Worth the Trip (20 page)

“But what is he getting out of it? What’s the point of all this?”

Trip shrugged. “He strikes me as a man with a sense of humor.”

“He has plans for the loot. We aren’t going to find the big payday this way.”

“Maybe not, but we’ll recover some of the stolen goods.”

“And your job is to recover everything.”

“We can call him if it will make you feel better. Maybe he’ll tell you what this is about.”

“Not over the phone.” Norah smiled. “But he’d get a kick out of it, and I hear laughter is the best medicine.”

THE SKY WAS A PUFFY MASS OF CLOUDS WHEN
they left the motel room the next morning, the air was so crisp it nearly crackled, and the Harley was gone. What surprised Norah the most was that she didn’t even blink, just looked at the silver car in the space where the Harley had been parked and thought, Oh good, heat. Not being curled around Trip was a plus, too, considering the state of their relationship, which was, not to put too fine a point on it, nonexistent, except where the robbery was concerned. Which was exactly as it should be, she reminded herself, and let it go . . . Okay, what she actually did was suppress it, but it amounted to the same thing with the caveat that there’d be a reckoning later. But Trip would be gone by then, so he wouldn’t have to pay for her lack of perspective, and she’d be able to handle it without him around to pity her. Pity would make it so much worse.

When they got to the car, she held her hand out for the keys. Trip gave them to her without resistance, which was kind of disappointing since she’d had all her arguments lined up, and now she wouldn’t get to demonstrate how firmly grounded she was in the case, and that she hadn’t spent a miserable night pretending to sleep while she was really concentrating on staying on her side of the bed so she didn’t inadvertently brush his wound and cause him more pain.

“You’d think the FBI could do better,” she said as she climbed into the driver’s seat of the late model silver sedan. “I’m going to have to memorize the license plate if we park it anywhere more crowded than this.”

“Not being noticed is the point here,” Trip said from the passenger seat, “and anyway, it’s what’s under the hood that counts.”

She nodded, ejecting the image of those heart-studded boxers from her brain, then giving her nerve endings a stern talking-to.
Those boxers are a slippery slope
, she told them, one that would start with mind-blowing pleasure and end up dropping her right into the emotional muddle she’d just worked her way out of. Trip was not part of the ADVENTURE anymore, at least not in that way.

She started up the sedan and directed it out of the parking space at the back of the motel lot toward the road at the front, the driveway taking her past the office. The manager came racing out, a small, round woman in her fifties, who might have been moderately pretty without the panic on her face.

Norah jammed on the brakes, Trip rolled down the passenger window, and the manager hurried around to his side of the car.

“How was your stay?” she said, definitely not what they’d been expecting. Arson, violence, even potential murder, but a status report with that expression?

Trip put his hand over the manager’s, and looked deep into her eyes. “Talk to Kizi lately?” he asked her, and when her mouth dropped open, he turned to Norah. “Go,” he said, which was all the impetus she needed. She pulled up to the road, and he said, “Right,” before she could even look both ways or remark that there was a lot of traffic for such a small town.

Right took her in the opposite direction from most of the traffic, at first, anyway, since at least four vehicles made U-turns and came after them. Norah stomped on the gas pedal, the car leapt ahead, the engine roaring. “You weren’t kidding,” she said, easing off.

“We’re up against people who know this area like the back of their hand,” he said, apparently a bad news first kind of guy. “We’re going to need all the speed we can get, but at least the roads are two-lane. That’ll work in our favor.”

“You think Kizi called the manager.”

“I think somebody instilled the fear of whatever gods the Ottawa pray to in her.”

“Some sort of nature religion, maybe an Earth Mother type of belief system.”

“Yeah, that’s the important thing here.”

“I’m trying to be calm,” she snapped at him.

“Calm is good,” Trip said, no doubt flashing back to her climbing out of the driver’s seat last time they were in a fix like this, which had been bad enough in her Escape but would be impossible in the sedan. Not to mention his wounded leg would present a problem. “We weren’t on the news last night,” he continued, keeping his voice to a quiet, even level.

