something that has to be balanced to stay upright.”
She made a face. “Where’s your sense of adventure?”
“I think I left it up there in the woods with Bigfoot and the mutant raccoons.”
“Okay, we’ll take your Corolla. He’s never seen it. And it’s inconspicuous.”
“And then what?”
“We explore all the side roads in the vicinity where he disappeared. I don’t think there are any motels in that particular area, so he must be in a house now. We look for that old green pickup parked at one of them.”
“He could be keeping it in a garage. Or he may have suspected he was being followed and turned off on a side road to hide, not because he lived there.”
“Yeah, I suppose.” She sounded deflated.
“But, okay, suppose we go out there and do see the pickup parked somewhere. And then what?”
“I have an idea,” she said. “But I’m not sure you’ll like it.”
Put that way, I was reasonably certain I wasn’t going to like it. However— “If it doesn’t involve mud, I’ll at least listen.”
“I’m thinking, after we find out where he’s staying, we park where we can watch the road. We wait until he comes out, then slip in and search his place. We’re already reasonably sure he took something from Mary Beth’s house—”
“He surely wouldn’t still be hanging on to something that incriminates him as the killer.”
“He might. Who knows? Or he might have something about the investment scheme, or whatever it was that was going to bring Mary Beth a bundle of money. He isn’t hanging around this neck of the woods for his health. There’s some reason he’s still here.”
I had to agree with that. A reason undoubtedly connected with money from some source. This was tempting. But I shook my head. “Going into his house. . . India, we can’t do that. That’s breaking and entering.”
“Yeah, that’s what I figured you’d say.” Big sigh. Phreddie had by now dragged her leather jacket off the chair and was kneading it with his paws. “And you’re right, of course. But maybe if we didn’t have to break in, if we just sort of found a way inside. . .”
“Like what? An open door and a ‘Welcome, Ladies. Cookies in the kitchen’ note?”
India ignored that facetious comment. “Even if we didn’t go inside, if we found where Sloan is staying, we could at least tell that detective.”
I unwound the towel around my head and rubbed my damp hair. Would Detective Molino be interested? Maybe. Or would he think I was tossing a red herring his way to distract him from neighbor Tom? Which may have been what he thought when I delivered Amy to him with her information about ex-commissioner-candidate McClay.
Giving Detective Molino information that specifically connected Sloan Delaney to the murder would pull a lot more weight, I decided. If we could dodge the problem of how we acquired that information, he could get a search warrant and legally acquire whatever incriminating evidence we spotted.
That, unfortunately, brought us back to the tricky matter of breaking and entering. Perhaps morally justified, if we gave the ethics of such an action a pretzel twist. The old question of whether a good end justifies a bad means. The slippery slope that has perhaps sent many a Christian into a mudhole.
Chapter Thirty
I wasn’t good at pretzel twisting, and I’d already slid too far down that slippery slope recently.
“No entering, even without breaking?” India sounded a little wistful, but not surprised.
“No. But I do think finding where Sloan Delaney is staying and telling Detective Molino is a good idea.”
“Okay, when?”
“I have church tomorrow morning, of course. And I have to wash the limo—”
“I’ll wash the limo while you’re at church.”
“How about coming with me? God isn’t a phony just because some people who call themselves Christians are. Maybe even some who are Christians, but don’t quite have their act together.”
Put that way, my breakthough in understanding sounded so . . . ordinary. Not epiphany-ish at all. Although India hesitated long enough that I thought she was really considering the invitation. Go, God, work on her! I cheered. But all that happened was that she said, “Just show me where you keep the limo detergent, or whatever it is you use. And some brushes and rags and stuff.”
So I did that next morning and then went to church alone, as usual. Where I overheard Janice gossiping to someone about a rumor the youth pastor had been in trouble with another young girl at a different church before Lori Crampton, and some other people were talking about a young couple who had just quit the church because of criticism for living together without being married. I didn’t try to figure out who was right or wrong here, the gossipers or the gossipees, just reminded myself that all the flaws and errors were human, not God’s.
