Chapter 8
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Tricia woke to a hand on her shoulder. She bolted upright, but this time she knew it would be Rubin—or she was expecting it to be him. Thankfully it was Rubin all right. “Hey,” she muttered.
“Time to go,” he whispered. His tone was somber, and she rubbed the sleep out of her eyes, to see him better and to get an idea of how urgent it was. “Are we in a panic?” she asked, throwing off her covers.
“No,” he replied, abruptly looking away—and she remembered that she was in her underwear, her body on full display. “But,” Rubin added, now looking directly into her eyes, “it’s definitely time to move.”
His tone had been so serious and formal. She glanced out the window and saw daylight just barely breaking through the sky. She nodded. “I’m on it.”
He stepped out of the room, looking back at her from the door, and closed it behind him.
She quickly got up, went to the bathroom, got dressed in her new clothes.
Then she stuffed the old ones into a plastic bag and put everything in the duffel bag they had brought for her.
She was even more grateful to have something else clean to get changed into.
She walked into the kitchen and was handed a mug of coffee and two sandwiches. “No leftover pasta, huh?”
“Nope, no leftover pasta,” Rubin confirmed. “More sandwiches are on the counter though.” He pointed to the plateful sitting there. “Would you prefer pasta for breakfast?”
“I would have eaten it for sure, but if there isn’t any—”
“We ate it last night,” Hayden admitted, with a smile.
“More like, he ate it last night,” Rubin corrected, pointing to Hayden.
“Good, that’s compliments to the chef,” she noted.
Rubin snorted. “The chef is quite comfortable to not have Hayden eat the very last bit of food.”
“Hey, it’s not my fault Oakley’s a great cook,” Hayden stated.
The teasing continued back and forth between them. As she glanced around, she realized that Trent was gone. So was Oakley. “Where are Trent and Oakley?” she asked. No one gave her an answer, so she guessed, “They’re already gone?”
“Yes,” Rubin said, his tone mild, “and we’re on our way in ten, following their lead.”
In ten minutes, they all headed outside to their vehicle, the last one here and still hidden in the nearby barn, with Hayden already in the driver’s seat. Just as she started to get into the back seat, a nagging thought arose in the back of her mind. Then true panic hit her. She turned to Rubin.
He asked, “What’s wrong? You feel okay?”
His face was calm, but something in his gaze chilled her blood. “This feels off,” she whispered, trying to calm down, taking deep breaths. “This area …”
He nodded. “Yeah, it sure does feel off. Get inside the car.”
She got in, unsurprised when suddenly they gunned it out of the barn and headed down the dirt road. “Where are we going?” she asked.
“Somewhere else,” Rubin replied.
They soon hit an old road that was likely pretty rough in the best of conditions. Hayden drove like a maniac, and she didn’t mind it one little bit.
As several hard jolts tossed her a bit, she cried out. When Hayden glanced at her in the rearview mirror, she didn’t show any signs of trouble. “I’m fine,” she said, for the umpteenth time, when a hard right threw her against the door. “I just wasn’t expecting this. You do you.”
“Don’t mind if I do,” Hayden replied, maintaining his speed.
“What just happened back there?” she asked Rubin.
“A vehicle was spotted coming up the driveway toward the barn,” Rubin announced.
Her stomach churned, threatening to return the sandwiches she ate wolfishly. “How did you know?”
He glanced down at his phone. “Trent was hidden on the highway and saw somebody on their way to us. Good thing we got out and left by way of the backroads,” he noted. “It’ll be a rough ride for a bit, and then we should be through the worst of it.”
“Uh-huh,” she muttered, as they navigated a section with more potholes than road, and then some washboard effect that made her teeth rattle. After that, it seemed to smooth out. “Do we know if they were looking for us? Could it have been somebody else, maybe a tourist or something?”
“Nope, their faces were all masked up, so that’s a hard pass as to tourists or somebody lost or whatever. Right now we won’t give people arriving in the dark the benefit of the doubt either,” he shared cheerfully.
“Right.” She sat back and took a deep breath.
Her coffee had somehow managed to stay inside the travel mug, which was a testament to the travel mug designers that made such an amazing feat possible.
Her last sandwich was still here, which she hadn’t had a chance to eat.
She wasn’t sure if she wanted to push it right now, considering that the road was not as smooth as she would have liked.
Hours later, when it looked as if they might pull onto a different road, she watched out the window.
