'Drive carefully!' Frank cautioned. He waved as the patched-up BMW pulled away, and he watched as it sped up and swerved onto I-94 West. Funny, he thought. The lady from Georgia had said her 'friend' had her purse. Why hadn't she said 'sister'? Well, sisters could be friends, couldn't they? Still… it made him wonder. Was it worth a call in to get a vehicle ID or not? Should've checked her driver's license, he decided. He'd always been a sucker for a hard-luck story. Well, let them go. He was supposed to be looking for speeders, not giving grief to battered wives. He turned his back to the west, and went to get himself a cup of coffee.
'Fifteen minutes on us,' Laura said as the speedometer's needle climbed past seventy. 'That's what she's got.'
'Thirteen minutes,' Didi corrected Laura, and she began to tear into a sausage and biscuit.
The BMW reached eighty. Laura was even passing the massive trucks. The wind flapped the plastic a little, but Frank had done a good job and the duct tape held. 'Better hold it back,' Didi said. 'Getting stopped for a ticket won't help.'
Laura kept her speed where it was, on the high side of eighty. The car shuddered, its aerodynamics spoiled by the caved-in passenger door. Laura's gaze searched for an olive-green van in the gloomy light. 'Why didn't you leave me?'
'I did.'
'You came back. Why?'
'I saw him rousting you. I had your purse. I knew it was about to be over for you.'
'So? Why didn't you just let him arrest me and you take off?'
Didi chewed on the tough sausage. She washed it down with a sip of hot coffee. 'Where was I going to go?' she asked quietly.
The question lingered. To it there was no answer.
The BMW sped on, toward the steel-gray West while the sun rose in the East like a burning angel.
2: The Terrible Truth
Laura had to cut her speed down to sixty-five again when she saw another state trooper car heading east. After almost half an hour, there was still no sign of Mary Terror's van. 'She's turned off,' Laura said. She heard the desperation rising in her voice. 'She took an exit.'
'Maybe she did. Maybe she didn't.'
'Wouldn't you?' Laura asked.
Didi thought about it. 'I'd turn off and find a place to wait for a while, until you had time to pass me,' she said. 'Then I could get back on the highway whenever I pleased.'
'Do you think that's what she's done?'
Didi looked ahead. The traffic had picked up, but there was no sign of an olive-green van with broken taillights. They had passed the exits to Kalamazoo a few miles before. If Mary Terror had turned off at any one of those, they'd never find her again. 'Yes, I think so,' Didi answered.
'Damn it!' Laura slammed the wheel with her fist. 'I knew we'd lose her if we couldn't keep her in sight! Now what the hell are we going to do?'
'I don't know. You're driving.'
Laura kept going. There was a long curve ahead. Maybe on the other side of it they'd catch sight of the van. The speed was creeping up again, and she forced herself to ease off. 'I didn't say thank you, did I?'
'For what?'
'You know for what. For coming back with my purse.'
'No, I don't guess you did.' Didi picked at one of her short, square fingernails, her fingers as sturdy as tools.
'I'm saying it. Thank you.' She glanced quickly at Didi and then fixed her attention on the highway once more. Behind them, the sun glowed orange through chinks in interlocked clouds the color of bruises, and ahead the sky was a dark mask. 'And thank you for helping me with this, too. You didn't have to call me when Mary was on the way.'
'I almost didn't.' She looked at her hands. They had never been pretty, like Laura's hands were. They had never been soft, never unworked. 'Maybe I got tired of being loyal to a dead cause. Maybe there never was a cause to be loyal to. The Storm Front.' She grunted, a note of sarcasm. 'We were children with guns, smoking dope and getting high and thinking we could change the world. No, not even that, really. Maybe we just liked the power of setting off bombs and pulling triggers. Damn.' She shook her head, her eyes hazed with memory. 'That was a crazy world, back then.'
'It's still crazy,' Laura said.
'No, now it's insane. There's a difference. But we helped it get from there to here. We grew up to be the people we said we hated. Talk-talk-talkin' 'bout our generation,' Didi said in a soft, singsong voice.
They rounded the bend. No van in sight. Maybe on the next stretch of road they'd see her. 'What are you going to do now?' Laura asked. 'You can't go back to Ann Arbor.'
'Nope. Damn, I had a good setup, too. A good house, a great workshop. I was doing all right. Listen, don't get me started or I might curse you out for this.' She checked her wristwatch, an old Timex. It was a little after seven. 'Somebody'll find Edward. I hope it's not Mr. Brewer. He always wanted to set me up with his grandson.' She sighed heavily. 'Edward. The past caught up with him, didn't it? And it caught up with me, too. You know, you had a hell of a nerve tracking me down like you did. I can't believe you talked Mark into helping you. Mark's a rock.' Didi put her hand against the piece of plastic tarp and felt it flutter. The heater was keeping the car's interior toasty now that the wind was blocked off. 'Thanks for not bringing Mark to the house,' she said. 'That wasn't the place for him.'
'I didn't want him getting hurt.'
Didi turned her head to stare at Laura. 'You've got balls, don't you? Walking in there with Mary like you did. I swear to God, I thought we were both finished.'
'I wasn't thinking about anything but getting my son back. That's all I care about.'
'What happens if you can't get him back? Would you have another baby?'
Laura didn't answer for a moment. The car's tires sang on the pavement, and a truck hauling lumber moved into her lane. 'My husband… and I are through. I know that for sure. I don't know if I'd want to live in Atlanta anymore. I just don't know about a lot of things. I guess I'll cross those bridges when I -'
'Slow down,' Didi interrupted, leaning forward in her seat. She was looking at something ahead, revealed when the lumber truck had changed lanes. 'There! See it?'
There was no van. Laura said, 'See what?'
'The car there. The Buick.'
Laura did see it, then. A dark blue Buick, its right side scraped to the metal and its rear fender bashed in. Earl Van Diver's car.
'Slow down,' Didi cautioned. 'Don't let him see us. Bastard might try to run us off the road.'
'He's after Mary. He doesn't want us.' Even so, Laura cut her speed and lagged a hundred yards behind the Buick and off to the right.
'I don't trust anybody who fires a bullet close enough for me to hear. Some FBI agent, huh? He didn't care if he hit David or not.'
And that was the terrible truth of it, Laura thought. Earl Van Diver was hunting Mary, not to arrest her for her crimes, but to execute her. Whether he killed David or not made no difference to him. His bullets were meant for Mary, but as long as Mary had David, one of those bullets might rip through him just as easily as through her. Laura stayed far behind the Buick, and after a couple of miles she watched it pull over toward an exit ramp on the right.
'Getting off,' Didi said. 'Good riddance.'
Laura eased the BMW over, following Van Diver toward the ramp. 'What the hell are you doing?' Didi demanded. 'You're not getting off, are you?'
'That's just what I'm doing.'
'Why? We could still catch up with Mary!'
