Doranna Durgin - Exception to the Rule

Because we had help, he realized.

Although not strictly true. He’d had options he hadn’t taken, not once he’d seen the second man go down. Two opportunities to have killed his opponent and one crippling blow that Rio had pulled. He’d chosen not to escalate the situation, not as long as the conveniently flying soup can had reduced his opponents.

Shaking off such thoughts, he opened the nearest door—the back seat—and gestured Carolyne into the car to the background tune of the approaching siren. “We’ll go down the road a way, pull over and find the bug. Once we find it, we’ll have a better idea when we were tagged. But until then…our new friend Bonnie has the right idea.” He made sure her feet were out of the way, then closed the door, ducking into the front seat. “We don’t need to be here when the police arrive.”

Carolyne groaned in disbelief and sank down in the seat, shoving aside the hasty pile of luggage they’d thrown in the back when they’d switched cars just north of Erie. “God. Hiding from the police. I can’t believe it.”

Rio spun the wheel one-handed, an arm across the back of the passenger seat as he looked behind, backing the car at a speed that made Carolyne shut her eyes, squinchy faced. “I’m not sure,” he said, “but this just might be an actual case of being too smart for your own good.”

She kicked the back of his seat. “I can’t believe you even said that!”

He grinned, shifted into drive and pulled out onto the road. By the time they passed a police cruiser coming from the opposite direction, he’d reached a sedate pace; rather than be seen as accelerating—by which the police might just guess he’d only just pulled away from the store—he cruised there until they were well out of sight.

Carolyne poked her head up, giving him a critical gaze in the review mirror. “You’re bleeding.”

“Long way from my heart.”

“You take this all so lightly!”

This time he looked into the mirror to meet her frightened gaze, big blue eyes that looked much better when they weren’t so red rimmed. “I don’t,” he assured her, and his back twinged slightly to remind him of that bad landing in the coolers. His opponent had been damn good…just not good enough. “But we’re okay. And we’re doing fine. Within a mile or so we’ll lose that bug, and they’ve got no way of knowing where we go from here.”

“But we’re headed right for Mill Springs! Of course they’ll guess—” But she cut herself short. “We’re not, are we? Headed the way we were going, I mean.”

“We’re not,” he affirmed. “We’ll turn around once we’re clean. And looky here—this is just the place.” He stepped on the brake hard, easing up just enough to keep from losing rubber, and made an abrupt turn into a single-lane asphalt road labeled Private Drive.

“But—”

He gave a sharp shake of his head. “Trust, Caro. Trust. We’ll only go far enough so we’re not easy to spot from the road. Mr. and Mrs. Private Drive will never know we stopped by.”

All the same, he did pull almost completely off the asphalt once he’d jockeyed the car through a series of J-turns to face the main road. Just in case Mr. or Mrs. Private Drive tried to pass by.

“Out,” he announced, cutting the engine but leaving the keys in the ignition. “For now we’ll assume we’re each clean, but that’s it. Everything else gets searched.” After a moment’s thought he went to the car trunk and pulled the carpet piece covering the spare tire. He put it on the ground beside the now open passenger door—Carolyne sat sideways in the seat, her sneakered feet on the ground. Pink sneakers. Very girly.

He gestured at the carpet. “Let’s start with your purse. Dump it on out.”

She upended the purse an inch from the ground, gently shaking it until the lining hung upside down from the loose crochet. “There,” she said. “I’ll bet you always wanted to do this.”

“Honey, I started my spy training early. Your first purse held a fake lipstick, a taped-up picture of that guy who played Bobby Ewing, an address book in which all the i’s were dotted with little hearts and a Texas Instruments calculator. There was a note from some guy, too, but I’ll pretend I didn’t look.” He glanced up at her dropped mouth and raised brows and added a wary “You’re not going to kick me again, are you? Because there’s not a nice thick car seat between us at the moment.”

She closed her mouth, and then muttered, “I’ll wait till you get back in the car.”

As Rio replaced the contents of the purse—considerably more than had been in that first version—he saw the police cruiser speeding back down the road. Hunting this car, he thought. If he were an officer and had a choice between running after a soup-flinging woman—even a soup-flinging woman with an unusual edge—or the couple who’d started the trouble, he knew whom he’d go for.

Fortunately, he’d asked for the car to be of a bland color, and had ended up with a dirty silver that no doubt bore some fancy car-paint name: platinum dream, arroyo shadow. If the officer behind the wheel was checking the side of the road, he’d missed his glimpse of Rio and Carolyne.

Carolyne hauled out her laptop case and methodically emptied it of peripherals for his examination, none of which seemed suspect. The laptop case, though…

“Here we go,” Rio said. Simple but high tech, a small disk that rested comfortably on the pad of his forefinger once he’d removed it from an inside corner of the laptop case. Not a listening device…just a tracker. “Not well placed. It was dark out…they were in a hurry.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your driveway,” Rio said, and put the tracker on a rock so he could smash it to bitty bits with another, pointier rock. “I took the laptop out early, came right back in for another load. Didn’t lock the car doors until after. Stupid, stupid…” His inner focus on the night before sharpened. “I did hear something out there.”

“Then we switched cars for nothing.” It shook her, the thought that someone had been at her house. When she knelt beside him on the carpet piece to gather up her gear, she’d started shaking again.

“Not for nothing.” He squeezed her ankle reassuringly. “It was a good move. And we’ll keep making good moves.”

She gave a shaky laugh. “What difference can it make, if they’re a step ahead of us? How’d anyone even know it was worth tracking me so fast? I didn’t tell anyone but you! Scott thinks it’s just a business trip.”

“You said your boss suspected a leak.”

She scowled, but it was denial rather than anger. Perhaps a tinge of horror. “I don’t want to believe that. I work with those people.”

“Believe it,” he said, and got to his feet, picking up the trunk carpet as she put her laptop in the car. “Or don’t. It’s not really important. What’s important is that we know there’s already someone looking for you. We won’t see our two friends from the store again—they know we’ve made them. We might not see anyone at all—Mill Springs is a good spot. Small town like that’ll make it easy to spot hired help. And as soon as we get there, I’ll start working on a contingency location. And you—” he paused to look down at her as she climbed in the back seat, apparently prepared to spend the rest of the ride to Mill Springs with her head down “—you put your mind to solving whatever can of worms you discovered, and then this will all be over.”

Carolyne shuddered in exaggerated reaction. “We don’t use that word worm,” she said. “Not where the laptop can hear.”

Hmm. Geek humor. Rio grinned at her as if he’d actually gotten it, and then after a moment he did get it. Worm, computer virus…bad joke.