Dirty Blonde (30 page)

“Help!” Cate screamed at the top of her lungs, her desperation echoing through the hills. He must have followed her up here.

She took off in sheer panic. Smoke wafted around her. Muddling her thinking. Intensifying her nausea. The car gunned its engine, and she ran for her life, stumbling in her wet sneakers. She stopped screaming. No help would come. She’d have a better chance if she didn’t betray her position. Her breath went ragged as it hit the icy air, mixing with a swirl of toxic fumes.

A phosphorescent sign stood in her path. DANGER! GROUND PRONE TO SUDDEN COLLAPSE! DANGEROUS GASES PRESENT! The sign stood at the north end of the old Route 61, now closed off. Cate knew the old route by heart, and it gave her an idea.

She ran past the sign, her breathing labored in the poisonous air. Russo must have been reading her mind, because in the next second, she saw his car, visible by its headlights, driving over the hump placed as a barrier at the head of the old Route 61. The car’s grille bounced as it bounded past the sign, spraying snow from its tires. Russo was going to run her down or get close enough to shoot her. But Cate knew this terrain. She fought to think through her confusion. She could see the stripped tree trunks in front of her, black shadows against the snow. She prayed the ground didn’t collapse beneath her.

She bolted behind the cemetery, her hands hitting stray branches. She fell in the snow, then got up. She climbed higher up the hillside she knew was there. It was the only point on the summit higher than the cemetery. She’d played on it all the time as a kid, since it was so near school. She tried to run fast and lightly, so the ground wouldn’t give way under her. Darkness descended, the higher she climbed. The only illumination came from below, the headlights of the dark car as it swung around. The high beams swept beneath her, cutting a lethal swath through the smoky air.

Go, go, go.
It was pitch black, no streetlights or highway lights. No moon. Nothing to delineate the terrain to anybody who didn’t know every inch of it. Her heart hammered. She kept running alongside the hill, not wanting to go too high, because the land fell off behind. She prayed she was remembering right. Fumes filled her nostrils. She couldn’t think.

Russo drove below, going straight, approximating the road she knew curved sharply off to the right. He wouldn’t see that. The road followed the curve of the mountain. He wouldn’t anticipate that. It was her only chance.

Cate watched him slow his speed, looking for her. Smoke surrounded them, obscuring everything. The mine fire raged underneath. Russo stopped at a smoking rent in the road, the asphalt ruptured like an earthquake. Cate prayed he fell in from his car’s weight. She covered her nose to keep her wits about her.

Russo careened around the steaming fissure. Cate bolted along the hillside, bracing herself on dead trees, trying not to breathe too deeply. Russo caught up to her on a parallel track. Almost time to put her plan into action. Soon Russo would get out of the car and hunt her down on foot. She ran harder, panting.

Now!

Cate ran down the hill in the dark, wet and bedraggled, kicking up snow all around her. She cut the mountain at a diagonal toward the car, then half-ran, half-stumbled down onto the unplowed road.

The engine gunned. Russo accelerated toward her. Snow pinwheeled from the tires, and Cate took advantage of her brief head start. She gathered all her strength and bolted across the front of the car. The car burst forward but she was past.

Crak!
A gunshot exploded over her shoulder. Cate screamed in terror. A bullet seared her cheek.
Now!
She threw herself down onto the hill and dove into the snow, grabbing for a tree trunk. She hugged it with all her might and scrambled for purchase with her feet.

In the next second, Russo followed her at top speed. Old Route 61 curved to the right under the snow, but Cate had led him to the left. It had worked. The dark car sailed right over her head. She buried her face in the snow. Heat, dirt, stones, and pebbles rained down on her like a storm from hell.

The car flew over the side of the hill, into thin air. The next sound she heard was Russo’s scream, joining another’s. Hers. Then the hideous crash of his car smashing into the highway below. Debris and broken branches roiled down the hill around her head. In the next minute, everything fell quiet. Russo couldn’t hurt her anymore.

Cate should have felt horror, or relief, but a terrible sleepiness took over. Smoke curled from the wooded embankment. Fog clogged her nostrils. Tears filled her eyes. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t muster up a single thought.

She felt distanced from herself. She didn’t know if Russo had survived the crash or if he had died. Her consciousness dissolved into smoke. She told herself to hold on to the tree but her grip began to loosen. Her sopping sneaker lost its foothold.

