Susan Phillips - The Great Escape

“I’ll find someone else,” she said, which was nonsense. There was no one else. “That guy over there.” She nodded toward a rough-looking man sitting in front of a platter of pancakes. “I’ll ask him. He looks like he could use the money.”

“His mullet tell you that?”

Panda was hardly the person to criticize another man’s hairstyle, although the other women in the restaurant didn’t appear as critical as she was.

He didn’t seem to be able to do two things at once, and for a while, he chose thinking over eating. Finally he took a too-large bite and, mouth full of burger, said, “You’ll guarantee me a grand even if you don’t last through today?”

She nodded, then picked up one of the crayons left on the table for kids. She wrote on a napkin and pushed it across the table to him. “There. We have a contract.”

He studied it. Shoved it aside. “You screwed over a decent guy.”

She blinked against the sting in her eyes. “Better now than later, right? Before he found out he might be a victim of false advertising.” She wished she’d kept silent, but he merely upended the ketchup bottle and slapped the bottom.

The waitress returned with coffee and eyes for Panda. Lucy shifted position, and the plastic bag rustled under her T-shirt. The coffeepot stalled in midair as the waitress turned to look at her. Lucy ducked her head.

He wadded up the napkin contract and swiped his mouth with it. “Kid doesn’t like it when she eats too fast.”

“You girls get pregnant younger all the time,” the waitress said. “How old are you, honey?”

“Legal,” he said before Lucy could answer.

“Barely,” the waitress muttered. “When are you due?”

“Uhm… August?” Lucy had made it sound like a question, not a declaration, and the waitress looked confused.

“Or September.” Panda leaned back in the booth, eyelids at half-mast. “Depends on who’s the daddy.”

The woman advised Panda to get himself a good lawyer and walked off.

He pushed away his empty plate. “We can be at the Austin airport in a couple hours.”

No plane. No airport. “I can’t fly,” she said. “I don’t have an ID.”

“Call your old lady and let her take care of it. This jaunt has cost me enough.”

“I told you. Keep track of your expenses. I’d pay you back. Plus a thousand dollars.”

“Where are you getting the cash?”

She had no idea. “I’ll figure it out.”

LUCY HAD GONE TO THE party knowing there’d be drinking. She was almost seventeen, none of the kids was going to narc, and Mat and Nealy would never find out. What was the big deal?

Then Courtney Barnes passed out behind the couch, and they couldn’t wake her up. Somebody called 911. The cops showed up and took IDs. When they found out who Lucy was, one of them drove her home while the rest of the kids got hauled into the police station.

She’d never forgotten what the officer had said to her. “Everybody knows what Senator Jorik and Mr. Jorik did for you. Is this how you pay them back?”

Mat and Nealy refused preferential treatment for her and hauled her back to the police station to sit with the others. The press covered the whole thing, complete with op-ed pieces about the wild children of Washingon’s pols, but her parents never threw that in her face. Instead they talked to her about alcohol poisoning and drunk driving, about how much they loved her and wanted her to make smart choices. Their love shamed her and changed her in a way their anger never could have. She’d promised herself never again to let them down, and until yesterday, she hadn’t.

Now she stood in a small-town discount store that smelled of rubber and popcorn. She’d adjusted the plastic bag under her shirt so it didn’t rustle, but she looked so mangy after hours on the road that no one was giving her a second glance, although Panda was attracting the same wary attention he’d garnered in the restaurant. A young mother even pulled her toddler into the next aisle to avoid him.

Lucy glanced at him from under the brim of her ball cap. “I’ll meet you at the register.”

He held up a cheap pink training bra. “This looks about your size.”

She gave him a tight smile. “Really. I don’t need any help. You can do your own shopping now. It’s on me.”

He tossed down the bra. “Damn right it’s on you. I’m keeping the receipts.”

But he still didn’t move. She added some ugly white granny panties to her shopping basket because she wasn’t going to let him watch her choose anything else.

He pulled out the granny panties and tossed in some neon-colored nothings. “I like these better.”

Of course you do. But since you’ll never see them, you don’t get a vote.

He slipped his hand under his T-shirt and scratched his stomach. “Hurry up. I’m hungry.”

She needed him, so she left the trashy nothings in the shopping basket and let him steer her to the single aisle that served as the store’s men’s department.

“I like to get input from the ladies when I shop.” He grabbed a navy T-shirt and studied the illustration, a cartoon drawing of a woman with enormous breasts and a rocket launcher between her legs.

“That would be a definite no,” she said.

“I like it.” He tossed it over his shoulder and began thumbing through a stack of jeans.

“I thought you wanted my input.”

He stared at her blankly. “Why’d you think that?”

She gave up.

A few minutes later as she set her meager purchases by the register, she experienced a stab of yearning for her pearls and headbands, her slim summer dresses and neat little sandals. They were the objects that anchored her. In her ballet flats and cashmere sweaters, a cell phone tucked to her ear, she knew who she was, not only the adopted daughter of the former president of the United States but a crackerjack lobbyist and first-rate fund-raiser for important causes that help children. Her stomach started to hurt again.

Panda shot her a sullen look as he paid for their purchases. Once they were outside, he shoved everything into the cheap gray nylon duffel he’d bought, wadding up her neon panties with his charcoal gray boxer briefs, and secured the duffel to the Yamaha with a bungee.

Panda didn’t like interstate highways, she’d discovered, and they rode east on dusty secondary roads that ran through dying towns and past run-down ranches. She didn’t know where they were going. Didn’t care. As evening began to fall, he stopped at a twelve-unit motel next to an abandoned driving range. The first thing she spotted when he came out of the motel’s tiny office was the single key dangling from his big hand. “I’d like my own room,” she said.

“Then you pay for it.” He tossed his leg over the bike and, without waiting for her, rode toward the last motel unit. She walked, her legs wobbly. At least straddling that big leather vibrating seat had made her feel nominally alive-right up to the moment she remembered those broad shoulders she was forced to stare at all day belonged to a man who communicated with grunts, ate with his mouth open, and was only putting up with her for the money. A man she was about to share a seedy motel room with.

All she had to do was make a phone call. One phone call and this insanity would be over.

She kept walking.

He was unfastening the bungee cord from the back of the bike when she reached their motel unit. He freed the duffel that held their recent purchases, then flipped open one of the saddlebags. As he pulled out that night’s six-pack, she spotted another bumper sticker, this one plastered to the inside of the flap.

The message was so over-the-top vile, it took her a moment to absorb what it said.