Kindred Intentions (5 page)

“This way!” Her shouts were broken by the
returning of her laughter.

The car kept moving. She could’ve sworn it
wasn’t slowing down at all. However, she kept waving her arms. It would surely
stop.

After a few seconds her certainty turned into
doubt, then certainty again, this time that it would run over her.

The deafening sound of a horn split the air
and Amelia threw herself against the guardrail, while the car proceeded
undisturbed.

“Fucking bastard! This is failure in duty of
care!” she shouted to it. Her trained eyes deciphered the number plate and memorised
it. Oh, yes, they would pay for this.

Then she was caught by a flash of inspiration.
Her badge. She returned to her jacket, abandoned on the roadside, and searched
through her pockets. But they were empty, save for a small packet with
sugar-free sweets, the sight of which only caused another grumble from her
stomach. “For fuck’s sake…” She tossed them away. No trace of her badge. She
had a fleeting memory of the last time she’d seen it. When she’d climbed on the
van, she had put it somewhere. It was still there.

“My usual good luck.” She was already talking
to herself like a lunatic.

She’d been so engrossed in her thoughts that
only now she realised that a car was arriving from the other direction. She
rose at the same moment as it passed in front of her, and went on. She didn’t
even have the strength to try to draw the driver’s attention. They wouldn’t
hear her.

The car screeched to a halt. It remained
still.

Amelia didn’t know whether to hope it would
reverse. Okay, she probably looked like someone needing help, but she hadn’t
gestured to it, and a car stopping without a reason before a woman along a road
recalled insistently to her mind the hypothesis of the maniacal rapist.

The car made a U-turn and resumed moving
towards her. It was a high-performance saloon, with a shiny new bodywork. At
least it wasn’t a poor devil, but it could be a rich maniac. As the vehicle
came closer, she made out the outline of the driver’s face, despite the glare
on the windshield. He was wearing a pair of sunglasses, but his look was
vaguely familiar to her.

The saloon stopped beside her; she was looking
at it as if she was hypnotised.

It couldn’t be true.

The window lowered. The driver had a perplexed
air. He took off his glasses, revealing a pair of ocean-blue eyes that she had
already seen more closely.

“Amelia?”

“Mike?”

3

“It’s a crazy story!” Mike exclaimed, after
listening to the account of what had happened to her. “I grasped something had
happened, because all at once they lost any interest in me, and there was a lot
of movement.” He tapped the steering wheel in an amused manner. “As soon as
they told me they didn’t need me anymore, I left; I had other things to do.”

“And for sure I didn’t expect to find you
here.” At last Amelia was relaxing. She had met Mike for the first time only
that morning and had spent no more than ten minutes with him, but he was no
doubt the best she could expect as a casual driver. Actually, more than the
best. “By the way, where are we?” She looked at the boundless countryside all
around them, only interrupted by the electricity pylons, as well as by the road
they were travelling on. It was an isolated place, but there was a sort of
comforting poetry in all that greenery lit by the sun on a lovely day.

“I’d say in the middle of nowhere.” And he
laughed. “Which makes everything even more surreal. I’ll head on the same way,
because there’s a village nearby with a police station.” He turned slightly to
her, offering a sly smile. His eyes were hidden again under his dark glasses.
“It seems to me the more suitable place.”

“Yeah, thank you.” Amelia set her safety belt
to the side of her shoulder, because it had ended up on her neck. In vain she
tried to adjust its height, then she gave up. She was still dazed. All that she
wished for was a shower and some clean clothes. Maybe before that, she would
accept something to eat with pleasure. She stole a glance at the digital clock
on the dashboard.
Ten past two
in the afternoon. That explained the heat. She reached out to the sunshield and
lowered it. Under the little flap was a mirror, which reflected her appearance
mercilessly. She tried to arrange her tousled hair. She felt ill at ease to be
with a man in such an awful condition. Then she looked at her blouse, which
once had been white, her jacket, now turned into a rag abandoned at her feet
and stained by sweat and dust, and at last her skirt, whose seam had been torn
in a few points. And she was worrying about her hair? She closed the flap and
the sunshield with a slap.

“Everything all right?” Mike asked, keeping
his face aimed at the road.

“Hm, let’s say so. Can I borrow your phone?”
She should have informed
Monroe
,
at least.

