Unfiltered & Unsaved (7 page)

The light turned green, but Hope didn’t really notice beyond a vague impression. She was too busy concentrating on the sound of Elijah’s voice, on the tense, worried tone in it. “I’m coming.”

“Hope, don’t.”

“Shut up, I’m coming to get you. Can you get out somehow? To the parking lot?”

“You don’t know what you’re getting into!”

“I know you’re already in it,” she said. “And I know that I need to help you get out of it.”

He was quiet again for what felt like a long, long moment. A car cruised up behind her and honked loudly; Hope flinched, and realized that the light was still green, and going stale. She hit the gas and hurried through—not fast enough for the car chasing her, which whipped around her and roared off. It was filled with drunk college guys, one of whom leaned his bare ass out the window as it sped past.

Honestly.

“We’re at the Rio Verde Valley Inn off of 298. First floor, southwest corner of the building. I’ll meet you in the parking lot. If you don’t see me, keep driving and don’t stop; toss your phone on the way out of town so they can’t track it, and whatever you do, don’t look back. Understand?”

He sounded serious—serious and scared. She swallowed hard and said, “I understand. But you’d better be there, E.J. I mean it.”

He hung up without replying. She stared down at the phone for a second, then turned left at the next intersection and dropped the phone into the passenger seat. It was at least five more miles to the motel. She’d only noticed it vaguely before, as an annoying neon blinking sign with a cartoon-y man in a nightgown and cap lying down on a mattress; the building had always looked more like a prison than a good night’s sleep, to her.

She supposed that impression might have actually been correct after all.

It occurred to her that she should be watching out for Skinner; he knew what her car looked like, after all. She tried to spot him as she drove, but if he was behind her, he was too good at it for her to see him.

She managed to make it to the Rio Verde Valley Inn’s blue neon sign in record time.

The parking lot was, as always, about one-third full, mostly of anonymous sedans and a couple of dusty pickups, with one familiar panel van sitting near the far corner. She supposed at least a few people checked in were there to actually sleep, not party, but she suspected that the cars probably changed in the lot at least three times during the night.

The southwest corner was where Elijah had told her he’d meet her. Hope took the turn into the parking lot and cruised slowly past the lined spaces and rooms with lighted windows. All the curtains were closed. She waited for someone to burst out of a room and charge at her—like Mr. Solomon—but it was quiet out.

Elijah, ominously, was nowhere to be seen.

She slowed even more, craning to look around. Shadows moved inside of the occupied rooms—and some of them were obviously occupied with each other, considering the interestingly intertwined silhouettes she saw—but she didn’t see anybody waiting outside.

If you don’t see me, keep driving,
he’d told her. And that was good advice, of course; if he couldn’t get out of his room, or decided it was too big a risk, then she needed to get the hell out of here and make a new start altogether—somewhere Mr. Solomon couldn’t follow, or wouldn’t bother. It meant giving up her life here, but it wasn’t much of a life, really; she could start over somewhere else. She had the resources in the bag sitting on the seat beside her.

But you said you’d do something good with it,
her conscience whispered.
What happened to giving it away to a charity, or to people in need? Why can’t you just start handing it out to the homeless? There’s probably a half dozen within a block of this place.

“I’m doing something good,” she whispered aloud, to silence that increasingly loud voice. “I’m helping Elijah. And his friend.”

What do you really know about this
friend
Avita anyway? You didn’t even ask him, did you?

How do you know Elijah didn’t just lure you here so they could rob you?

She hadn’t thought of that before, but suddenly it seemed like an imminent, chilling threat. This was the kind of place where screams for help went unanswered, after all, and the police response was slow. Hanging out with a hundred thousand plus in cash at a sketchy motel seemed like a really bad idea.

She yelped when a form suddenly lunged out of the shadows and into the white glare of her headlights, and she slammed on the brakes more out of instinct than real thought. The thin shriek of tires skidding sounded very loud to her in the silence.

