Chapter Twenty-Two
Twenty-Two
There was no doubt in Mary’s mind that she had figured out exactly how Nelson had managed to track her down all the way in Nashville – Kyle Doyle, with the help of the flight manifest. There was no other explanation, so the first item on Mary’s new ‘no go’ list was air travel – at least not for a while.
She’d also decided that for good measure, she would bounce from city to city for a bit before finally reaching her desired destination of Houston.
The bouncing around had been something else that she had picked up from spy movies, and since she was in no hurry to get to Texas and she certainly had the means to afford as many hotel nights as she wished, bouncing around sounded just like the kind of distraction she needed – but her first priority was to get out of Franklin…
pronto. It was too close to Nashville, and despite having managed to give gangster-suit man the slip, Mary had this nagging feeling that she was still far from safe.
The faster she got out of town, or better yet, the faster she got out of Tennessee, the better.
George Oakfield’s cliché sentence came back to her – ‘This is the first day of the rest of your life.’
With that in mind, just a few hours later, as the night sky began morphing itself into a bright-blue and cloudless morning, Mary took the first bus out of Franklin Transit Center bus station, heading south.
The bus she hopped on was half empty and heading to Birmingham, Alabama.
It was just a short three-hour trip, but it got her across the state line, and as soon as she got out of Tennessee, Mary could feel her heartbeat finally starting to settle into a steady rhythm.