Her eyes closed drowsily. She was so very tired. It had been a long, long day. If she could only put her head down and rest. On a pillow. On a shoulder. A man’s shoulder. Not Graham’s.

Nesbitt’s.

Don’t touch that

CHAPTER 38

Cate woke up to Nesbitt’s face in soft-focus fog. For a minute, she wasn’t sure if she was dreaming. He looked worried, so it couldn’t be a dream. Nobody worried in dreams. Also, she didn’t dream about Nesbitt. Much.

“Good morning, Judge,” Nesbitt said, and Cate blinked.

“Is it morning?” she said. Her mouth felt dry.

“I’m joking.” Nesbitt checked his watch. “It’s nine at night.”

“Oh.” Cate felt her head begin to clear. The room came into hazy focus. She was lying in a hospital bed with pull-up plastic rails. Light blue walls and a window on the right, its blue-patterned curtains drawn. An oxygen tube was under her nose. A mounted TV played on mute, a basketball game in too-vivid color.

“How do you feel?”

“I feel good.” Cate thought a minute. She didn’t hurt anywhere. She felt really happy. “Why am I so happy?”

“It’s the drugs.”

“I feel so calm.” Cate smiled, and Nesbitt smiled back.

“It makes a nice change.”

“What happened to me? Did I fall off a cliff?”

“No. They found you by the side of the road, passed out from the fumes. You got the full brunt. You were lying near a big crack of steam.”

“At least my pores are clean.”

Then Cate began remembering it all, albeit hazily. The cemetery. The cliff. The dark car. Russo. “Is he dead? He’s not dead, is he?”

“No. He’s upstairs, here. I saw him, and he’s resting. A bunch of broken bones, but the doctors say he’ll be fine.”

“Good. I think.” Cate felt her emotions revive, though buffered. “Now that he’s alive, am I allowed to wish he was dead?”

Nesbitt smiled. “Now that you’re alive, I can say I told you so.”

“So we’re even.”

“Exactly.”

“Is he in pain, at least?”

“I believe so.”

“A lot or a little?”

“Tell you what. As soon as he heals, I’ll beat the crap out of him for you.” Nesbitt’s smile faded. “We got the call almost as soon as it happened. He had his ID on him.”

“And his gun.”

“He took a shot at you?” Nesbitt asked, alarmed. “I hadn’t heard that.”

“I almost caught one, but I missed. Sorry.” Cate remembered the heat on her cheek. It didn’t even bother her. These must be
some
drugs. She resolved to show more empathy on the next drug case before her, then she remembered she wasn’t a judge anymore.

“He’ll be released into our custody, and we’ll charge him.”

“How does that work exactly? Will you charge him and then beat him up? Or beat him up and then charge him?”

“Usually we beat them up first. That way we get the confession.”

“Don’t vary it on my account.”

“Passers-by found his car and they called the locals, who were already on their way.”

“My genius car called the cops, didn’t she?”

“Right. How much you pay for that baby?”

“Not enough.”

“By the way, you’re gonna need a new one. That thing’s an accordion. Russo do that, too?”

“Yes.”

“Were you in it at the time?”

“No. It’s a Mercedes hate crime.” Cate saw Nesbitt frown, despite her excellent joke.

“We’ll need a statement. You’ll tell me in detail when you feel better.”

“I’ll never feel better than I do now.”
In fact, I may be in orgasm, as we speak.

“I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know about Centralia. It’s incredible. Toxic smoke coming right out of the ground like that. I can’t believe the feds don’t cordon it off.”

“It’s a theme park for carbon monoxide.”

“I don’t understand why they can’t put it out, after so many years. We can land a man on the moon but we can’t put out a fire?”

Bootleg miners didn’t help, but that’s another story.
“So when can I go?”

“They won’t let you go until morning. They want to watch your blood gases.”

“My blood has gas?”

Nesbitt laughed.

“I feel fine. Time to go.” Cate began to lift herself from the bed, then sank back down, dizzy. “Or not.”

“Chill. Or as my daughter says, chillax. By the way, I called your friend Gina, telling her you were fine, so she didn’t find out from the TV news. I told her that you’d be out tomorrow morning and she didn’t need to come up. That okay with you?”

“Good, thanks.” Cate nodded, pleased. Putting Gina out would have been the last thing she wanted.

