1990 - Mine v4 (42 page)

Then she looked over at the BMW, and Laura Clayborne standing beside it, staring at her.

She didn't like the woman's face.
You're nothing but a lie
, she remembered it saying.

Mary reached under her seat, gripped the Colt, and withdrew it. She cocked the pistol as she brought it up, and she aimed the barrel with a steady hand at Laura's heart.

Laura saw the gun's dull gleam. She inhaled a sharp breath that made the cold sting her nostrils. There was no time to move, and her body tensed for the shot.

The baby began to cry, wanting to be fed.

Mary caught sight of a car in the sideview mirror, pulling up to the pumps behind her. It wasn't just any car, it belonged to the Michigan highway patrol. She lowered the Colt, easing the hammer back into place. Then, without another glance at Laura, she drove away from the pumps and turned back onto the road that led to I-94's westbound lanes.

Laura was looking frantically for Didi. The woman wasn't anywhere in sight. She's left me, Laura thought. Gone back to the gray world of false faces and names. She couldn't wait any longer, Mary Terror was getting away. She got into the car, started the engine, and was about to pull away when a woman shouted, "Hey! Hey, you! Stop!"

The cashier had come outside and was hollering at her. The state trooper, a burly block of a man with a Smokey the Bear hat, devoted his full attention to the BMW. "You ain't paid for your gas!" the cashier shouted.

Oh shit
, Laura thought. She put on the parking brake again and reached for her purse from the backseat, where she'd left it. Only her purse wasn't there. From the corner of her eye she saw the trooper walking toward her, and the cashier was coming, too, indignant that she'd had to venture out into the cold. The trooper was almost to the car, and Laura realized with a start that the Charter Arms automatic was lying within sight on the floorboard. Where was the damned purse? All her money, her credit cards, her driver's license: gone.

Didi's work
, she thought.

Laura just had time to slide the automatic up under the seat when the trooper looked in, hard-eyed under the Smokey the Bear rim. "Believe you owe some money," he said in a voice like a shovel digging gravel. "How much, Annie?"

"Fourteen dollars, sixty-two cents!" the cashier said. "Tryin' to skip on me, Frank!"

"That so, lady?"

"No! I've —" Claw your way out, she thought. Mary Terror was getting farther away! "I've got a friend around here somewhere. She took my purse."

"Not much of a friend, then, huh? I guess that means you don't have a license, either."

"It's in my purse."

"I suspected so." The trooper looked at the windshield, and Laura knew he was taking in the
Go home
carved there. Then he looked at her bruised cheek again, and after a few seconds of deliberation he said, "I believe you'd better step out of the car."

There was no point in pleading. The trooper retreated a couple of paces, and his hand touched his hip near the big pearl-handled pistol in his black holster. My God! Laura thought. He thinks I might be
dangerous
! Laura cut the BMW's engine, opened the door, and got out.

"Walk to my car, please," the trooper said, a clipped command.

He would ask for her name next, Laura figured as she walked. He paused to take a look at her tag, memorizing the numbers, and then he followed behind her. "Georgia," he said. "You're a long way from home, aren't you?"

Laura didn't answer. "What's your name?" he asked.

If she made up a name, he'd know soon enough. One call on his radio to check the tag would tell him. Damn it to hell! Mary was getting away!

"Your
name
, please?"

There was no use in resisting. She said, "Laur —"

"What's going on, sis?"

The voice made Laura stop in her tracks. She looked to her left, at Didi Morse standing there with the purse over her shoulder and a bag with grease stains on it in her hand. "Any trouble?" Didi asked innocently.

The trooper gave her his hard glare. "Do you know this woman?"

"Sure. She's my sister. What's the problem?"

"Tryin' to steal fourteen dollars and sixty-two cents worth of gas, that's what!" the cashier replied, her swollen ankles aching in the bitter cold and the breath pluming from her mouth.

"Oh, here's the money. I went over there and bought us some breakfast." Didi nodded toward the burger-joint section of Happy Herman's, which had a sign announcing their trucker's breakfast special of sausage and biscuits. She took the wallet out, counted a ten, four ones, two quarters, and two dimes. "You can keep the change," she said as she offered the cashier her money.

"Listen, I'm sorry." The woman brought up a nervous smile. "I saw her startin' to drive away, and I thought… well, it happens sometimes." She took the cash.

"Oh, she was probably just moving the car. I had to go to the bathroom, and I guess she was coming to pick me up."

"Sorry," the cashier said. "Frank, I feel like a real dumb-ass. You folks take it easy, now, and watch the weather." She began walking back to the grocery store, shivering in the frigid wind.

"You ready to hit the road?" Didi asked Laura brightly. "I got us some coffee and chow."

Laura saw the shine of fear deep down in Didi's eyes.
You wanted to run. didn't you?
Laura thought. "I'm ready," she said tersely.

"Hold on a minute." The trooper planted himself between them and the car. "Lady, it might not be any of my business, but you look like somebody gave you a hell of a knock."

A silence stretched. Then Didi filled it. "Somebody did. Her husband, if you want to know."

"Her husband? He did
that
?"

"My sister and her husband were visiting me from Georgia. He went crazy and punched her last night, and we're on the way to our mother's house in Illinois. Bastard took a hammer to her new car, broke the window out and cut up the windshield, too."

"Jesus." The hardness had vanished from the trooper's eyes. "Some men can really be shits, if you'll pardon my French. Maybe you ought to get to a doctor."

"Our father's a doctor. In Joliet."

If she weren't about to jump out of her skin, Laura might have smiled. Didi was good at this; she'd had a lot of practice.

"Mind if we go now?" Didi asked.

The trooper scratched his jaw, and stared at the darkness in the west. Then he said, "All men ain't sonsabitches. Lemme give you a hand." He walked to his car, opened the trunk, and brought out a tarpaulin of clear blue plastic. "Go in there and get some duct tape," he told Didi, and he motioned toward the grocery store. "It'll be back on the hardwares shelf. Tell Annie to put it on Frank's tab."

Didi gave Laura the breakfast bag and strode quickly away. Laura was fighting a scream; with every second, Mary Terror was getting farther away. Frank produced a penknife and began to cut out a fair-sized square of blue plastic. When Didi returned with the silver duct tape, Frank said, "Long way to Joliet from here. You ladies need to keep warm," and he opened the BMWs door, slid across the driver's seat under which the automatic pistol rested, and taped the plastic up over the window frame. He did a thorough job of it, adding strip after strip of the silver tape in a webbing pattern that fixed the plastic securely in place. Laura drank her coffee black and paced nervously as Frank finished the job, Didi looking on with interest. Then Frank came back out of the car, the duct tape reduced to about half its previous size. "There you go," he said. "Hope everything works out all right for you."

"We hope so, too," Didi answered. She got into the car, and Laura was never so thankful in her life to get behind a steering wheel.

"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.

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'!! 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.