BAD TRIP SOUTH (13 page)

She hurried Crow away from the car, avoiding the headlights, and over to the side of the road. Someone came up to them, an elderly man in overalls. He said, “You’re hurt, let me help you.”

Heddy snarled, “Get the fuck away from me, man,” and he backed away, surprised.

Crow was stumbling, but his steps were surer as they reached the gravel lining the road where Jay stood holding Emily in his arms. Next to him stood Carrie shivering, keeping her arm close to her body. Jay was already surveying the wrecked cars looking for someone to help them, someone to report to, Heddy saw it in his face.

“
Move it,” she said, slipping her free hand into her purse. It was a new one she’d bought at a discount department store when she had gone out earlier to pick up the chicken for dinner. It was a big forest green vinyl bag and it held, besides the money and her gun, two pints of Jim Beam. It seemed a lifetime ago that everything had started going wrong. The guy at the service station surprising her at the ladies’ room door. The boy who stepped into the room with a gun to which a silencer had been attached. And now this...

She herded the family before her and steadied Crow with one hand on his upper arm. They passed by the other wrecked cars. Heddy saw the female driver of the Volkswagen and knew she was either dead or completely knocked senseless. She wasn’t moving while two men tried to pry open her stuck driver’s door. She saw the kid in the Galant, his girlfriend on her knees in the front seat, hanging over him and wailing. People were at her door, trying to convince her to come out of the car. Spilled gasoline from ruptured tanks created rainbow sheets sparkling across the pavement. Heddy wrinkled her nose at the stink. The whole place could go up with one spark.
Outta here, had to get away from here.

All total there were probably eight cars and trucks at the scene, but most everyone had exited their vehicles to try to help the people still remaining in the wrecked cars. They paid scant attention to the five stragglers making their way past the stalled cars into the darkness beyond. Too many people all over the place, too much activity.

Heddy looked around and saw the road was bounded on one side by a forest and on the other by open fields. She said, “We’ll head across the road, into those trees.”

They lost the glow of headlights as they moved deeper into tree cover. The land was flat and it was clear between trees so the going was easy. After they were in a couple of hundred yards, Heddy told Jay to turn right. She hoped they were following the road and could come out far enough away from the wreck to catch a ride. Not catch a ride, actually, but take one.

Her face kept burning so that she put her hand up to her cheeks over and over, wondering how bad it looked, how red it was. Yet they’d been lucky, all of them, to escape serious injury.

They could get away from this mess if they hurried. They were behind the highway patrol’s back if she was right about this maneuver. Who the hell knew? She was like some kind of glider that sailed in the clouds, going whatever way the wind blew.

Carrie was making sounds. Heddy said, “Shut up, you’re not hurt.”

“
Where are we going?” Jay asked, but he continued walking.

Crow kept wiping his lip and saying, “Shit, I’m all bloody, shit, look at this shit, how’d that happen, Heddy?”

“
It was an accident, how’d you think it happened? No, really, I decided there wasn’t enough excitement and thought I’d plow into an oncoming car. You dumb fucking goof.”

“
Can it, will you? Where we going?” Crow wanted to know, unconsciously echoing Jay.

“
I hope we’re following alongside the road and we can come out above the wreck. I’ll flag down a car.”

“
Maybe you’ll flag down a patrol car,” Jay said. “Maybe you better flag down an ambulance. My wife’s hurt and Emily might be hurt too.”

“
I’m okay, Daddy.”

Just then they heard the sirens and knew the ambulances and cops were closing in. Everyone stopped, even Heddy, to listen. She judged they were too far away to ever find them now. She couldn’t even make out any individual lights from the direction of the highway, only a hazy yellow glow that came through the tops of the trees. At any moment she expected to hear an explosion and the whole area light up with flame.

She pushed them onward and for another twenty minutes they walked through dark silent woods, no sounds other than their feet on the soft cushiony leaf fall on the ground and an occasional whimper from Carrie. Even the kid was quiet, walking next to her father, holding onto his hand to keep from falling in the dark.

When Heddy thought they were far enough from the scene, she instructed Jay to head back toward the highway. At the woods’ edge, she turned to Crow and put both hands on his shoulders to look into his face. “You okay now? Can you keep an eye on them until I get another car?”

He grinned a little then winced and wiped at his split lip. “Yeah, I got it wrapped.”

“
I wish that was true.” With that she stepped away from the treeline and crossed a soggy drainage ditch, her shoes sinking and squishing, to the roadside. She saw a car coming toward her, its headlights small white eyes cutting through the darkness. There was no lighted bubble on top so she hoped it wasn’t a patrol car. If it was...hell, she’d know what to do if it came to that. You did what you had to. That’s what she and Crow had been doing for days now. Whatever the situation called for, they did it. You didn’t survive any other way.

She stepped onto the macadam and felt the heat of it warm the soles of her muddy shoes. Despite the earlier rain the highway retained sunny summer heat. She was sweating, fear sweat, even though the air had cooled. She could smell herself, musky sweat crawling all over her body. She didn’t know how she looked. She had on the wig and had straightened it before leaving the woods. But she might have blood on her from Crow and her face was probably scarlet with burns. She had no idea. She just knew she had a mission to perform, and she’d do that. Nothing could stop her.

As the car neared, slowing, she stepped further into the road blocking passage and waved her arms. The car lights were in her eyes, white sapphire suns bearing down out of darkness. The car stopped. She rushed toward it and around to the driver’s side. She had the gun out before she got there and hit the rolled up window with the gun barrel. The driver was a woman, fortyish, her eyes big and round with new fear.