Mike inserted a hand in the front door storage
pocket and then gave her a smartphone that looked like it had come straight from
space. Amelia took it with a certain amount of reverence. But from a man with a
car like that, she couldn’t expect a phone for paupers like hers. Well, the one
that was now smashed up on the tarmac somewhere in the City, probably under the
tyres of another vehicle.

“Disable the Bluetooth, if you want to have a
private conversation.”

She looked at him, bewildered, for a second. A
private conversation? Ah, yeah, right, he’d thought she wanted to speak to a
relative, certainly not to her chief. Anyway excluding the hands-free wasn’t a
bad idea. “Let’s see if I get how to do that.”

“There’s an icon …” He gestured.

Amelia found the way to recall the settings,
touched the Bluetooth symbol, and disabled it. Then she stopped. “And who
remembers
Monroe
’s number …?”

Mike laughed. “These contraptions should
simplify your life, instead they break your habit of using your memory. Call
112.”

Right, she just had to identify and ask to be
connected to the headquarters in the City. She turned on the virtual keypad of
the phone and was about to type the number, when the barred battery symbol
started blinking, accompanied by a far from reassuring sound. “The battery is
low.”

“Damn it, it doesn’t last longer than a
fucking couple of hours,” the man complained, perhaps in an excessive way.

But what did she know? Maybe a long-lasting
dispute was taking place between Mike and his phone battery. Amelia smiled at
her frivolous thoughts.

“In there, in the glove compartment, there’s
the charger that you can plug into the cigarette lighter socket. You’d better
use it. When it goes like that, it may shut down any moment.” He barely turned
to look at her. “What are you laughing at?”

“Nothing, nothing,” she said, opening the
cover in front of her and inserting a hand. There it was. It was stuck amongst
a ton of other bits and pieces, including empty chocolate bar wrappers she
couldn’t identify. The condition of the compartment was the exact opposite of
the remainder of the car. It was like it had been tidied up in a hurry, by
throwing in there all the stuff that was around. This time it was she who stole
a glance at him.

He was absorbed. From time to time he moved
his head, as if he was checking the rear-view mirror.

Amelia decided to stop staring at him. He
would catch her, they always caught her, and it would be embarrassing.
Embarrassing? More embarrassing than this? She let a snort escape and then took
out the charger. She plugged it into the cigarette lighter socket and tried to
make the mini-USB plug match the mobile phone port. Her hands were numb and she
got the side wrong four times. It was a record even for her. Finally the smartphone
beeped, confirming it was charging.

“Hm,” Mike muttered.

“What’s up?”

“That black car.” He was keeping his head
raised again towards the mirror.

She turned to see. Her safety belt slipped
from her shoulder and ended up on her neck. Her abrupt movement triggered the pretensioner,
and soon after, the band was choking her. “Fuck!” She let the phone drop to her
lap and stretched out the belt, so that she could turn. A black car with
darkened windows was travelling at a certain distance from their vehicle. It
didn’t give what could be defined as a reassuring impression.

“I saw it pop out from a side road not far
from the point where I picked you up.”

The expression ‘picked you up’ made her feel
even more helpless than she really was, but she had to admit it was appropriate
to the circumstances. “Are you sure?”

He chuckled, as if she had asked something
funny. “Of course. It’s remained on our heels all the time, but now it’s
getting closer, now that the bends are coming.”

Amelia turned forward. There was a hill in
front of them and the road followed its outline. She looked back again. This
time she kept the safety belt away from her neck with a hand. The black car was
even closer. She sensed a shiver down her spine as she remembered that presence
watching her in the cottage, when she’d been tied up and hooded. The same
person who had drugged her. Who was it? She still couldn’t understand why they
had freed her. She had the annoying sensation that she had somehow ended up in
the middle of someone’s depraved game and that this was just the beginning.

“I don’t get it. I was in their hands. Why
have they freed me, if they are trying to take me again now?”

“Wanna stop and ask them?”

The black car became closer; the distance
wasn’t exactly safe.

“I’d say no!”

Mike sped up. Amelia’s body flattened against
her seat, but since she was sitting sideways, it wasn’t a pleasant sensation.
“Ouch!” She straightened and checked her neck, where a moment later her belt
ended up again. “For fuck’s sake …” She moved it to her arm, but with great
difficulty, given that it stopped at any movement.

“I suggest you keep it there, you could need
it.”

She looked in the wing mirror. The other car
was so close that she couldn’t glimpse its headlights. It couldn’t be
coincidence. The road was going up, with a curve on the right. Mike’s car
revved down, but he immediately changed gear and stepped on the gas, moving a
bit away from his pursuer. The latter gained on them again, but didn’t really
seem interested in reaching or overtaking them. What did they want? If their
intention was to freak them out, they were succeeding. Or at least they were
succeeding with Amelia.