They headed onto a much smoother pathway, so she opened up her sandwich and started munching, even as they raced forward.
“Whose plan was this?” she asked. When Rubin turned to her with a smile, she shook her head.
“Right, your plan. I should have known. Anytime you can keep us on the move, you’re just happier, aren’t you? ”
He laughed. “That’s hardly the reason we’re on the move.”
“I know. I know.” She gave a wave of her hand. “You don’t want to be a sitting duck.”
Hayden laughed at that. “She’s got your number, doesn’t she?”
Rubin shrugged and finally shared, “It didn’t feel right from the beginning. We should have left at midnight.”
“If it doesn’t feel right, we should be on the move,” she agreed.
“You obviously got some sleep in, didn’t you?”
“How do you know that?”
“You’re in a pretty good mood,” he noted in a matter-of-fact tone.
“I don’t know. Last night was … better somehow. I didn’t have that same sense of fear as I went to bed. I got a little break in all the nightmares, yet obviously only a little bit, considering where we’re at right now,” she explained. “Still, I’ll take it.”
“Hopefully this won’t happen again,” Rubin replied.
“Yeah, I’ll believe that when I see it,” she muttered.
She finished her sandwich, drank the rest of her coffee, and then sat back, trying to distract herself.
She knew their intended destination, but not exactly where or how they were attempting to get there.
By the time she relaxed and napped a couple times, she surfaced to her bladder calling out to her. She sat up in her seat.
Rubin smiled. “Glad you could join us in the land of the living.”
She nodded. “We need to pull up somewhere soon.”
Hayden laughed. “I got it.”
“What’s so funny?” she asked.
Rubin sighed. “Hayden bet me twenty that the first thing you would ask for was to stop.”
She rolled her eyes at that. “How close are we?”
“Good timing. A gas station is coming up, and we’ll stop and get a bathroom break there.”
“Glad to hear that you understand the need for breaks.”
“We do, just not all the time. We try to hold it as long as we can, so we don’t take them very often. The more that we’re seen, the more chance that we’ll be in trouble or will get caught somewhere along the line.”
“I understand, but who the hell would give a crap that I’m even here, wherever here is?” she asked, followed by a yawn. “We are in some countryside with more cows than people, right?”
“Yet somebody cares because Trent sent a video of whoever checked out the barn, and they were pissed,” Rubin told her. “So that person was really hoping they would find us. Therefore, not having found us means they’re still on our tail.”
“You put a camera in the barn?”
“It was just a hunch,” Rubin muttered.
Hayden chuckled. “He’s team lead for a reason.”
She nodded because he was right. Rubin was one of the most vigilant people she’d ever met, and she had met a lot of influential people in her life. “We could just fly somewhere, you know?”
“We could, as long as we had a private plane and no need for your visa,” he clarified. “That’s the plan to hop over to Switzerland, but that doesn’t mean that we still won’t be tracked.”
“It seems so ridiculous that anybody went to all this effort,” she told him. Seeing that Rubin was about to say something, she raised her hand to stop him. “I know. It’s not about me. It’s about my father.”
“We think so, until other information contradicts that theory,” he explained.
“How is he doing?” she asked, trying hard to quench the bitterness on her tongue. Then she frowned at him and asked, “Did you ever get an update on Sam and Dean Jameson?”
“I did,” Rubin stated, with a nod. “The dean is expected to recover, and Sam is also doing much better. She’s being treated for a broken arm and leg, but it looks as if she will pull through.”
“Thank God for that,” Tricia muttered.
Rubin added, “And your father is fine.”
She sighed. “To even think that all this happened because I’m related to a US senator.
I don’t really know Sam that well, but I certainly don’t blame her for throwing me to the wolves when we were kidnapped.
She and Shirley were just trying to survive because they knew, by then, it had nothing to do with them.
It only made sense what they did—although being quiet might have served them better.
Still, I don’t think they would have been let go in the end. ”
Rubin nodded. “Right, it’s highly unlikely. The fact that one of them lived is amazing.”
“And that is literally due to the fact that you were coming to get me,” she stated.
“Everybody does the best they can in those situations,” Hayden shared. “As it turned out, the kidnappers had to get out of there fast. They did a sloppy job, and Sam got left behind, alive.”
Rubin agreed. “The point is, good on her because now she has another chance to have a life.”
“Yeah, she does,” Tricia pointed out, “but Shirley does not.”