“I’ll take you back to the city tomorrow morning, when they discharge you. You’ll need the ride. Okay with you, too?”

“Sure, thanks.”

“By the way, there is good news. Jenna Whitcomb was found in bed with Mark Melendez.”

Cate frowned, confused. “You mean Jenna Whitcomb, the actress?”

“Yes, the new Julia Roberts. She was caught by
Access Hollywood
, cheating on her husband, Ron Torvald, the new Russell Crowe.”

Cate smiled. “How could any woman cheat on the new Russell Crowe? I wouldn’t even cheat on the old Russell Crowe.”

“It’s a major scandal. They’ve released the photos, and he’s already said he’s filing for divorce tomorrow. Mark Melendez is the new
new
Russell Crowe.”

“How do you know these people?”

“I told you, I have a teenage girl. My house gets
Cosmo
. We vote on Hottie of the Month. We even take the quizzes. Don’t tell the guys on the squad. Boys can be so dorky.” Nesbitt rolled his eyes, and Cate laughed.

“So why does this matter to me?”

“This is the gossip of the decade, which means the heat is off of you, at least temporarily. You’re off the map. There’s no press for you outside the hospital, and I bet there’ll be very few at your house because there’s a big local angle to the story. Mark is from Doylestown.”

“Mark? You on a first-name basis?”

Nesbitt actually blushed. “Gimme a break. He’s Hottie of the Year. We voted for him.”

“So the press is gone? I feel so used.” Cate felt a residual sleepiness, and Nesbitt, watching, cocked his head.

“You want some water or something?”

“No, thanks.”

“I should tell the nurse you’re awake.”

“I don’t feel so awake,” Cate said, her eyelids drooping. Suddenly she felt good and drowsy, postcoital without the coital, and in the next second, she drifted into sleep.

The next time she woke up, the room was dark except for various red and blue numbers on her vital-signs monitor. Her heartbeat was a glow-in-the-dark green outline of jagged peaks and valleys that reminded her of the Appalachians. She touched the tube under her nose, and the oxygen was still there. But Nesbitt was gone, his chair empty. She tried not to feel let down. He was above-the-call, but he wasn’t crazy.

Cate breathed in and out, taking silent stock of her situation. On the plus side, she was alive, she hadn’t gotten Russo killed, and there was a new new Russell Crowe from Doylestown. On the negative side, she had no job, no boyfriend, and no reason to go home. She lay still in the dark watching the Appalachians march across the vital-signs monitor. She had no idea if it was truly nighttime, in the artificial day/night of the hospitals.

She felt oddly suspended in the middle of time and space. She didn’t belong here, up north, among the peaks and valleys. Centralia had loosened its hold on her; she had overdosed on its toxins and they’d almost killed her. She felt oddly free of it somehow. The fire that raged had burned from within, and consumed their family like so much fuel. She wouldn’t let it consume her, too.

Cate didn’t belong here anymore. She needed fresh air. She wanted to go home, and for the first time, home meant Philadelphia. She had to start over. She’d figure out how when she got there. Maybe on the way back, she’d talk it over with Nesbitt. She told herself she wasn’t looking forward to it, before her eyes closed again.

“Judge Fante?” It was Brady at the door the next morning, in his dark neat suit, worn with a black topcoat and a fresh shave. “How’re you feeling?”

“Fine, thanks.” Cate rose from the bed and shook his hand, dressed in her sweats and sneakers, now dry. She was already in her coat, feeling herself again, and had even showered for the trip home with Nesbitt.

“You’ve had quite an experience, with Russo and all.”

“How is he?” Cate’s nurse hadn’t known.

“He’s fine, resting. He’ll be in the hospital awhile, unless they transfer him to Philly.”

“Good.”

“I heard that your car’s totaled. I came to take you back to the city.”

“No, Nesbitt’s taking me.”
Another jurisdictional dispute over little old me.

“He can’t make it. He was called on a job, and when we heard you were stranded up here, I came up.”

Rats. I mean, thanks.
“You didn’t have to do that. I could have taken a train or rented a car.”

“I’m detailed to you until the end of the week. I took the liberty of getting your personal items from your car. Your purse, your cell phone, and some boxes. I think your secretary called your insurance company. We’re good to go.”

“Great, thanks,” Cate said, then rose with her signed discharge papers. “We should stop by the hotel to get my stuff.”