Jeff Abbott - Trust Me

If he lowered the chain from her throat she could fight him, even with the gun. Their confidence was daunting. He tightened the chain around her throat again, just enough to pull her close. ‘Not quite yet,’ Luke said. ‘Let’s walk to your car.’

‘Mouser has the car keys.’

‘Car keys,’ he called.

‘No,’ Mouser said. ‘Come on, Snow, enough. Let’s get going before the sky opens up again.’

Snow stayed still. ‘I just wanted to see what he’d try. What he’d do. It’s like watching a hamster work a maze.’

‘I’m going to shoot you is what I’ll do,’ Luke said.

‘Then shoot,’ she said. Her calm was maddening.

‘I… I need you alive for now. You come with me to the car.’

‘And we’ll be hot-wiring it?’ she asked. ‘You saw that in a movie, right, schoolboy?’

‘Come on.’ He gave the chains a harder pull than he meant to and she gagged.

‘For every second of pain you cause me, I will give you an hour of it.’ The icy tone of her promise chilled his skin. He shouldn’t be afraid of her but he was.

‘Maybe he doesn’t have the keys to toss me. Maybe you do,’ he said in a harsh whisper in her ear. ‘You. Mouse!’

‘Mouser.’

‘Whatever. You stay on the porch. I see you come off, I shoot her.’

‘How you want to play it, Snow?’ he asked again. The rain started again, hissing in the pines, thunder booming in the distance.

‘Do as he says,’ Snow said.

They hurried backward down the long path toward where he and Eric had come through the gate. The rain boomed out of the clouds, thick again. Mud sucked at their shoes, darkness drank them up except when the lightning flashed in the wet heavens.

Luke blinked, trying to keep sight of Mouser, looking back over his shoulder toward the gate. The metal chains grew slick in his grasp, from sweat or rain.

‘Empty your pockets.’

‘I don’t…’

‘Shut up! Prove to me you don’t have the keys. Pull out your pockets.’

Snow made a little grunt of anger and jammed her hand into her pocket. She stumbled against the gun and he pulled the gun away from her head. Suddenly she lashed her head back to catch him in the face. He tottered and she pivoted and powered him into the mud. The hand holding the gun slid deep into the muck. She wrenched free of the chains, nearly breaking his arm. She aimed a brutal kick at his head but he rolled and caught it on the upper back. He raised the mudglopped gun but she knocked it free from his hand, with a savage and precise kick. The gun was gone.

No gun. She was screaming for Mouser.

He lashed the chains at her face, she ducked back and fell, and he turned and ran. Away from the gate, from the glow of the automatic light. Into the rain-drenched blackness.

The grass rolled down a slight incline toward a dense grove of pines. He dodged around the trees; the faint glimmer from the gate lights receded.

He had no light for his path except the inconstant slash of lightning. He stumbled and fell, ran ten more feet into a pine, the bark scraping his cheek. Lightning again showed him an opening in the growth and he ran toward it. He spotted the silvery barbs of a wire fence. He eased below the bottom strand, sliding in the mud, slicking him from head to foot.

Luke stumbled past the fence and back into a stretch of unpaved road. Roads led, eventually, to people. He tried to get his bearings. To his right, the road bent into the darkness where he’d run from. To his left the road went straight. Toward civilization.

He ran hard to the left, grateful for the clean, smooth unobstructed line. He was tired of dodging pines.

He ran. Aware of nothing but the bright pain in his legs and the pounding in his chest and the chains weighing his arms down.

Suddenly headlights exploded into life behind him, a loud growl of tires speeding. Engine revving. The lights, low to the ground, cut across him, pushing him to run faster, as if the light had weight. The car accelerated toward him. He powered hard to the right. A gully cut down along the side of the road, topped by another wire fence. The car couldn’t go across the gully.

He slid down into the mossy-wet ditch, hauled himself up the side and skidded under another wire fence. The pine growth was heavy here. The rain strengthened, the wind rose. He bounced off the trees, trying to run as fast as he could. He roped the chains around his arms to silence their clinking.

He could hear the sound of pursuit behind him, moving past the trees, running. Suddenly a flashlight sparked on, caught his shoulders in its glow as he ran up to a jumble of fallen pines. He slid under the brush and where his leg had just been he heard a pop like a bullet. But it couldn’t fly straight, not in this rain.

A scream gelled in his throat and he moaned it away. He scrabbled into the earth and slid under the pyramid of tumbled, fallen pine trunks – there was a narrow passageway, formed by nature. Hoping to God he wasn’t sliding into a dead end, or a rattler’s nest. He saw an opening, slithered through it, staggered to his feet.

He ran, for several more minutes, before he collapsed against a heavy trunk.

Gasping, nearly drunk with exhaustion, he heard an engine ahead of him.

Soaked to the skin, he followed the fading roar. A minute later he stumbled out into another road. Paved. A painted line gleamed on the center, under a heavy cover of incessant rain. A highway or farm-to-market road. In the far distance he saw red taillights, a car. Inching into another lane because of a dark shape huddled on the road’s shoulder.

Someone pulled over because of the torrential rain. He ran toward the shape.

A semi tractor-trailer. He was twenty feet away when the truck’s blinkers flashed and the truck inched forward.

Heading back onto the road.

No, he thought. He had to get out of here now or they would kill him.

The back of the truck read WINGED FEET TRANSPORTATION Houston/Beaumont/Tyler.

The truck’s left wheels turned onto the asphalt.

Luke ran, every muscle in his body screaming. The truck’s back was now ten feet away from him; the pavement slick. He stumbled, nearly fell, stayed on his feet. He grabbed the back door of the semi and hauled himself onto the heavy metal bumper. He stood on it and looked for a way to open the truck’s doors. He found the handle but it was locked.

It didn’t matter – as long as he was getting away from his pursuers. He pressed his face close to the wet metal of the truck’s doors, steadied his feet on the wide metal bumper that served as a step into the vehicle.

He looped the chains around the door’s handle, an improvised safety belt. His arms felt like jelly. He considered signaling the truck – but then the driver would stop, and if they stopped, Mouser and Snow might catch them. Better simply to get away.

The truck eased its speed slowly up to a cautious forty – Luke guessed – and the wind and the rain plucked at him. His own breathing boomed in his ears. He shivered against the metal doors.

He heard a whoosh, then another, and the truck rocked in the wake of sudden hard surge of air. Two other trucks, passing in the opposite direction.

How many minutes had he piggybacked? Ten? Twenty? His legs ached, crouched on the bumper, lashed to the handle, trying to keep his balance. If he fell he’d break his neck.

Maybe his pursuers were still hunting him in the woods, blissfully ignorant that he was gone, speeding away on winged feet. His arms screamed in pain. He couldn’t keep this up forever; maybe it was time to signal the trucker…

He sensed the approaching lights behind him. He looked behind him and saw headlights – low to the ground, not a truck, a sedan. The lights were racing toward him, with the awful certain intensity of a snake slithering close, its unbroken gaze a hypnosis.