Elijah looked terrible. They’d avoided bruising his face, but she could tell from his pallor and the tense way he held himself that he was hurt, maybe a lot. He pressed one hand to his side, and beneath it, his shirt leaked red. The other hand he held out, palm out, in a silent plea to stay still.

Then he leaned forward and rested that palm on the hood of the car, breathing hard.

Hope didn’t think, she just jammed the car in park and jumped out to grab his arm. His weight sagged against her, and then he managed to find his strength again and pull away. “Help her first.”

For a second she didn’t know who he was talking about, and then she saw the dark-haired girl huddling in the shadows near the parked panel van. She looked young,
very
young—sixteen, maybe seventeen. Too young to be out on her own living like this.

And very, very scared.

“Come on,” Hope said, and gestured to her. “It’s all right. Come on.”

The girl got to her feet, moving awkwardly, and Hope realized that it was because of the high round swell of her stomach. She was pregnant, at least six months gone. Painfully thin, against that lush curve.

“Avita, come on!” Elijah said. “It’s okay. She’s a friend. Hurry!”

Avita took a few steps toward them, but before she could reach them, the door swung open from one of the motel rooms, and a big, beefy man was silhouetted in the glare of lights. She cried out and backed up. When Elijah tried to go to her, he staggered again.

The man lunged forward, grabbed Avita by the elbow, and yanked her toward the door. “No you don’t,” he said, and shoved her bodily inside.

Elijah let out a groan that sounded more like frustration than pain, but he didn’t try to go after her. Instead, he yanked open the passenger door and practically fell inside. “Go!” he yelled at Hope. “Come on, move!”

She slid in behind the wheel, slammed the door, and put the car in drive. As she hit the gas and made a wide, fast turn, she saw the man in the doorway—Mr. Solomon, she guessed—watching them. He wasn’t trying to come after them.

It looked like he was … smiling.

Hope saw why as she completed the turn and headed for the exit of the parking lot. Bathed in the neon blue glow of the sign sat a parked black sedan with heavily tinted windows, squarely blocking the way out.

“You have to get past him,” Elijah said. “It’s Skinner.”

“I can’t! He’s blocking me!”

“Ram it! You can’t let him get you!”

Elijah was right, because the driver’s side door of the black sedan opened, and the bald head and broad shoulders of Skinner emerged. He was pointing something at them.

He was pointing a
gun
at them.

Hope felt a wave of freezing cold, then burning heat, and something just clicked inside—that same God-granted survival instinct she hadn’t known she had, and it made her shove the gas pedal to the floor, whip the wheel aside, and hope like hell her sensible old car was up to this challenge.

Skinner saw what she was up to and ducked back in his car, just before her Chevrolet hit the curb two feet from his front bumper with a bang hard enough to make her see stars. The tires jumped the concrete and dug into the narrow rock strip, then spun with a shriek on the sidewalk. In another second the car banged again as the back wheels followed. Then they were thrown around by the next hard bounce, hitting the street.

Hope didn’t let up. The tires hadn’t blown out, by some miracle, and she screeched into a turn and felt the engine roar to a speed it hadn’t tried to achieve in years, if ever. Elijah was talking, but she couldn’t hear him; her attention was on the wheel shuddering in her hands, and the shimmy of the wheels on the road, and the baleful glare of Skinner’s headlights as he swung out of the entrance to the parking lot in pursuit.

Great, now you’re in a car chase. Good plan.
Her conscience was taking on a snarky tone now, which wasn’t at all helpful.
You’re not a car chase kind of girl, Hope. Do you really think you’re up to this?

Elijah was still shouting at her, and now that the surge of adrenaline was starting to fade and reality set in, she could hear him. “Hope! Hope, you’re going the wrong way, turn right! Head for the freeway!”

He was right. She was instinctively heading back toward the university campus, where there would be no safety, and no cover, and it would be dangerous to be conducting a high speed chase. She took the next right, barely backing off her speed, and saw that the black sedan was gaining on her. “He’s faster than we are!”

