The last rays of shimmering orange faded from the horizon as night fell at last on Hopkins Bend. The cruiser’s headlights illuminated a winding two-lane stretch of blacktop, the road shrouded on both sides by tall trees that swayed in the quickening wind. The wind made the lower-hanging branches look like grasping tentacles in the encroaching darkness, a perception that did nothing to soothe her live-wire nerves.
Close to half an hour had elapsed since the pileup at the roadblock and the ensuing bloodshed. She’d driven maybe fifteen of those minutes before turning down a paved side street, after realizing it wouldn’t be smart to stay on the same damned road under the circumstances. She figured the side street would eventually lead to other streets, maybe even a highway. And then she would be home free. But so far this road was it, and she had a sick feeling it was circling back toward the heart of the town. Frustration made Jessica pull to a stop at the road’s shoulder and stare through the windshield as she struggled against the grinding terror taking root within her.
A single word forced its way through clenched teeth: “Fuck!”
She was in a world of shit, but her overriding concern at the moment was the simple reality that she was completely lost. She didn’t know Hopkins Bend at all, a situation that wasn’t aided any by the total dearth of street
signs and lamps. If she could get back to Old Fork Road, she might stand at least some slim chance of slipping away before a net could draw tight around her. But she had no clue how to get from here to there. She didn’t even know where
here
was, the name of this goddamn nowhere street, this fucking path to certain doom and damnation.
She slammed the steering wheel with the base of a hand. “Fuck this fucking bullshit!” She screamed, a high, shrill sound that filled the cruiser’s interior and made her head hurt. “Goddamn you all,you redneck motherfucking sons of bitches!”
She fell back against the seat, breathing heavily. Her sore ribs were aching again now, a pulsing agony made worse by the manner in which she’d vented her frustrations. She shifted in the seat and winced again. A small part of her felt like giving up then. An oppressive weariness threatened to weigh her down. She felt it in every inch of her body. Her eyes fluttered as she thought about it, and she slid down deeper into the seat. The prospect of surrender became more appealing the closer she drifted to sleep. She couldn’t hope to get away with what amounted to mass murder anyway. She should just stay where she was and let the police catch up to her in their own good time. At least on death row she’d have a chance to rest before her inevitable rendezvous with the lethal injection chamber…
A stray thought drifted through her fading consciousness, jolting her back to full wakefulness with a heart-pounding gasp.
“Shit!”
She sat up straight and ground her fists into her eyes. Then she blinked and stared through the windshield again, her thoughts lingering on the stark truth that had brought her back from the edge.
Death row?
That was a laugh. It would never get that far, if whatever remained of the local law had anything to say about it. She would be killed on sight. No jury. No trial. They’d skip all that pansy liberal shit and go straight to the execution phase of things, with maybe some time set aside beforehand for a few rounds of torture and rape. The latter caused that steel to rise inside her again, that hard core of unyielding strength that had seen her through the many battles so far. She felt a piercing shame at having considered surrender for even a moment.
She reached for the gearshift and muttered at the reflection of cold blue eyes visible in the rearview mirror. A killer’s eyes. Her own eyes. “Buck up, Jessica Sloan. Daddy didn’t raise no quitters.”
A wash of blinding white light bathed the cruiser’s interior in the same moment she put the vehicle in gear. Her breath caught painfully in her throat and her heart slammed a triple-time beat.
Here they are.
Her right hand shot toward the passenger seat, groping for a gun. Her fingers slid over the stock of the pump-action shotgun even as the grim certainty that she would never be able to bring the weapon to bear in time dealt an almost crippling blow to a psyche still reeling from so many other traumas. But then the cloak of white light slipped away and she heard the whir of a motor passing by. She let go of the shotgun and watched a red blur of taillights plunge deep into the night and disappear around a bend in the winding road. The car was moving fast, had passed through the cone of light projected by the cruiser’s headlights, there and gone in a second. But that second was all Jessica needed to identify the vehicle as a seventies junker.
A civilian car.
