Death at the Wheel (13 page)

He nodded. "Yup. Then she tells the officers that the reason it's in the backseat is that it was in the road and wouldn't get out of her way no matter how much she honked, so she decided to back up and run into it, to scare it off. It went over the hood, over the windshield, and got stuck in the backseat, one hoof wedged between the seat and car. She thought it was kind of cute." He shook his head. "It's a wonder it didn't end up on top of her and bye-bye chickie."

I winced at the "chickie," but I have no patience with people, male or female, who won't use their brains.

"Roland collects moose stories," Andre said. "He once had to comfort a woman who thought she'd killed one of Santa's reindeer. And there was the assistant attorney general going north to do a title search. Swerved to avoid a moose and rolled the car, and then refused to go in the ambulance unless all the papers came, too."

Moose stories were fun but the clock was running. Time for me to hit the road, preferably sans moose. I did take the time to clean my plate while the guys talked shop and then I said my polite good-byes. In deference to Proffit's bachelor ears, I didn't bother to tell Andre what I'd be missing until we were together again. It was only going to be forty-eight hours. With enough cold showers, I could wait that long.

I was zipping along on 95, blessing the sixty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit even as I exceeded it, when a black van loomed up in my rearview mirror, coming closer and closer until we were almost sharing a seat. I was in the slow lane and the passing lane was clear, but knowing that some drivers are numb as stumps, I moved over to let him pass. He moved over with me and stayed on my tail. Annoyed, I pulled back into the right lane. This time, the van pulled alongside and bumped the side of my car. I swerved out of the way and hit the horn to wake him up, but he bumped me again and stayed there, pressing steadily against my car.

Recognition brought a stab of fear and an adrenaline surge. This was no careless or inattentive driver. This was someone trying to force me off the road, and there were no other cars in either direction.

My sweaty fingers slipped on the buttons on my car phone as I pressed *SP while I clung to the wheel and tried to keep the van from pushing me down the steep bank. Behind the heavily tinted glass, the driver was invisible. We were both slowing down, most of the way into the breakdown lane, when the van accelerated, shot past me, and pulled in at an angle in front of me, forcing me to a stop and pinning me there. I was trying to give a coherent account of what was happening to the police dispatcher when Dunk Donahue appeared at my window, a gun aimed at my head.

"Shut up and get the fuck out of the car." The lurch of my stomach made me regret my big breakfast.

"You said you weren't a cop!" he roared as he grabbed my shoulder, his fingers digging deep as he hauled me out of the seat and slammed me against the car. My silk blouse shredded, the sleeve coming away in his hand, leaving my shoulder bare. If there was such a thing as wardrobe insurance, I'd be a good candidate.

"I'm not a cop!" I said as forcefully as I dared with a gun only inches from my face.

"A stoolie then. You looked pretty buddy buddy with that cop at breakfast."

Realization that he'd been following me, spying on me, zipped through me like an electric shock. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Why were you having breakfast with the state police?" he demanded in a furious voice.

The gun bobbed and jumped in his hand like a living thing, shiny and lethal and filling my view until it was all I could see—just the gun and below it the red-streaked skin of my shoulder. I struggled to stay calm; to treat him like the reasonable man he wasn't.

"I don't know what your problem is, Dunk. Or why you're holding that gun to my head." Keeping my voice calm and level. Informative. Conversational. Trying not to scream. "I was just having breakfast with my boyfriend and that other guy, the trooper, just happened to come along. I've never seen him before."

"That's not how it looked to me."

"I can't help how it looked. I'm telling you how it was. I was having breakfast with my boyfriend, Andre Lemieux, and Trooper Proffit came along and joined us." I raised my voice, hoping, with the car door open, that the dispatcher might still be listening. That's the beauty of those little microphones. You can talk without taking your hands off the wheel. Or your eyes off the gun. "What's the matter with you? Here I am, just driving along Route 95 in Gardiner and suddenly you're trying to drive me off the road."

"Pipe down, missy," he ordered, waving the gun just inches from my nose. "I can hear you just fine." He reached past me and pushed the door shut.

