get to pick the show,” she retorted. “Never went out with the guy again, either.”
Matt regarded her with a smirk. “Ironically, it’s Earth that first came to understand their culture and accept it. Come to think of it, you wouldn’t make a bad Klingoff warrior woman.” He pulled a volume from the shelf in his office and handed it to her.
“Thanks,” she said sarcastically, flipping through the color photos and text about Space Quest in its various incarnations. “I can see why the kid’s schizoid. This is weirdsville, but it’ll give me enough background to fake it when I get to the convention. All I have to do is wait for a chance to snatch Farley.”
“Be careful. If Scruggs did hard time, even as a kid, he won’t want you taking away his meal ticket.”
“I always come out on top, remember?” she purred, planting a quick kiss on his mouth.
Sam drove a specially equipped Ford Econoline van, an old model with an engine her uncle Dec had helped her soup up. It could go from zero to sixty in less time than most fancy European sports cars and had been remodeled to serve the nurse-transporting-a-patient cover she used on many retrievals. The paneled back was furnished with a unique set of restraints to hold her “patients” securely while she drove.
Going against Matt’s advice, a frequent occurrence since they’d met, she headed out that night for St. Louis. It would be a long pull and the “Con” as he called it was set to begin the next day. Who knew where Farley and Elvis would head after that? Sam wanted the kid safely in her grasp while she could still reach him. Maybe they were saving the twenty K to skip to Mexico, for all she could figure.
Clutching a twenty-ounce paper cup filled with thick black coffee, heavy on the sugar, she headed up I-95 and hit the Florida Turnpike. Dawn was a faint glow on the horizon when she felt the blowout yank the steering wheel from her grasp. Cursing, she quickly corrected, grateful for her uncle’s training, then pulled to the side of the road. Wonderful. A stretch so isolated she could dehydrate before Road Assistance found her.
With no time to waste, she climbed out of the van and opened the back doors. This was hardly the first flat she’d changed, but dammit, it was costing her time! Sam wondered why the hell the tire had blown. She’d checked them carefully, always did before she drove. “Probably some litterbug tossing a beer bottle out his window a few miles back,” she snarled, placing the jack under the rear bumper.
Before she could start working the jack, headlights appeared on the horizon. Although she’d been careful to pull well off the highway, Sam had been drilled by her uncle Declan to always be wary of dozing motorists when the flat was on the left side of the vehicle. The inbred precaution saved her life. Still squatting, she glanced up to see the car veering directly toward her.
Sam dropped the jack and flung herself across the berm into the marshy weeds of the ditch.
Chapter 5
The car grazed her van, leaving faint dark smears on the white paint. Not a direct hit, but the speed of the encounter rocked the Ford’s suspension. By the time she climbed from the muddy ditch, pulling briars and dry leaves from her clothes, the car had vanished into the distance. She couldn’t even tell what make or model it had been. Too busy leaping for her life.
“What the hell is it about me and cars lately?” she muttered, thinking about the incident in the parking garage. Did someone want to stop her from retrieving Farley? She watched the horizon for lights as she walked to the front of the van and pulled out her cell. Dead zone. Big surprise considering she was smack in the middle of nowhere. May be best not to call Matt and worry him. And what could she tell Patowski or any of her cop buddies?
She hadn’t a clue about the car, other than that it wasn’t the Olds. That ancient rust bucket couldn’t have moved that fast without the driver putting his foot through the floor-boards and breaking a leg. And it had been an indistinct light color. The paint deposits on her van were dark.
“Damn, it’ll cost a bundle to get this baby repainted.” She would add the expense to Winchester’s tab, but having a quality paint job done took time and aggravation. Just in case the jerk decided on another crack at her, she dug her snub nose .38 out of the glove compartment and shoved it into her belt before returning to the jack.
“Maybe I’m being paranoid. Just some drunk or dumb kid showing off for his buddies,” she said. But all the while she fixed the flat, she kept an eye on the highway.
Sam caught a few hours sleep that night in a cheap roadside motel. By late afternoon the following day, she was past Atlanta, heading toward the Tennessee line. Scenery was great and traffic light. She hummed along with a Cole Porter tune on her CD player, watching a big Caddie coming up behind her. Fast.
“Who does that jerk think he is, Mario Andretti?” she muttered.
The highway wound its way through some very mountainous terrain with steep drop-offs and sharp turns. Definitely not the place for a big luxury sedan to be doing ninety. “Your funeral, buddy,” she said as the Caddie pulled abreast of her. She slowed to let him pass as they approached a beaut of a curve.
But he didn’t pass. Instead the black sedan started to crowd her, veering dangerously over the line into her lane. A quick glance at its right side showed scrapes and flecks of white paint. “Shit!” she gritted out, punching the accelerator.
All the wiggle room available to her right was a couple of feet of berm and then a flimsy guardrail. The drop-off below was a minimum of fifty feet. She could easily have outdistanced the heavy car on the uphill grade with her specially modified engine if not for the wicked curve coming up much too fast. But the Caddie driver’s intent was clear, even though the tinted windows hid him from view. This bozo was out to finish the job he’d begun the preceding day.
“Uncle Dec, I hope you weren’t exaggerating when you explained what this suspension can take,” she said, along with a short prayer as she cut the wheel sharply and tromped the gas pedal again. Her speedometer approached triple digits. She’d left the Caddie behind but he was closing once more. If she dared to slow down to negotiate the curve, he could rear-end her and blast the van through the railing. Sam and the Econoline would fly over the edge like a Canaveral rocket.
But the landing would be a lot rougher.
She felt the van’s two left wheels leave the ground as she entered the sharpest angle of the curve. Sam literally leaned to the left as she held the accelerator steady going into the final turn. When the wheels hit the pavement again and the van surged straight ahead up the road, she murmured, “Thank you Uncle Dec. Who’d a thought St. Jude was a mechanic?”
The Caddie was dropping back quickly when she checked her side-view mirror. Too far away to get a plate number, which would no doubt be as bogus as the one on the Olds. She felt the adrenaline rush begin to fade and took several deep breaths, calming her jangled nerves. It had been a lousy twenty-four hours.
At least she didn’t have her usual scalding cup of joe between her legs, she considered philosophically. Now that would’ve been a really painful way to touch up her bikini line. She tried the cell as soon as she saw a tower on a nearby mountaintop. Dialing 911 she was patched through to the local highway patrol. Somehow Sam had a gut feeling that the black Caddie with its incriminating exchange of paint would be long gone before they could spot it.
On impulse, she dialed Matt. “Hi sweetie… Oh, no, nothing much. I’m about halfway to St. Louis… Yeah, should get there tomorrow. Just wondering if you’ve had time to check out Winchester or Reicht yet… No,