“No shit.” Elijah tried to turn to look, but winced and faced forward. He put on his seatbelt, struggling to fasten it. “Just keep pushing it as fast as you can. He’s not going to want the cops on his ass. He’s armed.”

And I’ve got a hundred thousand in drug money,
she thought, but didn’t say. “Where do I go?”

“The freeway’s mostly trucks this time of night. Get some of them in his way, and take an off ramp while his vision’s blocked.”

She risked a quick glance at him, though the street was flashing past at frightening speed. “Are you okay?”

“Peachy.” He took his hand away from his side and looked down. There was a rip in his shirt, and the fabric was soaked with blood. “It looks worse than it is.”

“Oh God … were you shot?”

“No. He knocked me down and I got cut on some glass. It’s superficial. It just needs some stitches. Look, I don’t want to go to the hospital. It’s not that bad.” He grimaced and put his head back against the seat.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry about leaving your friend.”

He sighed. “Yeah, she was just scared out of her mind. I don’t blame her, but I hate leaving her behind. She needs help, Hope. She needs it bad.”

The freeway entrance was hurtling up fast, and she took it, risking a glance in the rear view mirror as she did. They’d caught a lucky break; a lumbering eighteen-wheeler had swung in behind them and was grinding its way up the ramp while they sped on like a jackrabbit… and Skinner’s black sedan was caught behind the beast. Hope pressed the gas all the way down, coaxing the last bit of speed out of the old engine, and zoomed and weaved between the rolling buildings of trucks. When she was sure she couldn’t see Skinner, and he couldn’t see her, she hit the off ramp and took some fast, blind turns into a residential street, where she slowed her speed and pulled in at the curb to douse her lights.

They waited tensely for a few minutes, but Skinner didn’t appear. The most exciting thing was the appearance of a cat, which strolled serenely across the road in front of them.

Hope let out a shaking breath. “I think we’ve lost him.”

“I think so too.” Elijah’s voice had gone quiet, as if he was afraid to wake people in the houses around them. “Where did you learn to drive like that?”

“I didn’t.” She felt a wild impulse to laugh, but knew if she did it would creep out of control, and she was afraid she’d sound as crazy as she felt. “So … what do we do? Maybe we
should
call the cops. If you’ve got bruises and cuts, they can’t ignore what you have to say about how badly they treat you.”

But Elijah was already shaking his head. “Solomon is an old hand at this. He’ll tell them his usual bullshit about how I got drunk and out of control and got in a fight with some stranger, and the others will back him up because they’re all scared to death. By the time the cops really start looking into it, he’ll have packed up and rolled on. He’s never been arrested. Probably never will be.”

“But Skinner—he kicked in my door! He was
seen
.”

“Skinner knows how to disappear; he’ll be on his way out of town before they start looking for him. Solomon will be packing up the others and driving on tonight, cutting his losses. Like I said, they move on.”

“So …” She hesitated. Outside, the wind whispered and tossed a tumbleweed around on the road. “You’re free?”

“Free.” He echoed it as if he didn’t understand the word, but then he repeated it, heavy with some kind of emotion she couldn’t read. “Free. Yeah. I guess. Wish I knew what that meant.” She couldn’t explain it for him, because she didn’t know herself. The silence stretched, and then he took in a deep breath. “Look, I hate to beg, but I need to get cleaned up. I don’t have any cash. If you could pay for a room for me for the night, that’s all I’ll ask. You can go back to your normal life and forget all about this.”

“I don’t think I have a normal life anymore,” Hope said. “I was trying to pretend I did, but … I can’t do it. I can’t stay here. I need to leave and find something else—something worth doing. Worth being.” She waited another silent moment. The cat had hopped up on another parked car and was washing its face, not a care in the world. “I think I know a place we can stay tonight.”

She started the car and pulled out, cruising slow and steady into the dark.