Chapter 34
Jojo drove home that evening from the state police barracks after she and Conor had talked to Kyle Barnes, with the wind whistling around the makeshift patch on the driver’s side window of her truck, and her teeth clenched in the bitter cold.
She was eager to talk to Kyle’s father tomorrow.
Was being pissed that your son had been crippled a big enough motive to murder seven people?
She shook her head. What a ridiculous question. Nothing was a big enough motive to murder seven people, to murder even one person.
She turned off Radcliff Lane onto Long Bottom Road and slowed to less than fifty miles an hour.
This was a particularly gnarly stretch of highway between her uncles’ house and Somerset.
The whole road was narrow and winding, but on one half-mile length a solid rock wall rose up only a couple of feet from the north side of the road, and runoff from spring rains down the mountain had eaten away at the edges of the pavement on the south side.
Going into town in the morning, she had to be careful not to clock a side mirror into the rocks, and on the way home, she kept her eyes on the crumbling asphalt on her right, careful not to let a tire slip off the edge, since a swan dive down that mountainside to the creek below was probably not survivable.
And the cherry on the sundae lay at the east end of that stretch, where the road doglegged abruptly south, just about a right-angle turn. The guardrail there was mangled by all the poor souls who didn’t make the turn and ran off into the woods beyond.
Trident was lying in the seat beside her with his head in her lap as she turned onto that section of the road, the warmth of him spreading out in all directions. She glanced down, stroked his head and when she looked up, another car was coming directly at her.
It took a precious second or two for her to realize what was happening. The road was wide enough for two cars—just barely—but the car barreling toward her was in her lane!
She was only going about forty-five miles per hour, but a collision at that speed would throw both vehicles off the road and down the embankment.
Even with her lights on high beam, she could tell nothing about the other vehicle because of the glare of its bright lights on the windshield.
Instinctively, she yanked the steering wheel to the left, driving so close to the rock wall, her side mirror kissed an outcrop and sparked.
Still, here in the “oncoming traffic” lane the other car would pass by safely in her lane, with a couple of feet to spare.
But the other car swerved at the same time she did, into the same lane—was still coming right at her.
Somebody was playing a deadly game of chicken.
Her available options here were not great: head-on collision, take a header off an embankment, or ricochet off a rock wall and then take a header off an embankment.
Between one heartbeat and the next, a face suddenly flashed bright in her mind—Tie Rod Beckett, his crooked grin and bad teeth, and the way he cocked his head to the side when he told stories about his moonshining ancestors in Alabama and Georgia—tales so outlandish she hadn’t believed a word of any of them until the day they were riding together in a van headed back to camp, and rounded a bend to find an ambush set up in the road right in front of them.
The next thing Jojo knew, they were hauling ass in the opposite direction with Tie Rod bellowing out a wild war whoop.
“That, baby girl,” he’d cried jubilantly, “is what’s called a bootlegger’s turn! ”
It was the only thing that would save her now.
Time did that thing it did sometimes when it shifted down into a lower gear and Jojo’s senses became acutely aware.
The hum of the tires on the road’s icy-slick surface.
The feel of the steering wheel vibrating just a little.
She moved her hands away from the standard ten o’clock and two o’clock positions and put both hands at the bottom of the wheel, palms up, left hand at roughly 7:30, right hand at about 4:30, a position that would allow her to let go with her left hand and whip the steering wheel all the way around in one motion with her right.
She took her foot off the gas and the nose of the pickup dipped as the weight of the vehicle shifted forward.
Then she spun the wheel hard, in a circle of motion lit by the glare of oncoming headlights.
The front tires bit, but the rear end felt suddenly light, like it was floating, like the back of the truck was going to keep going while the front changed its mind.
She jammed her foot down on the clutch, reached down with her left hand and yanked the emergency brake.
The rear tires locked with a violent jolt.
The whole truck shuddered, twisted violently, shoving her up against the door.
Poor Trident was thrown off the seat into the floorboard as a screech cut through the air like tearing metal.
The world outside the windshield swung in a panoramic blur … the car headlights coming at her … the black emptiness of the sky over the drop-off … the gray rock wall flying past sideways as the back end whipped around.
The sliding tires rumbled.
The wet pavement hissed.
The truck’s engine stumbled in RPMs, briefly floating between traction and chaos.
Jojo didn’t breathe, every nerve braced, waiting for the spin to be complete.
The instant the truck’s nose swung all the way around to face the opposite direction, Jojo let go of the handbrake, slammed the gear shift into first gear, and hit the gas.
The tires caught with a violent snap of traction and the force shoved her back into the seat as the truck rocketed back toward Somerset.
It felt like getting punched by gravity, spun in a centrifuge and yanked forward again, all in less than three seconds.
When she got to the curve in the road, she looked in the rearview mirror to see how far behind her the other car was. But it wasn’t there. It must have gone off the embankment because the road was utterly empty, as if there’d never been a car there in the first place.