he’d said. “You don’t want to go in there and remember him there like that.”
Like how?
He saw it in my face, let out a roar of denial and lunged at me. He was twice my size and if he ever caught me in that bear hug, I’d be dog meat.
He grabbed my arm and swung me around. I raked his face with my car keys and tried to knee him in the groin. I must have missed the main target, but it did loosen his grip for an instant and I snatched up a hammer from the workbench. By then, he had a lug wrench in his beefy hand, and he swung so hard that both my keys and the hammer went flying. A second swing landed a glancing blow on my hip and I fell to the concrete floor.
As he moved in for the kill, I grabbed Allen’s creeper board and shoved it toward him. He stepped down heavily on it and both feet went out from under him.
I didn’t wait to see how he landed, just sprinted for the door as fast as I could, slammed it and rammed the padlock home.
Ob God, for a car key! There was a spare set in a magnetic case under the fender but Pete was already banging against the door and I knew the hasp wouldn’t hold long enough for me to find them and drive away. The way my hip throbbed from where he’d hit me, I also knew I couldn’t run far.
Thanking the Lord for the moonless night, I dashed down the lane straight for the barn shelter fifty feet away and dived under the wrecked Maverick just as Pete burst through the door. There wasn’t much room and I wiggled through the powdery dry sand till I was under the furthest hulk, a car that rode a lot higher than the Maverick.
From where I lay in pitch darkness, I could see Pete rush around his car and mine, looking for me. Car doors banged and I heard something crash against the shop wall, then he reached into his car and my heart sank as he pulled out a powerful flashlight and began searching more carefully. As he pointed the beam under the cars and all around the shop, I saw that he held the flash in his left hand.
His right hand held a pistol.
I wiggled right up against the cinder block supporting the left front wheel, oblivious to black widows, brown recluses or snakes of any color that might be hibernating in the cracks and crevices. All I wanted was a crack or crevice myself. Or better yet, a deep dark hole.
Instead, I realized that space had opened up above me. Of course! The motor on this old car had been pulled years ago, probably before I was even born. I pushed my hand up through cobwebs and waved it around. There was plenty of room up under the hood, although my hand encountered so many dangling wires and sharp ends of copper tubing, I wasn’t sure if I could get past the axle and the radiator without tearing my clothes—not to mention my skin—to shreds.
But then Pete’s flashlight turned toward the shed and shelters and damned if I didn’t find that terror makes a real good lubricant. I slipped up into the motor housing like a greased monkey and my foot left the ground just as the light swept a long low arc under all the cars.
Pete was so close I could hear his heavy grunts as he stooped to look under each car.
Panicked, I realized there was a gaping hole under the dash where the floorboards had rusted through into the motor housing, and I quickly turned my head so that my face wouldn’t shine back should the light hit it.
Fortunately, it was only a hasty inspection and the light didn’t linger. Through the broken window, I heard Pete move around to the vehicles on the other side of the shelter, then the vibration of running feet, as if it had suddenly dawned on him that I might have headed for my daddy’s house.
I pushed my way through the hole, up into the front seat, and found that I was inside the Hudson Hornet whose racing virtues Allen had sung when Kidd and I met him out here last month. The upholstery was filthy and probably riddled with mouse nests, but all I cared about was keeping tabs on Pete. Maybe if he went far enough down the lane, I could risk a run for my car, at least grab the cell phone and call for the cavalry.
I crawled over the high front seat and into the back. The seat here was hard as a rock, more like a thinly padded church pew than the cushiony springs of the front seat. I knelt on it though and peered through the tiny dirty rear windows.
I might never know why Pete killed Mr. Jap—momentary rage at hearing Merrilee slighted for Allen? Or merely the greedy assumption that Merrilee would split the estate with Allen if Mr. Jap died?—but I was pretty sure the same assumption was what sent Dick Sutterly over to Pete this afternoon with that promissory note. “Don’t tell the Grimeses or Allen Stancil,” he’d said Wednesday afternoon when he was so gleeful over securing Adam’s land. And I’d been too weary of the whole subject to try to educate anyone else about the laws of inheritance. In view of how quickly Pete had attacked me, I had to wonder if Dick Sutterly had really seen Pete last Saturday or if Pete’s guilty conscience led him to believe that Sutterly’s proposition was a prelude to blackmail?
Out in the field, the powerful beam of that flashlight swept across the fallow field, up and down both sides of the lane. If he would just go on over the rise and down toward the creek—
The light disappeared. I waited a few seconds, but saw nothing. Just as I reached for the door handle, there was a burst of light, then darkness. He was coming back, straight across the field to Mr. Jap’s house, trying to catch my silhouette between the lane and the dim porch light, hoping to flush me with his flashlight.
The old frame house sat up on low brick pilings with a lattice skirting that gapped in places. Pete circled the house, shining the light up under every corner.
Eventually he stood up and I rejoiced to see the slump of defeat in his shoulders as he trudged back over to his car. I was just starting to take big breaths of relief when his hand banged down on the hood and he straightened purposefully.
Oh, dear Lord, he was heading back toward the sheds! There was no way I could scrabble across the front seat and under the hood in time. As I ducked down below the windows, my weight shifted, the seat tilted and I was almost dumped to the floor.
I instantly remembered all the bottlegging lore I’d ever heard. Praying it would be empty, I tilted the padded board all the way over and a darker crevice appeared. In the old days, the hollowed-out backseat would have held at least four dozen half-gallon Mason jars of my daddy’s best white lightning. No reason it wouldn’t hold his daughter now.
I slid inside and pulled the padded board back over me like a coffin lid.