“
Open the goddamn door.” Could she shoot this woman? She didn’t think so. Or maybe she could. Yes, she could. If she had to, she’d shoot her.

The woman started moving the car forward and Heddy stepped back, taking aim, ready to put a bullet through the window. The woman watched her and slammed the brakes. The car, a very old red Ford Escort, died.

“
Get out of the car,” Heddy shouted. She looked up and down the highway, hoping no one else would come along. “Hurry!”

The woman unlocked her door and stepped out. Heddy marched her at gun point across the ditch to where Crow waited with the others. “Go get in the car, I’ll take care of this,” he said.

The woman was babbling. She had been terrified when the woman pointed a weapon at her, but now that she saw so many strange people, some of them dripping blood or looking wounded, Heddy could see she was wild with panic. Her hands fluttered at her breast as if they would be able to catch reality and bend it back to normal again.

Heddy gestured the family to the car. She got them inside and tried the ignition. It started on the first try, but it backfired and boiled smoke from the exhaust. She put it into gear and heard the clunk, felt the lurch jerk her backward as the transmission dropped into drive.

“
What a piece of shit. I had to stop a car that ought to be in a junkyard, for crying out loud!” She turned it around and kept it idling by placing one foot on the brake while pressing on the gas pedal to keep the engine going, waiting for Crow. She thought at first the sound she heard was another backfire, but then she realized the sound had come from the forest where she couldn’t see a thing.

Crow killed the woman. Well, she wasn’t surprised. The woman would have told the cops her car had been stolen; she would have let everyone know what car they were in. Shit happens, that was Heddy’s philosophy. It happens to be the best of us, she thought. Don’t it, though? Life’s a beach and then you drown. What a hoot.

If she wasn’t so exhausted, so wired and sick to her stomach and trembling with an overload of adrenaline, she’d laugh at just how many people were dying tonight. It was a regular slaughter.

#

THE Escort wouldn’t go over fifty miles an hour. At that speed it rumbled and spit coal black smoke from the exhaust pipes and threatened to shake itself to pieces.

“
You couldn’t find a better car than this?” Crow asked. He wished now he’d let Heddy stay in the woods and he’d been the one to approach the road to flag down a vehicle.

“
It’s not my fault that woman was driving this junk heap.”

There had been headlights behind them for twenty miles now. Another junk heap unable to go very fast, Crow wondered? Or their pals from St. Louis?

“
Well, we’re gonna have to do something, Heddy. I think we’ve got company on our ass.”

He saw Heddy glance in the rearview mirror. The car jerked and banged as she tried to push it above fifty. Suddenly she applied the brakes and they all found their heads whip-lashing. She pulled to the side of the road.

“
What’re you doing?” Crow asked, glancing back over his shoulder at the car that had been following them.

“
We need to settle this right here. I can’t outrun them. Let’s just get out of the car and do it, Crow.” She pushed open the creaking driver’s door and stepped out.

Crow hurried, doing the same. He said, “You take the keys?”

Heddy held up the car keys and shook them.

They both turned to face the oncoming headlights.

“
Don’t pull a gun until you know for sure,” Heddy said. She had her hand in the green vinyl shoulder bag.

The car came toward them slowly. When it reached where they stood at the side of the road, it stopped. Crow stiffened. How damn many people had the lab owners sent after them, a whole fucking battalion?

Someone got out on the driver’s side and looked over the roof at them. “Got car trouble?”

He was about a hundred and fifty years old, Crow estimated. He had a white Santa Claus beard and enough wrinkles to rival the surface of the moon. This was not someone tailing them from the wreck, couldn’t be. The tough guys in St. Louis didn’t hire on geezers. The relief that flooded through Crow was like a whoosh of cool wind down a hot canyon wall.

“
Nah, we’re okay, Pops.”

“
Anything I can do to help?”

“
Nope, thanks for stopping.” Crow gave little thought to taking the old man’s car. It was something from the forties, something almost as old as he was. A faded black round-roofed car that looked like a hearse. They’d be no better off hijacking it.

When the old man pulled away, Crow gave Heddy a grin. “We’re getting paranoid.”

“
Getting
? I’ve already passed paranoid into insane.” She laughed a little, relieved too.

Back in the car with the Escort on the highway again, Crow said, “They check out that Riviera, they’re going to wonder where the owner is.”

“
I thought of that.” Heddy looked over at Jay. “But I don’t think we can let them go.”

Crow wondered why. Yeah, they knew where he and Heddy were going, but what did it matter? They’d be out of the country before anyone caught them. Maybe. Maybe not. He wasn’t sure about that, really. For that reason or perhaps reasons of her own Heddy just didn’t want to let the family go. For his part, Crow realized with a shock that he wouldn’t be able to pull a trigger on Carrie or the little girl. He had a thing for Carrie. It’s true she had talked him out of doing anything back in the motel room, but even that made him want her more. She spoke to him in a soft, soothing voice. She appealed to his honor and no one had done that in years. Relinquishing the idea of taking her against her will made him feel cleaner somehow than he’d felt in ages.

Oh, he could do Jay easy, no problem, but kill a kid or a woman he wanted to fuck? Not in this lifetime. So they’d have to let all three of them go.

He hadn’t wanted to bust the woman in the woods, for that matter. He thought about it before he did it. He didn’t listen to her. He’d heard better pleading from guys in Leavenworth. Shit, he’d done better begging
himself
. Not that it had saved him either. It just seemed sort of sad to murder a woman because she had driven her car down the wrong road at the wrong time. Wasteful. She was old, maybe forty-five, and she was fat as a butter ball and she was, in the end, dead as sin, lying on her stomach in old dead leaves with a hole in her head. Damn shame.