She stomped on the gas pedal and the cruiser shot
away from the road’s shoulder, tires squealing as they hit pavement and caught traction. She kept the accelerator down with one foot and tapped the brake pedal with the other as she cranked the steering wheel and took the cruiser around a sharp bend at high speed. The cruiser went up on two wheels for a wild instant, sending a perverse shiver of exhilaration spiraling through her. The impact of the wheels striking the pavement as they came back down jostled her and caused the pain in her ribs to flare again, but she kept the gas pedal down and leaned over the steering wheel, eyes intent, scanning the way ahead for any glimpse of the speeding sedan’s taillights. She licked her lips and felt her breath quicken. Her nostrils flared, and she flexed her fingers around the steering wheel’s molded grip. She felt a weird kind of excitement, what she guessed was meant by the old phrase “the thrill of the hunt.” But some of that faded as she continued to speed through the deepening night. For a few strained moments, she was sure she’d lost her quarry for good.
Then she saw it.
A seventies sedan. It was stopped at the side of the road some thirty yards ahead. The driver’s-side door stood slightly ajar, and the dome light was on. Jessica spied a shadowy single form leaning toward the passenger seat. She tromped on the cruiser’s brake pedal and brought the car to a shuddering halt perhaps ten yards to the rear of the sedan. She scanned the cruiser’s dashboard and found what she was looking for after a few desperate seconds. The flashing lights atop the cruiser’s roof came on, bathing the roadside in strobing shades of red and blue.
She grabbed the dead cop’s .38 and took a deep breath.
You can do this.
Sure she could. She thought of all the daring things she’d already done today. The return to Hoke’s house after he’d raped her. The abduction. The wild flight into the woods. All the men she’d killed so far. This was nothing. She just had to make the driver of the sedan believe she was a cop long enough to get him out of his car. The number-one obstacle was her civilian outfit. But the jeans and tight black V-neck T-shirt she wore were dark and unremarkable, the T-shirt unadorned by any logo or image. Good enough to get by for those few first crucial moments after she stepped out of the car. Or so she hoped. She set the gun down and pulled her long hair back, twisted it in a quick knot, and looked in the mirror. She squinted and made her face go hard. The reflected expression disturbed her. It made her look tough, maybe even a little mean. Which was not at all how she’d seen herself prior to today. But she wasn’t really that person anymore, was she? A slight pang of loss came and went. There would be plenty of time to think about what she had become if she ever managed to make it back home. In the meantime…
She grabbed the gun again and got out of the car. The sedan’s dome light winked out in the same instant she threw the cruiser’s door shut. She hesitated a moment, standing next to the cruiser with the gun pointed toward the ground. And in that moment she was intensely aware of the inherent dangers in police work. The man driving the sedan could be a criminal, might even have a gun of his own. Maybe he’d turned the light out so she wouldn’t see him going for a weapon. There were a lot of fucking maybes here, so many ways everything could go wrong. But the hell with it. This was obviously her only chance to ditch the cruiser and put some levels of separation between herself and the murdered cops.
Her fingers flexed around the .38’s grip as she took her
first steps toward the sedan. She was close enough now to see that it was a tan Chevy Nova. It was a heap, probably held together by spit and duct tape. She raised the gun slightly, still pointed at the ground but held in front of her, primed to lift and snap like a cobra if necessary.
She reached the Nova and bent at the waist to peer through the open driver’s-side window. A young man with short, greasy hair and a day’s worth of stubble on his square chin grinned up at her. An unlit cigarette was tucked behind an ear. He looked her up and down and made an appreciate noise. “Damn, darlin’. When did the local law start hiring supermodels?”
Jessica pointed the .38 at the center of his face. “Step out of the car.”
The man’s grin faltered some, but didn’t disappear entirely. “I ain’t done nothin’ wrong, girl. Why you pointin’ that thing at me?”
“Shut up and step out of the car.”
The man smirked. “Yeah? Or what? You’ll shoot me in the face?”
He laughed.
Jessica thumbed back the .38’s hammer. “Yes. I’ll shoot you in the fucking face.”