In spite of overcast skies and a sprinkle of raindrops, the limo was back to its black-jewel sparkle by the time I got home. India had even put fresh circles of painted-black duct tape over the bullet holes in the lid of the trunk, souvenir of a past encounter with a killer, that I’d never yet gotten fixed. She also had chicken sandwiches ready for lunch, so we ate, and then took off in my old Toyota.
Whitecaps bounced on steel-gray water when we reached wide Hood Canal, no boats out today, the wooded hills on the far side lost in drizzle and mist. I wondered how things had worked out for the reunion up at Serenity Springs Campground, if there’d been any flying teeth. India had no trouble locating the area where Sloan Delaney had disappeared. We turned on the first road and proceeded cautiously past half a dozen nice homes to a dead end. No green pickup.
The next road had a garage sale sign with an arrow. This road was considerably longer, winding several miles back into the wooded hills, the houses on larger acreages. At the yard sale we looked at each other, and India said, “Why not?” We got out and prowled through furniture, clothes, books, knick-knacks, and a bear statue made by chainsaw out of a log. I was tempted. Doesn’t every new, mud-baptized redneck need a chainsaw-sculpted bear in her yard? But I decided I couldn’t get it in the car, which was probably fortunate. Instead I asked the woman in charge if she knew anyone on this road with an old green pickup. She didn’t, but India bought a cheese grater.
At the third road, I braked just a few feet inside the turnoff, reluctant to go farther. This road was narrower than the others, barely single lane, more dirt than gravel. Cedar branches met overhead, darkening the already gloomy sky. A brushy-banked creek gurgled alongside the road. A big bird perched on the bony branch of a tree up ahead.
“What do you think?” I asked uneasily. I’m not given to worrying about bad omens, but how often do you see a bird that looks way too much like a vulture in your pathway?
“It looks like a beatup-green-pickup kind of road.”
Yeah, it did. And that’s what we were looking for. I edged forward cautiously. We passed an old house that looked deserted, glass broken out of windows. Smoke rose from a rusty chimney on anothe
r old house, with two junked cars and a rusty backhoe out front. We’d gone about a mile, rounded a bend, and there it was, facing us dead-on, the way things turn up in nightmares.
A battered green pickup. A driver whose scowling features made the vulture look like the chairman of your friendly neighborhood welcoming committee.
“That’s him, isn’t it?” India whispered, even though he couldn’t possibly hear us. “Do we want to talk to him?”
“About what? Tell him we’re selling Avon and ask if he wants to order skin cream?” I definitely didn’t want to talk to him about murder. Not in this isolated area. I didn’t wait for an answer from India, just craned my neck to look behind us. Maybe thirty feet back I spotted a wider space where I figured I could squeeze the car off to the side and he’d have room to get by.
I did that, pretending to be very busy with something on the dashboard when he pulled up beside us. Maybe he wouldn’t recognize us. Yeah, right. And maybe my jiggly thighs will suddenly turn to hard muscle. He tooted the horn to get my attention, and I reluctantly opened the window.
“What’re you doing in here? This is a private road. Residents only.”
As if this were some exclusive subdivision and you needed a pass to get in!
I was mumbling something about a wrong turn when his eyebrows scrunched together. He leaned his head out the window to get a better look at me. Unfortunately, at that moment, India leaned around me to get a better look at him.
I really doubted he’d have remembered just me, but India isn’t all that forgettable. Especially for him. A gun strapped to a boot tends to brand someone in your memory. I wondered if she had it with her today.
Whatever, something kicked in for him. “Hey, I remember you,” he said.
I ignored that. “Am I over far enough so you can get around us?”
“You’re the women I ran into in the driveway that night at Mary Beth’s house.”
There didn’t seem any point saying, Mary Beth who?, so I just murmured a noncommittal, “Oh?” I briefly wondered why he didn’t just scoot on by and pretend we’d never seen each other before, but then I figured he probably realized that we recognized him. And we weren’t here by chance.
For Whom the Limo Rolls Page 23