We've all seen a thousand guns on TV, a steady, lifelong diet of them. The real thing, I was discovering, was very different. A gun holds your attention, grows until it fills the whole space before your eyes. This one was so close I could smell the oil used to clean it. I wondered if I could snatch it and throw it away—a fine time to be imagining heroics—and realized that if my hand moved, his hand would move, and that would be it. I thought about how I'd promised Andre I'd be careful.

Sweat was soaking what was left of my blouse—profuse, cold, drenching sweat, running down my arms and down my sides. Unbidden, my mother's annoying line—that horses sweat, men perspire, and women glow—popped into my head. Under stress, my mind reacts produces strange thoughts. Well, if mom was right, at this moment I was glowing like a beacon.

I hated this great red beast of a man who was making me sweat. Hated him so much I was almost as mad as I was scared. I wanted to scream and swear until I blew him off the face of the earth. But, discretion being the better part of valor, I piped down. I didn't want to die beside an interstate because a misguided attempt to help someone had mixed me up with Duncan Donahue. Death in the breakdown lane might be a great title, but it wasn't how I hoped to end my days.

"Okay, let's go through this again," he said, thrusting his head toward me until his face so close I could see the rusty stubble, the moles, scars, wrinkles. The whites of his small eyes were as red as his face. "The guy you spent the night with. Who's he?"

"My boyfriend."

"What does he do?"

I didn't dare lie. "He's a detective with the state police."

Dunk Donahue's red face radiated anger. I could see how badly he wanted to hit me, just for something to do. Up close and personal, as they say, he smelled of stale sweat and old beer and cigarettes. I figured he'd probably slept in the van. Even though there was a cool breeze, he was sweating, too. Much as I hated him at that point for making me afraid, I could see that he was almost as scared as I was. Scared and confused. He wasn't used to doing his menacing in such public places. Probably, for all his piggish sensibilities, not used to pulling guns on women.

"You're from Massachusetts. Why would you have a boyfriend in Maine?"

"I met him when he investigated my sister's murder," I began, but this wasn't the time for long stories. "Look, the Maine police don't have any interest in this. Julie lives in Massachusetts, the crime was in Connecticut.... This doesn't have anything to do with you. Why don't you believe me? I'm telling you the truth."

He hesitated, the gun wavering. "I don't get it," he said. "You're in New Hampshire on business and then coming to Maine to see your boyfriend. Why'd you come see me?"

"Like I told you. I was trying to help Julie... I thought you might know something useful." Fear does strange things to the vocal cords. My voice came out little and squeaky. "I thought you might know of someone who wanted to hurt Cal Bass... or something about his business. Something... anything we could give to the police so they'd see Julie isn't the only possible—"

He shoved the gun into his waistband, grabbed my arm, and twisted it up behind me, pressing my face into the car. I yelped involuntarily from the pain. "You'd better be telling me the truth, missy. I'm not letting anyone hurt my sister."

I struggled with my temper. "Use your head, Dunk," I said. "The only one here hurting your sister is you! Forcing me off the road and threatening me at gunpoint isn't going to help Julie. If you don't believe I'm who I say I am, look in my briefcase. Look at the letters, the papers. Just a big bunch of Northbrook stuff."

He just grunted and jerked my arm. I bit back a groan and tried again. "We both know the most important thing for Julie's peace of mind right now is to know that her daughters are safe, right? That's the one thing you can do for her. You go around acting like a mad dog and pulling guns on people, you won't be allowed to keep them."

I was trying to make him be reasonable but my words had the opposite effect. He gave my arm another vicious twist and spun me around again, leaning into my face. "Watch who you're calling names, you big bitch. Now, I'm going to let you go this time. If you know what's good for you, you won't say anything about this. Not to the Maine police or the Massachusetts police or the Connecticut police. Or your boyfriend. Get it? No one. You'll forget this ever happened. You try to get those kids taken away and I swear, I'll come after you. And next time, it won't just be a warning."

He spat the words out, his breath hot and foul. From what I'd seen of him at work, he was so accustomed to controlling people through intimidation that it wouldn't occur to him I might not do what he said.

In the distance, like the chimes of freedom, I could hear a siren wail. "Bitch!" he yelled. "You called the cops." His face went purple with rage, folding in on itself like a withered apple. The hand with gun came up.

