Page 51 of No Place Left to Hide

Eighteen

Now

Shit, shit, shit!” Jena shouts. “I’m going to get arrested for reckless driving. We’re going almost ninety in a fifty-five. I can’t afford that kind of ticket! My mom is going to lose her fucking mind—”

“Stop! Take a breath and get to the side of the road. I’ll handle it.”

For a second, I think she’s too far into her panic spiral to hear me, but she lets off the gas. We can’t safely pull over until the road straightens out again. It looks like there’s some kind of field to our left, and a guardrail to the right with thick trees on the other side. The breakdown lane is barely wider than the Subaru, but we’re at least safely out of the road when we come to a stop.

“You’re not going to get arrested, because you weren’t driving,” I say, unbuckling her seatbelt.

She blinks at me, and we both look back. The cop hasn’t caught up with us yet. But that’s hardly surprising. They were parked when we blew past them. We only have a few seconds to edit the situation and do some damage control before they come around the bend.

I press myself against the glove box. “Go, go, go.”

Jena dives for the passenger seat, and I climb behind the wheel, buckling into the driver’s side again. Our seatbelts click into place as and the cop pulls behind us. With any luck, they didn’t see us moving around in here. But even if they did, the whole being-stalked-by-an-unhinged-lunatic-with-a-vendetta angle should surely take precedence.

“I was driving the whole time, got it? It’s my fault we’re in this mess anyway, and it’s my car. If there are any tickets or charges, they’ll be on me. You’re an innocent passenger as far as the officer is concerned, okay?”

Jena’s eyes mist. “Thank you.”

“Besides, if your mom’s going to be pissed about your phone, she’d lose her ever-loving mind if you came home with a five-hundred-dollar speeding ticket and a suspended license. Never mind if they tack on a reckless driving charge too. You don’t have the benefit of my dad’s get-out-of-jail-free card, so this one’s on me.”

She nods, but this makes her tear up even more.

I glance at the rearview mirror. This whole night has been a collage of bright, glaring lights. This time they’re red and blue instead of a Bronco’s high beams; still, they’re no less blinding. I grab my wallet out of my favorite purse and Jena hands me my registration from the glove box, but we won’t need it. Not when the officer hears why we were going so fast and calls my dad.Especiallynot after they call my dad.

Shit.

He’s going to be furious, but evenhecan’t find fault with me on this one. If anyone knows how impossible the Heck family is, it’s my dad. Besides, what other choice did I have? Let him run me off the road?

I picture my dad pacing the length of his home office, rehearsing answers to generic questions for his last confirmation interview. Hisface was pinched in concentration. I called his name three times to tell him dinner was ready, and he never once heard me. It was like his meeting was the only thing that existed in the world. Like it was all he had space for.

On second thought, getting run off the road might have been a better option in his eyes. But I’m determined to utilize a similar focus.

I roll down my window and wait for the officer to do the normalsit in the car and fuck aroundroutine, but they surprise me by getting out of the vehicle right away. They stop beside my window and I’m staring straight into a goddamned flashlight from hell.

“What on earth were you kids thinking?” a female voice demands, loud and furious.

She lowers the flashlight, and my vision is all afterimages until I slowly blink her back into focus. Her name tag says LEFEBVRE, and she has a police badge from Dallas, Oregon. A wave of relief washes over me. I didn’t realize we were so close to Dallas already. We’re almost out of the dead zone.

I let that relief drive the conversation. “Thank god you’re here. We need your help. We’ve been racing down this highway—”

“I’m aware of that,” Officer Lefebvre says flatly.

In the shine of her headlights, I see she’s by herself. Her blond hair is combed back into a meticulous ponytail. She looks about thirty.

“How old are you two? And what the hell happened to the back of your car?”

“We’re eighteen,” I say, waving a hand at the back, “and that was all Brandon.”

“Brandon?”

I give her the absolutely shortest version of the story. Bullet points, really. The sooner she realizes we’re in danger, the sooner she makes afew phone calls and I’m no longer at the mercy of that asshole. Being on the side of the road feels too exposed. I keep compulsively looking behind us like he’s about to fly around the corner at any second.

But that’s stupid. If he were still on the road, he’d be here already. And even Brandon Heck isn’t foolish enough to fuck with a police officer. Everyone’s idiocy has limits.

I tell her about the phone calls and the vandalism. Brandon appearing at the beach party. The tailgating, the high beams, the deer, the canned goods… When I get to the broken windshield, I say, “That’s when you saw us. He’d just pulled away when we passed you.”

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