Джеймс Паттерсон - Three Women Disappear

We both paused for a moment.

He broke the silence. “Let’s stop and think, Miranda. I believe we may have a misunderstanding.”

I could see the look in his eyes. There was no misunderstanding. He was a demonic tarantula crawling up from below relentlessly. I’d originally thought we were evenly matched. I was wrong. He was immensely better at this. He had chosen a bad route, but was now rushing up behind me with a violent focus.

Bloodlust.

Then he made a move I didn’t see coming.

“Aaron!” he yelled upward.

What is he doing?

“ Aaron Cooper! ” he yelled again.

I kept climbing.

“Your wife is coming to kill you, Aaron!”

What?!

“She thinks you betrayed her!”

He’s insane . Did he actually think this would work? I started accelerating my climb even faster than its already uncomfortable speed. I took risks that required not looking down. “Don’t listen to him!” I shouted upward.

“She’s lost her mind, Aaron!” he yelled. “Protect Sierra! Because Miranda is coming to kill you!”

My husband would never believe this . Though, in his delirious state… I scrambled over the edge in an ungraceful lunge, then stood by the road getting my bearings. I grabbed the purple kangaroo hat. My predator was no more than thirty seconds behind me on the trek. I’d need every nanosecond of that margin.

Go!

The black SUV was parked down the road. I vaulted the guardrail and sprinted directly for it. I was of course profoundly relieved to see it there, but also instantly reminded that this vehicle was the source of my misery.

No matter, it was a sight for sore eyes. This model came with all the options I ever wanted: Aaron and Sierra!

As I got closer, stumbling my last few steps, I could see the two of them lying against the rear wheel. When I sent them up here, it had seemed impossible. I don’t know if I actually believed they could make it. But there they were, delivered as promised. One napping daughter and one still-intact husband.

“Get inside!” I shouted at them. “ Get inside! ”

Clay was just making his way over the guardrail, only ten seconds behind me. I fumbled for the keys and the unlock button. Aaron and Sierra started to stir, roused by my voice, but gradually, too gradually for my liking. I arrived like a train wreck, my own momentum slamming me against the rear door on the driver’s side. I yanked it open to shove (as gently as I could) the wobbling Aaron into the interior, throwing Sierra in his lap. I flung open the driver’s door and jumped in, cranking the ignition just as the rear window was shattered.

Clay had found a rock—probably forged from his own kidney stones—to smash the window. He was already thrusting his arms into the back seat, attempting to grab my husband by the collar.

“Daddy!” cried Sierra, seeing her father about to get yanked into the clutches of pure evil.

I stomped on the gas and gunned it. Clay’s arms retreated as the SUV rocketed forward, and we finally hit the road at full speed. I wanted to make Clay appear in my rearview mirror and shrink.

And he did. Just as two white vans emerged in the distance behind him. His reinforcements.

CHAPTER 23

THE SPEED LIMIT was fifty on this treacherous desert road. I was doing eighty-five. Barely paying attention to handling the turns, I only cared about making the little white dots in my rearview mirror shrink.

Both vans had stopped to pick up their overlord, then quickly regained their cruising speed. I was mesmerized by the rearview mirror. I lost focus on the road before I corrected my swerve, fishtailed a bit, and steadied. Miranda, you’ve officially been issued a second chance to get this right .

To steer into the skid.

I banked hard on the next turn. It was a tight enough curve that it was marked with a road sign in cautionary yellow. SPEED LIMIT 45 MPH.

I took it at a hundred.

The back tires squealed as our entire SUV tilted toward the cliff. Not decisively so, but enough for me to dig my fingernails into the supple, calfskin, optional leather-covered steering wheel.

The white vans weren’t slowing down at all. In fact, the closer one was a turn behind me as we slalomed along the S-curves.

“Hold on tight, please,” I said to my cargo.

I lowered my glance at the rearview mirror to peek into the back seat at Aaron. He looked sickly pale, his skin was a blank, white canvas for a wife’s deepest fears.

“I’m gonna find us a hospital,” I said to him.

I started fumbling for the air-conditioning switch. These brand-new SUVs have monstrously elaborate control panels. It looked like NASA in there. Temperature. Humidity. Angle. Dual. Custom.

“Babe, there’s gotta be a bottle of water somewhere.”

He didn’t answer. There was an orange backpack on the seat next to me, which I started to dig through, filled with hard paper rods. No water.

“Babe?” I said.

“I can find it, Mommy,” Sierra spoke up.

Before I could caution her not to roam the interior of a vehicle that’s careening around cliff roads, she was up and about, crawling over the headrest, so that her tiny bottom filled my rearview mirror for a moment. And just behind her, flying out of the previous turn we just finished, I could see something terrifying.

The first white van. Directly behind us. With passengers. With guns.

My hand fumbled across the air-conditioning panel, inadvertently scraping the radio volume knob upward. I grabbed the wheel with both hands and floored it, as music started blaring—Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire”—while our SUV roared down the road at one hundred five miles per hour.

We thoroughly skidded at every turn. The back of the vehicle fishtailed and I’d correct it by guiding the front wheels toward the potential danger. It worked. We stayed in control.

But so did the white vans, which apparently had less to lose than we did, because they both dared every law of physics. Every maneuver, every curve—they were gaining on us.

And soon they were on either side.

“Mommy!”

Out came those guns. On my left, a man leaned out of the passenger window, wielding a nasty-looking contraption that fired more bullets than I ever wanted to know about.

BRATATATATAT! Either it was a warning shot or his aim was bad, but I could see the bullets whiz by in front of my wind-shield, and I didn’t want to find out.

I’m sure the best move would’ve been to slam on my brakes and have him magically end up shooting the other van. That’s how it works in cartoons, but I’m just not that kind of animated rabbit. Instead I jolted the steering wheel sharply to the left and slammed our SUV against the passenger door he was shooting from.

We bounced into the van and would’ve lost control had I not escalated the maneuver by swerving back across the road into the other guy for stabilization.

Wham!

Our SUV thus corrected its course and remained centered down the stretch of road, as the vehicles on either side of me lost traction. The first van wiggled, slowing him down so he was now slightly behind us; the other scraped the rock face and, to my shock and delight, careened back into the first one.

Now the two vans were meeting in my rearview mirror. And at a hundred miles per hour, that wasn’t a simple collision.

This would buy us at least five minutes.

I sped up to one hundred twenty-five miles per hour. I had to assume they’d resume the chase, if they could, when they could. I didn’t know what the capacity of my engine was but I knew my tires were shaking. Big, oafish SUVs are not meant to go triple the speed limit. Yet, miraculously, within a few minutes we were emerging out of the canyons, beginning the hundred-mile downslope back toward civilization. I still shook with adrenaline, constantly checking my rearview mirror as the mountains gave way to hills and landscape broadened to wide-open space.