Carey was agitated, hyper, frazzled with the adrenaline running through him, the way it was in battle, when your glands pumped chemicals into your bloodstream and action was the only off-valve to bring you back down again. “Just keep on,” he said, his eyes swollen in their sockets. “Or no, pull over. Pull over and wait till they go past again.”
Sten flicked on the blinker, looking for a spot up ahead, and there it was, a patch of bleached-out dirt on the edge of a dropoff, and in the next moment he was swinging onto the shoulder, generating his own tornado of dust. Unfortunately, he was barely off the road, the turnout so narrow the driver’s-side wheels were still on the blacktop, and he had a fleeting vision of a logging truck roaring round the turn to peel off the left side of the car—and how would he explain that to Carolee? Not to mention the insurance company?
The engine shut itself off, dutifully. There was no traffic. He lifted his eyes to look into the mirror. “What if they don’t come by? What if they already went past their turnoff just to fox us and they’re doubling back?”
Carey turned a stricken face to him and jerked his head round to stare out the back window, where the road lay silent and the sun swelled to brighten the surface till it might have been freshly oiled. “Just wait,” Carey said.
“Wait for what? They’re gone, I tell you.” Another glance in the rearview. The bushes gilded in light. The soaring trees. Everything as still and innocent as the beginning of time. “I’m for turning around.”
And then suddenly the pickup was there, rounding the bend, looming huge in the rearview. It gave him a jolt. He could feel his heart going. He snatched a quick breath and kept his hands firmly on the wheel, as if it were in danger of breaking loose and disintegrating before his eyes. The truck was moving at a good clip, but it slowed abruptly as it came up even with them and both he and Carey turned their heads to stare into the faces of the four men, no pretense now, the truck twice the size of the Prius, big tires, big cab, and it came to a halt right there beside them. It was a staring contest, that was what it was, and he was thinking they would be armed and why wouldn’t they be because this was no church group and these were no ranch hands, thinking What have I got myself into?
The man behind the wheel, the older one, had a face that sucked up the light, his eyes red-rimmed and sleepy, but the look he gave Sten was unmistakable. Sten had seen it all his life, on the football field, in the service, from the punks at the high school who thought they were men when they didn’t have the faintest notion of what a man was, the look that said, Don’t fuck with me. Five seconds, that was all there was to it. Nobody said a word, though the windows were down and the one in the passenger’s seat was close enough to spit on, and then the tires jumped and the pickup shot up the road to vanish round the next turn.
“Call the sheriff,” Sten said, and in that instant he had the car in gear and he was lurching out onto the roadway, pedal to the floor, something gone awry in him now, the switch thrown, and he could no more have turned around and gone back home than cut off his own hand. This was America, this was his turf, where he’d been born and raised, not some shithole in the jungle somewhere. “Son of a bitch,” he said.
And Carey? Carey was clutching at the passenger’s strap with one hand and trying to work his phone with the other. “Slow down!” he shouted. “It’s not worth it. Jesus, Sten, you’re going to kill us.”
The trees careened past, tight turns here, the coast far below them now, dips and rises, timberland, better than fifty inches of rain up here on the slopes each winter and thirty-nine below, rain that swelled the streams and percolated into the soil and pushed the biggest trees in the world—living fossils—up into the sky. The tires shrieked. Air beat in the window to slap at his face. “I can’t get any reception,” Carey said, as if it mattered, and then the white flash of the truck’s tailgate shone through the treetrunks up ahead and he eased off on the gas, in control now, because they might have had the advantage on the open highway, but here the smaller vehicle was more than a match for them.