The man stopped laughing and the mirth drained from his sparkling eyes. Blue eyes. Greasy hair aside, he was actually pretty hot, at least by Hopkins Bend standards. A strange fantasy coalesced in her head as she stared him down. She saw herself forcing him into the Nova’s back seat. Keeping the gun on him as she pulled her pants down and sat on his face. Her lips curled in self-disgust. Could she really be considering perpetrating rape against this man after all she’d been through today?
My God,
she thought.
You’d be no better than Hoke.
Of course she wouldn’t do it.
But she kept staring at him, kept thinking things no
woman in her position should be thinking. She imagined her pussy pressed against his red lips, and the arousal rising within her grew to a flame of intense desire. A fresh surge of self-disgust accompanied it. The clock was ticking. She had to get in the Nova and get away from the cruiser and its flashing lights.
The man frowned. “You’re not a real cop, are you?”
“No.”
There was fear in his eyes now. “Fuck. You stole a cop cruiser. I’m not even gonna ask what happened to the cop. You’re gonna kill me, aren’t you?”
Jessica bit a corner of her bottom lip, thought a moment. Then said,“Maybe not.”
The man’s frown gave way to a small, hopeful smile. “It’d sure be cool if you didn’t. It’s a rotten old world a lot of times, but I sure like being alive.”
Jessica realized she liked the sound of his voice. A deep, easygoing drawl with an underlying humor in every syllable. She struggled to keep her face hard. “I bet you do. But it’s gonna depend on what you can do for me.”
“Like what?”
Jessica allowed the smallest of smiles to shade the edges of her mouth. “Like on how fast this heap of yours is. And on how quick you can get me out of this goddamn redneck shithole town. And maybe even a little on how good you kiss.”
The man grinned. He reached for the cigarette behind his ear and wedged it into a corner of his mouth. “Hop in, darlin’. I think you’re gonna like the answers to all them crazy questions.”
Jessica lowered the gun and hurried around to the other side of the Nova. The man reached across the seat and unlocked the door for her. She slid inside, set the .38 on the dash, and reached for him, seizing handfuls of his shirt and pulling him close. Their lips met and they
tasted each other hungrily. Her tongue slid in and out of his mouth. She nipped at his bottom lip, elicited a low growl of lust from the man. Then they broke the clinch and stared at each other, panting heavily.
The man grinned again and shook his head. “Damn. What a crazy night this is turning out to be.”
Jessica cupped his crotch and squeezed. “What’s your name?”
The man groaned. “Larry. Uh…damn, woman. Larry Wolfe.”
Jessica licked her lips. “Larry, you don’t know the half of it.
Crazy
doesn’t begin to cover what I’ve been through. And I’ll tell you all about it after you get me someplace safe.”
She let go of his crotch and smiled at the way he shuddered.
This was insane.
She knew it.
And she didn’t care. Fate was playing a lot of fucked-up games with her head today. She figured the best way to cope with it was to keep on doing what she’d done so far—just roll with it.
Larry turned in his seat and sat up straight behind the steering wheel. He put the car in gear, and in a moment they were rolling down the road. He glanced at her. “I’ll take you to my house. That’s where I was headed anyway. It’ll be the safest place for now.”
Jessica tensed. “No. I told you. I want out of here. Now.”
Larry shot her a reassuring smile. “Look, I don’t know what you’ve done or why you’re in trouble, but it’s obvious it’s something pretty heavy. You don’t want to be on the road much longer tonight. At my place you’ll have a chance to hunker down and let the heat cool off.”
Jessica thought about it. “You’ve got a point.”
“Sure I do. And think of the fun we can have with a bit of privacy.”
Jessica smiled. “Yeah. Okay. Fuck it. Let’s do it. One question, though.”
“Yeah?”
“Are you as fucking crazy as everybody else I’ve run into here? Are you one of the bad guys?” She retrieved the .38 from the dash and held it in her lap. “Because I’ve killed a lot of people today, Larry. I’d hate to have to add you to the list.”
Larry shrugged. “I live on the outskirts of town proper. The real crazies are out in the woods. I know some about the shit that goes on, but that’s about it. I don’t exactly condone any of it, but it’s just the way of things. If you’re raised here, you know not to make a stink or talk about the old families and their fucked-up ways in mixed company.”
Jessica was silent for several long moments.