63. Louise
LOUISE
You may think you know what tension feels like. You’re wrong.
Tension is driving down a highway with half a million dollars worth of drugs in the back, waiting for a cop to pull you over.
Tension is driving knowing that one little mistake—a single dangerous overtake, drifting a mile over the speed limit—could result in the red and blue lights and then the death of someone you love.
Tension is doing all this in a truck with scratchy, lumpy seats, a gear shift that feels like stirring a lead rod in a barrel of broken parts and the steering from an ocean liner.
For six hours straight.
Sean had driven for the first six hours.
He would have kept going for longer but, when he roused me at a gas station to see if I wanted to use the bathroom, I looked at his drooping eyelids and insisted I take a shift.
As morning broke, the cops came out in force.
They were looking for easy tickets to make their quotas, but the traffic was light, so pickings were thin. That made us a prime target.
I’d never realized how much I zoned out on a long drive until I couldn’t do it anymore.
Even when I was just sitting in my lane, cruising along, I was constantly checking the mirrors for approaching cops, checking my speed, checking I wasn’t doing anything else wrong.
When a cop overtook us, I’d sit there bolt upright, arms so stiff on the wheel that my muscles screamed, eyes straight ahead.
They’d get closer and closer and closer, right up alongside us.
..then they’d pass by and I’d breathe again.
I was soaked with sweat by the end of the first hour.
Now it was nearly noon and I was a wreck. My hands throbbed from gripping the wheel so tightly; my thighs burned from the awkward pedal position, made for someone with longer legs than me; my arms, shoulders and back were on fire from the constant stress.
And it wasn’t just the drive itself. My mind kept going back to what we were attempting here.
A deal with the cartel, people who made Malone, with all his heavies and his jazz club, look like a spoiled child.
I’d seen the news stories. If they weren’t happy with the deal I offered them, they’d simply shoot us.
And my plan pretty much guaranteed that they wouldn’t be happy.
And even if we could somehow cut a deal with them, we still had Malone to deal with. Wherever we ran, he’d hunt us down—
An ear-splitting whoop! from behind me. Whoop! Wh-wh-wh-whoop!
I checked the rear view mirror and saw the cop car, six feet behind me, lights flashing. The officer behind the wheel jerked his thumb for me to pull over.
Fuck.