“You’re not talking to a mental patient.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’ve spent the last few days with you,” Norah shot back, which, as far as she was concerned, explained her slipping hold on sanity. “Can we get back to the confirmed lunatics?”

“Those guys knew they winged me, and we weren’t going far,” he said, sounding disgruntled now. “They probably reached out to everyone they know, and it spread from there.”

“Seven degrees of separation?”

“Let’s hope not. That would mean Hollie and those guys who followed us in Chicago know where we are.”

It wasn’t a stretch to think Hollie might know, considering she was probably still in the state. “Maybe I should worry about these guys first,” she said, watching them in the rearview mirror, a caravan of trucks, cars, and SUVs, none of them new, all of them wobbling in and out of the line, jockeying for position. Then most of them peeled off, leaving three vehicles behind the sedan.

“Want some more bad news?” she said to Trip. “They seem to be communicating with each other.”

“There’s a shocker.” He twisted around and looked out the back window. “They’re going for a squeeze maneuver. One of them will stay behind us, one of them will get in front, and the third will come up alongside us in the other lane and force us off the road.”

“I wouldn’t enjoy that.”

“Definitely not since I doubt they’d be as focused on me this time.”

“You think they’ll hold a grudge?”

“They seem like the type.”

“What if I keep them from getting in front of me?”

“That’s the defensive way to handle this situation.”

“And defensive isn’t going to be enough,” Norah said, not that the grimness in his voice was her first clue. Hearing the part about the grudge had pretty much put her on the offensive.

“We’ll have to take them out, then get to the highway as fast as possible,” Trip said. “Before somebody else finds us.”

“Do you know where the highway is?”

“GPS,” he said, pulling out his phone. “Not that we can miss I-75 since it runs right down the middle of the state. But it would be nice to come across it on a road where there’s a ramp. Once we’re on the highway they’ll have no way of knowing where we are.”

“So, violence.” She glanced over at him. “Got any suggestions?”

“Don’t worry about denting the car.”

She snorted softly, smiling despite herself. “Something more specific might be helpful.”

“Just keep driving, it’ll come to you.”

Great. For days he’s been dictating to me. Now, when I want him to tell me what to do he clams up.
And asking again would make her look needy and pathetic, not to mention there was her pride, which he’d stirred up by making sure she knew he was there for the FBI, but not for her and her father. So, what the hell, if he was willing to put his fate in her hands, then damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.

They’d left the town behind, the road curving through farmland and woods. The vehicle immediately behind her, a pickup truck that sounded like a ninety-year-old chain smoker with pneumonia, nosed out into the next lane. She swerved, keeping the sedan in front of the truck, one eye on the rearview mirror, the other on the tight curve coming up ahead. The truck was in and out of the oncoming traffic lane, and the driver was getting good and angry.

They hit the curve, both vehicles slowing drastically. Norah kept to the right lane, the guy in the truck taking it as an opportunity to get around her. And oncoming traffic wasn’t cooperating, which was to say there wasn’t any. Damn, Norah thought, punching it as they came out of the turn, then shrieking when her windshield filled with horse and buggy, equipped with one of those triangular warning signs.

“Amish,” Trip yelled, bracing himself in the passenger seat because the road was bounded by deep ditches, with marshland on one side and heavy forest on the other. The buggy didn’t have anywhere to go, and neither did she, coming up fast on the buggy. And then it got worse.

A semi appeared down the road. Somebody wasn’t going to be happy in a minute. Norah decided it wouldn’t be her. She floored it, the sedan rocketing forward, giving her just enough room to slip in front of the pickup, the car giving a little shimmy when their bumpers brushed.

The pickup driver found himself next to the buggy, staring at the word MACK in capital letters and made the only maneuver he could, cranking the wheel hard to the left and going airborne into the swamp. Norah just caught the splash before she buzzed around the buggy and whipped back into the right lane.