The man beside her, instead, looked almost
relaxed. As the bends became tighter, Mike started taking them at high speed,
braking at the last moment, before accelerating again as he exited them.

During the whole manoeuvre she was flipped
left and right. Aghast, she kept staring in front of her, avoiding looking at
the precipice at her left, which was becoming deeper and deeper, as they gained
altitude.

An impact from the back and her body was
pushed forward, but the safety belt stopped, keeping her firmly against the
seat. Amelia shouted.

“Son of a bitch …” were Mike’s words. How
could he keep so calm?

The engine roared and the car gained some
advantage over the chaser. Right after, they found themselves taking a hairpin
bend. Mike slowed down; the centrifugal force would have taken them right off
the road otherwise.

The black car pulled up alongside them on the
right, occupying the other lane, then it steered against them.

The violent contact made them swerve. Their
car’s front left side ended up against the low guardrail while still travelling
at high speed. And as it reared up a bit, it bent enough to exceed the height
of the protection on the edge of the road.

Amelia’s world turned sideways again and went
upside down, then sideways to the opposite side. For a second she had the
sensation she was flying, together with the one of churning guts. Then there
was another impact, followed by her world returning straight, but heading down,
with trunks and branches coming against her. With a series of violent jolts,
the car made its way into the wood clinging to the hill, slowing down and down.
At last it stopped with a crash. A bang, and then a big white balloon hit her
chest and face. Breathless, she waited until everything stopped, while her
airbag deflated and her safety belt kept her tied to the seat, preventing her
from falling forward.

“Are you alive?”

“I think I am.” Her mouth had emitted little
more than a murmur.

She could barely see the tree before her,
against which the front of the car had crashed. She knew she was balanced
precariously anyway and she didn’t dare move her gaze to the side. She hoped
that, by focusing on the tree, it wouldn’t collapse under the weight of the
vehicle.

“Okay, don’t move,” Mike said.

Who could move? “No problem.” Out of the
corner of her eye, however, she saw that he was certainly moving.

The car tilted a bit to the right. Amelia
shouted again.

“Don’t worry.” Judging from the tone of his
voice, he was really calm.

She forced herself to shift her eyes from the
tree and look at Mike. He was taking something out of the door pocket. Amelia
tried to comprehend what she was seeing, but she just had no idea what it was.
He raised his knees, blocking them against the steering wheel, then he made the
thing
pass across his safety belt and it got cut. The position he had taken
prevented him from falling.

“Now keep calm.” His attitude was Zen, to say
the least, just as if he found himself in such a situation every day. He
reached out to push a button.

The noise of a mechanism opening behind her
made Amelia turn. She couldn’t do it completely, because she was firmly
attached to the seat, but she managed enough to see the boot hatch rising.

When she addressed him again to ask for an
explanation, she noticed he had placed his hands in the middle of the dashboard
and was moving sideways with measured gestures. However, each move caused a
slight vibration of the car, which gave the impression it was on the verge of
tipping. Mike succeeded in turning his body. Now his back was leaning against
the dashboard and the windscreen, crossed by a web of cracks, and he was
sliding over what remained of the passenger’s airbag, to put himself in front
of Amelia. His legs were astride hers. He reached out to the opening lever of
the door and pulled it, but the door didn’t open fully.

“Help me open it, I can’t from here.”

Realising her arms were still in one piece,
Amelia grabbed the handle and started pushing. The door was made heavy by the
fact that the car was hanging on the opposite side, but she suspected that it
also depended on the shock, which was taking away the strength from her
muscles. With the help of his hand holding the belt cutter, while he was still
pushing against the dashboard to avoid falling on the steering wheel, the
door’s weight overcame the point where the slope inverted, and finally it
opened wide.

“Okay, now I’ll cut your belt.”

“Wait, wait!” Amelia exclaimed, caught by a
sudden terror. Or rather by the intensifying of the terror she already felt.
“If you cut it, I’ll fall!” She looked him in the face. Again he had that amused
air, as if he was making a fool of her, but without speaking. “What’s up?”

Mike shook his head with a smile on his lips.
“I was just thinking that I’ve known you for a little more than six hours and
in this time someone’s tried to kill me twice, always when I was in your
company. It seems like you are quite a lightning rod of troubles.”