frolicking in the pool, adults in the Jacuzzi. The humidity was almost tropical. Too bad she didn’t have a bathing suit, she’d’ve loved to get in the water, do a couple laps, soak in the Jacuzzi, feel safe.
She picked up a couple towels, headed back to her room. Back in the reception, she waved at Emily, who gave her a little wave back. Izzy met her eyes, saw fear and she wondered if Emily had been speaking in the past tense when she said she’d been in an abusive relationship, because right now she was giving off the aura of a battered woman. She wanted to ask the girl if there was anything she could do, but she had her own problems and they were pressing.
Back in her room, she decided to check the news before she took the shower. She flipped through the channels, found Nick Nesbitt anchoring his daily CNN report. She had the sound off, was about to turn it up, when her granddaughter’s picture flashed on the screen.
She gasped, dropped the remote. She gasped again when she realized it wasn’t Amy, because the eyes were brown, not blue like Amy’s. As she’d feared earlier, somebody knew exactly what had happened to her, knew enough to fake a photo of Amy, to change the eye color. She was in more trouble then she’d thought and she’d thought she was in trouble deep.
She had to get out of here, get on the road. But to where, she didn’t have a clue.
Lila had been driving hard, driving fast for the past three-quarters of an hour. A couple miles past the flaming wrecks, she stopped, got out, made the man in her passenger seat as comfortable as she could, raised the ragtop.
“ Shit,” she muttered. With everything that had been going on-the helicopter crashing into the semi, the wounded man who’d shot it down-her adrenaline had been sparking on overdrive, the only thing she could think about was the task at hand. Now that she was safely away, she saw the damage to her car. The back of the Jag looked like it had been through a war. It was covered with dings, divots and scratches where debris from the explosion had hit it. One of the taillights was broken.
“ Someone’s going to pay.” She wasn’t muttering now. She was mad.
Back in the car, she got back on the road, keeping the speed at a constant eighty-five, till she got to McCloud, where she slowed to fifty-five through the small town, then back up to eighty-five.
She passed two logging trucks as if they were standing still just before she came to Highway 5, the freeway that went from the Mexican border in Southern California all they way through the Golden State to Oregon, Washington and Canada beyond. Which was where she’d be heading if she were Izzy Eisenhower. Lots of space to get lost in up there.
On the freeway, she had to hold her speed down to seventy-five, because unlike the two lane highway she’d just turned off of, it was crawling with cars and trucks and well monitored by the Highway Patrol and the last thing she wanted was to get pulled over. Even if all kinds of government bad guys weren’t after her-and right now being paranoid seemed appropriate-she’d have a hard time explaining the bloody man riding shotgun.
She was hungry, wanted to stop at Micky D’s in Yreka, but she kept on. At the Oregon border, the speed limit dropped to fifty-five and she slowed to sixty-five as she started up toward the Siskiyou Pass.
“ So, have you taken me prisoner?”
“ You’re awake.” She sighed. “I didn’t know if you were going to make it.”
“ Take more than a little explosion to take me out.”
“ Tough guy, huh?”
“ Been called that once or twice.”
“ How’s your hearing?”
“ Okay, I covered my ears as I dove away.”
“ Been in a situation like that before?” Lila said.
“ Two tours in Vietnam when I was a kid. Some things you don’t forget.”
“ Okay, so you’re hearing okay. I just got mine back. For a while there I thought I might be permanently deaf. Ears are still ringing, though.”
“ That’ll stop.”
“ So, how are you?”
“ Beaten up, back hurts.” He shifted in his seat. “But I’ll be okay.”
“ Awful bloody.”
“ Something hit me just before I hit the ground, metal, glass, I don’t know. Punched me like there was no tomorrow.” He reached a hand behind his back, under his field jacket, pulled it back out. “Nothing there. Cut me though. Bleeding has stopped, so it’s not bad. I’m guessing it was a metal fragment, big enough to knock me down and out and bounced off. That’s good, though. If it would’ve been smaller or if it would’ve been glass, it would’ve penetrated and that would’ve been bad.”
“ Sorry about your rig.” She moved into the fast lane, passed a couple trucks.
“ Yeah, that’s a bummer.” He winced. It hurt more than he was letting on. “Lucky I was traveling empty. No paperwork about destroyed cargo.”
“ But you lost your truck.”
“ That’s gonna be hard to explain, but I’ll figure something out. Maybe I stopped because the engine sounded funny. Helicopter hits my truck. Good Samaritan picks me up, takes me to a hospital.”
“ How come you didn’t call 911.”
“ No phone.”
“ How come we didn’t stop in Yreka?”
“ We didn’t?”
“ Behind us, we’re in Oregon now.”
“ Really? You didn’t head straight to the nearest hospital?” He winced again. “You are in trouble.” He looked out the window. “Yeah, we’re in Oregon, sure enough.”
“ You shot that helicopter out of the sky. That was pretty cool. You were pretty cool.” She was at the top of the pass now, passing several trucks which had pulled off in the brake test area. “But what I don’t understand is why?”
“ Actually, I shot the pilot. His passenger had a Mac 10. In my experience guys with Mac 10s in low flying helicopters don’t take prisoners.”
“ But is wasn’t your fight.”
“ Anytime there’s a damsel in distress, it’s my fight.”
She glanced over at him and he hit her with a smile so real it was as if she’d been smacked by a ray of sunshine.
“ I’m Black,” he said.
“ No shit,” she said.
“ It’s my name.” He laughed. It came from his belly. “Last time I introduced myself that way to a young lady, who said what you just did, ‘No shit,’ it changed my life. She was a gunslinging girl in trouble, too.”
“ Katie?”
“ Yeah, Katie. She was fast on the draw, hit what she shot at and when she killed a man, she didn’t look back, didn’t cry over it. Course, those she killed had it coming.”
Lila gave the man a glance, put her eyes back on the road, shifted into the fast lane and passed a truck on the winding road down into Ashland.
“ Don’t believe me?” His voice was low now, conspiratorial, almost a whisper. “No reason you should. Most folks who carry concealed never use their weapon. Most are braggarts or cowards, trying to impress with their gun or trying not to be afraid. Of course, most are men. Most women I’ve met are against guns.”
She gave him a scowl, then put her eyes back on the road as she slid back into the slow lane, in front of the truck.
“ Don’t look at me like that, just stating facts.”
“ Whose facts?”
“ Mine. My opinion, based on my experience.” He laughed again, a chuckle this time. “Women who carry are either in trouble or deal in trouble. Either way, someone crosses them better look out, because unlike a lotta men with a gun hidden in their clothes, a woman with a gun is a mighty dangerous animal.”
“ I think I resent that statement, Mr. Black.”