“One down,” she said to Trip.

“That was luck.”

“What have you got against luck?”

“Nothing, but there are two more guys back there who are already on the phone getting reinforcements. And after your little demonstration, there’ll be more than three of them. Picking them off one at a time isn’t going to cut it.”

So what do you suggest?
She didn’t waste time asking the question, though. The other two vehicles, a low-riding car and an SUV, were around the buggy and coming up behind her. And she could only think of one maneuver that might work. It might kill them, too, but it was all she had.

She poured on the gas, the sedan’s engine roaring as they sped down the long straightaway in front of them, with another sharp curve ahead. She hit the edge of the curve with a quarter or third of a mile between the sedan and the other two vehicles, stopping so fast the sedan shuddered as the tires lost traction, the back end sliding and the tires smoking as she forced the car into a tight U-turn.

“What are you doing?” Trip said, one hand on the dash, eyes on the two vehicles barreling down on them.

“You wanted a master stroke,” she said, accelerating to a modest speed and keeping the car dead center on the white line.

“Back off, Norah, this is a suicide mission.”

“They don’t want us dead, remember?”

“Unless it’s us or them.”

Norah kept going, filled with a recklessness that was part adventure and more hurt than she cared to admit—the pain she’d suppressed last night—figuring she’d deal with it later.
Later
, apparently, was now, and while she had no intention of dying, or even being hurt, it gave her a bit of a kick to give Trip some of his own medicine. Payback? Sure, and it was absolutely insane. But it was a lot of fun, too.

She pressed harder on the gas pedal, aiming straight for the last two chase vehicles, accelerating as they raced toward each other, no hesitation, no second-guessing, her hands firm on the wheel. When she was close enough to see their faces through their windshields, when Trip shouted, “Noraaaaaah,” and the other drivers were yelling, too, she swerved sharply toward the SUV, which was slightly ahead.

The SUV driver took evasive action out of pure reflex, cutting the wheel sharply to the left, which sent him hurtling over the ditch and into the woods beyond. Norah was already cutting the wheel hard toward the car, that driver going airborne like the first, his yell trailing off behind him like he’d fallen over a cliff instead of making a short trip into a shallow marsh.

Norah slammed on the brakes, turned around, and drove back the way they’d come, slowly, checking both vehicles as she passed by them.

“They could have guns,” Trip said, his voice an octave higher than usual.

“They weren’t even out of their vehicles yet, and I wanted to make sure they were okay.”

“What the hell were you thinking?”

Norah shrugged and kept driving, keeping the car to the speed limit. “It always works on TV.”

“TV?
TV
? Jesus Norah, you almost killed us with a TV stunt?”

“I didn’t almost kill us,” she shot back, more than a little irritated. Being on familiar ground again, at least intellectually, helped her keep her cool. “I challenged drivers who were probably men and likely bullies. Aggression in bullies is used to cover up a lack of self-esteem, often with a host of underlying fears and phobias.”

“Bullies don’t always back down when you confront them.”

“That’s true, but the confrontation took them out of their behavioral comfort zone, and when I introduced unexpectedness—I swerved, in other words—they were confused and frightened enough to flinch.”

“And if one of them had been a psycho with a death wish?”

She shook her head. “Those guys are usually loners.”

Trip sat back, clearly steaming. “You’re getting a kick out of this, aren’t you?”

“Absolutely.”

“A thousand things could have gone wrong.”

“And nothing did, so why are you tearing me apart?” She already knew the answer—she’d taken his role in the operation and left him to sit back and be rescued.

Trip huffed out a breath and flopped back in his seat, proving her point. He didn’t sulk for long. “I didn’t think the second guy was going to take the bait,” he said, glancing over at her with a grudging little smile that warmed as he talked. “He stuck with you for a second.”

Long enough for her to start thinking of alternatives, but what she said was, “I never doubted he’d lose,” which curiously enough was the absolute truth.

“And that’s why he did,” Trip said. “Half of any success is believing you can pull it off.”