David
I didn’t have much time to process what Aunt Agnes had to say. Not that she’d said much. But the implications were immense.
By telling me to run, she must have had some idea where I was, and of my situation.
Agnes seemed to know I’d just met up with Dr. Jack Sturgess.
And she wanted me to get away from him as quickly as I could.
A millisecond after Agnes screamed at me, I turned my head left to look at Dr. Sturgess. That arm he’d been keeping close to his side was moving away from his body. I thought I saw something small and cylindrical in his hand. Like a pencil with a metallic point.
No. More like a syringe.
“Shit!” I said, then dropped the phone, threw the column shift into drive, and pressed my foot right to the floor. Mom’s old Taurus was no Ferrari, but it kicked ahead fast enough to push Sarita back in her seat, spray gravel all over the front of Gaynor’s Audi, and make Dr. Sturgess leap backward to keep his feet from getting run over.
“Stop!” he shouted. “Stop!”
The Taurus fishtailed on the gravel, then lurched and squealed as the left back tire connected with pavement.
“Who was that?” Sarita cried. “Who called you?”
I couldn’t think about answering her question. I glanced back for half a second to make sure we weren’t pulling into the path of a tractor-trailer, and caught a glimpse of Sturgess fiddling with his jacket, possibly reaching into it.
“Get down,” I said to Sarita.
“What?”
“Get down!”
I checked my mirror again, worried that the doctor might be carrying more than a syringe. But he wasn’t standing there with a gun in his hand. He was running back to Bill Gaynor’s Audi.
There was an intersection just ahead. I cut across the lane to make a left, the tires complaining loudly. The car felt as though it had gone up on two wheels for half a second. Sarita threw up her hands, braced herself against the dash as we went around the corner.
“What happened?” she asked. “What did you see?”
“He had some kind of needle,” I said. “He was holding a syringe. Another second and I think he would have jabbed it into my neck.”
There was another cross street only a quarter mile ahead. If I took that, and then the street after that, and even the one after that, I thought I had a good chance of losing them. The Audi could outrun this old clunker, no doubt about it. But if they didn’t know which way we’d gone, it wasn’t going to matter how fast that marvelous piece of German engineering could go.
I reached down beside me, feeling for my cell.
“Where’s my phone?” I shouted.
Sarita looked down between the seats. “I see it!”
“Get it!” I said, keeping up my speed, glancing in the mirror, not seeing any sign of them yet.
The next cross street was too far away. I feared the Audi would round the bend, that Gaynor and Sturgess would catch a glimpse of us before we could make the next turn.
“Hang on,” I said.
I slammed on the brakes, leaving two long strips of rubber on the road. I could smell it, and smoke billowed out from under the wheel wells. I cut the car hard right and sped into the parking lot of a Wendy’s. I drove straight to the back of the property, behind the restaurant, making sure the car was not visible from the street. This fast-food place, and a lot of the other businesses along this stretch, had sprung up to serve spillover customers from Five Mountains, and were probably all feeling the pain, now that the park was toast.
Not that that was a major concern at the moment. I was just glad for a place to hide.
“What are you doing?” Sarita asked. “Are you hungry?”
I sat there for maybe five minutes, then slowly drove down the side of the building and approached the road. I nosed up to the edge, looked both ways.
No sign of the Audi.
I headed back in the direction we’d come from.
“The phone,” I said.
Sarita went back to digging between the seat and the transmission hump. “I can’t quite . . . I got it!”
“Okay,” I said. “Go back to the last call and connect me to that number.”
She pressed the screen a couple of times, then handed me the phone. “It should be ringing.”
Agnes picked up immediately. “David?”
“What the hell’s going on, Agnes?” I shouted. “That fucking doctor of yours was ready to jab some needle into me!”
“Did you get away? Are you okay? Where are you?”
“I’m heading back into town. How did you know? How did you know what was going to happen?”
“I can’t explain over the phone. I . . . I can’t. I’ll meet you at your parents’ place. I’ll explain. I’ll explain it all. Do you have Sarita with you?”
“Jesus, how did you know that?”
Were we on satellite surveillance? How could Agnes be aware of everything and everywhere we—
Unless she’d been talking to Sturgess. Or Gaynor.