I felt an eerie distancing, a sense of being outside myself watching the scene, a sense of time slowed down. My whole body was cold, tense, anticipating. This was it. Just as I was beginning to allow myself to consider the possibility of a life beyond work—a life with Andre—I was going to die on a dusty roadside.

He swung the gun toward my head. I ducked, closing my eyes, heard the clang of metal and the thud of flesh as he hit the car instead. He stared at his bloodied fist and at me, and if looks could kill I would have died on the spot. The wailing grew louder. "You'd better not say anything," he said. He gave me a tremendous shove that sent me sprawling into the travel lane. I heard the screech of brakes, the blare of a horn, as I rolled sideways, clawing for purchase on the asphalt. A woman in a red Cherokee gave me the finger as she sped away. Donahue sprinted for the van and roared off in a shower of gravel.

The force of my fall left me breathless. I scrambled away from the traffic on my hands and knees and sat on the sandy asphalt, too shaken to get up, my mind full of the blaring horn, the screeching tires, the sensation of rushing metal inches from my head. Slowly, tentatively, I rubbed my hands together, dusting the gravel off. Most of it was imbedded and would have to be picked out. I felt like I used to when I fell off my bike. Badly scraped hands and knees and seriously wounded pride.

A police car alive with lights pulled up behind me. A trooper got out, ran over, knelt down. I looked up into Roland Proffit's worried gray eyes. "Thea? I heard on the radio... Good God, what happened?"

"I'm okay," I said. "I'm okay. He didn't shoot me," and promptly burst into tears.

"Who
didn't shoot you?"

"Duncan Donahue. He came in his van and forced me off the road. He had a gun. I've never seen anyone so angry. But he didn't shoot me...." The words were almost inaudible through my sobs. Mortified, I struggled for control.

"Let's get you up," he said. Bending down, he put his hands under my elbows and gently raised me. "We'll go over to my car and you can tell me all about it."

I held my swollen, sandy, oozing palms stiffly in front of me. Little rivulets of blood were running down my ruined stockings. I've had my clashes with cops. They can be real stinkers. They're the ultimate authority figures and heaven knows, I have my problems with authority figures. But when you're dazed and shocked and hurt, no one can be kinder or understand better. I was happy to let him help me up; happy to lean on him as I hobbled to his car. My legs felt unreliable; the aftermath, I knew, of having had a gun pointed at my head.

He asked enough questions to put a description of Dunk and his van on the radio, then gave me time to pull myself together, as he produced a first aid kit and tended to my battered hands and bloody knee. "Good thing you don't play the piano for a living," he remarked as he picked gravel out. I felt like the hapless heroine of a silent movie, ready to clap my hand to my breast and declare Trooper Roland Proffit my hero.

"I could take you to a hospital." I shook my head. "You ready to talk about it?"

"He had a gun," I said in a small voice.

Proffit nodded. "Scary, aren't they? Do you know him?"

"I met him yesterday. In New Hampshire. At Verrill Brothers Trucking. I was stupid. I went there to ask about his sister...." As I told my story, anger creased his brow and darkened his eyes and I could see that he was ready to go out and slay dragons or at least Duncan Donahue on my behalf. Even a modern woman like me gets a thrill from that kind of protective anger.

"What do you want to do now?" he asked. "Sure you don't want to see a doctor?"

I shook my head. "I'm okay." I wanted to say that I'd felt more battered than this after a wild night with Andre, but I knew I'd better not. Andre is a very private person. "I'm fine. A little shaken and sore, that's all."

He stared at the ripped off sleeve and the muscles in his face tightened. "I could call Andre."

I shook my head. I didn't want to make a big deal out of this. "I just want to go to work now."

"What about Donahue?"

I thought about Julie, in prison, worried about her kids. "I don't know if you can do this," I said slowly, "but I really don't want to press charges. It's a huge hassle for all of us. As well as the last thing his poor sister needs right now. I just want to be sure he stays away from me."

He nodded, a hard look in his gray eyes. I knew he wished I'd asked him to throw the book at good ole Dunk. "Pressing charges is the best way...."