Chapter 32
The truck coasted off the highway, and then went along a slower, rougher road that sometimes made the truck bounce, and twice required a complete stop for what felt like thirty seconds while Jane and Karen waited, their muscles tensed to fight.
Then the truck would back up or go around something and then go on.
Karen said, “Where do you think we are?”
The truck slowed some more, and then stopped.
After a few seconds it turned to the right and lurched downward, then tilted to the left, as the right front wheel went over something, then tilted to the right as the left went over it.
The two bodies slid as the truck bumped along.
Jane could hear gravel being kicked up by the tires and peppering the underside of the truck.
“Be ready,” Jane said. “They won’t go too far off the road.”
The truck kept going for another few minutes. This time after the truck stopped, the engine stopped too. “This is it,” Jane said.
After a pause they heard the clank of the lock bar being turned and sliding up, and then the latch being turned to keep the bar up.
The door on the right swung outward and Jane could see the man’s arm and hand, and then the other door.
The world outside was dark, but the man held a flashlight in his hands.
He aimed it into the bay of the truck and into their eyes.
Then he said, “Okay, time for a pee stop.”
Jane was hopeful for a second because for now he was fooled.
If he had realized they were free, he would have slammed the doors and locked them in.
But she knew that what had made him stop out here was that the woman had ordered him to kill Karen.
What he had told them to do was certain to show him their hands weren’t bound behind them.
She rose to her knees, stood, and walked to the edge, sat, and slid off the edge of the cargo bay floor to the ground, then instantly lunged for him.
He jumped back away from her, crouching to prepare to fight, but when he did that, it brought his upper chest and head closer to her.
Jane slashed his neck, and she instantly knew that his left carotid artery had been cut, because blood was spurting out with each heartbeat.
He dropped the flashlight and clamped his hand over the wound, staggering backward away from Jane.
Karen jumped from the truck behind him. When her feet hit the ground, she ran two steps and stabbed him in the back, withdrew the knife, and stabbed him again and again. He fell to the bare, sandy ground among clumps of weeds, quickly bleeding out.
Jane ran forward along the right side of the truck.
When she reached the cab, she saw that the woman was gone.
She spun around and ran for the back of the truck and found Karen still holding the knife, standing a few feet from the man’s body.
Jane slammed and locked the back doors, then patted the man down.
She found the keys in his pocket and took them.
She snatched up the flashlight that was still lit and lying near him, and said, “Come on.”
They both ran to the cab, and Jane got into the driver’s side, locked the doors, and shone the flashlight on the area around the steering wheel and found the ignition.
She started the truck, turned on the headlights, and drove forward, but could see only about sixty or seventy feet ahead.
The dashboard was lit now, and she found the switch and turned on the bright high-beam headlights.
They lit up the area ahead of them for at least a hundred yards.
She handed the flashlight to Karen. “Use this where the headlights don’t reach. We’ve got to find her.”
First Jane drove in a slow circle so the headlights would shine in every direction, but they didn’t see her.
Jane said, “I’ve got to guess that she’s headed back toward the road.
If she tried to go across the desert she’d die.
” There was only light in one direction, a faint glow like a haze along the black horizon.
Jane drove the truck toward it at a steady ten miles an hour, weaving to make the headlight beams sweep while they both looked for the woman.
“There,” Karen said. “What’s that? It looks like tracks.”
Jane turned right toward the spot where Karen was aiming the flashlight, and in the brighter lights the tracks in the sandy earth stood out.
The woman seemed to have been at a dead run, with about a yard between steps.
Jane straddled the tracks and sped up. As long as she could see the tracks, she raised the speed to twenty-five miles an hour.
There were places where the woman had intentionally diverted her steps into patches of weedy plants, but each time, Jane’s high-beam headlights would reach the space beyond, where they illuminated the tracks farther ahead.
After a few minutes, they made out the tall, thin woman in her dark jeans and black pullover running far ahead. As soon as the headlights reached her, she looked back over her shoulder, and her pale face flashed white in the light. Jane said, “Now she’ll try to get out of the light.”
The woman veered to the left, toward the distant light of the road. When Jane followed, gaining speed and moving the light beams to center her again, she tried the right. Jane kept the lights on her and accelerated. The woman stumbled, fell, pulled herself up, and kept running.
“What are we going to do with her?” Karen asked.
Jane said, “She beat you and burned you. Twice in three years she tried very hard to drag me off so her friends could torture me until I betrayed all of the people I ever helped. They would have been auctioned off to the people who want them dead.”
“That’s not really an answer.”
“She knows where my family lives. My husband and our baby.”
“That doesn’t tell me what you’re going to do.”
“Yes it does.”
Jane sped up until the woman was caught in the headlights with the truck only ten feet behind.
Jane stood on the accelerator and saw her go down between the headlights.
The truck ran over the top of her. Jane stopped the truck, took the flashlight from Karen, and said, “Stay here.” She jumped from the cab and trotted back to the place where the woman lay.
Jane found the woman in the flashlight and stopped about eight feet from her prone figure. She said to the woman, “When you hit somebody with a truck, you might not see everything happen, but you hear it, and feel it. And then there’s blood and broken bones.”
The woman suddenly rolled and charged toward Jane.
As she dashed toward Jane, she reached behind her and her hand came back with the ten-inch butcher knife she had taken from Karen’s house.
Jane waited as she came, then feinted and stepped aside at the last moment.
As the woman passed, Jane jabbed the switchblade knife in beneath the woman’s ribs and withdrew it.
The woman seemed to falter in indecision for a second, and then decided to keep running.
Jane sprinted after her, grabbed her hair, and jerked her head backward, then brought the knife across her throat.
She released the hair and said, “All you ever had to do was leave us alone.” She walked back, picked up the flashlight again, and shone it on the woman until she was dead.
Then she walked back to the truck where Karen waited.
“Help me load her into the back of the truck with the others. We can drag her up the ramp. Then we’ll go back to get the man too. ”
An hour later they were back in the truck’s cab bumping the wheels up onto the main road.
Jane said, “We’ll have to find a place where we can wash while it’s still dark, and then open the bag that woman filled with clothes from your closet.
” She looked at Karen, who was sitting beside her crying.
She left her alone and kept the truck moving.
About ten minutes later she saw a sign that said they were on Interstate 15, and then another that said that they were passing Halloran Springs.
Another sign told her that there was an exit ahead that would take her toward Laughlin, and soon they were crossing the state line into Nevada and heading for Arizona.
After a while Karen seemed to run out of tears. “I’m sorry. It’s just nerves and fear. I wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for you. And I started thinking about the horrible things you’ve had to live through to know how to do all this, and then I was stabbing him too, and I just—”
Jane said, “And now you have some horrible things in your memory too. I’m sorry for that, but I’m glad you were there to fight for my life.”
After a long drive, she stopped the truck south of Las Vegas and north of Bullhead City, Arizona.
She found a boat launch that was deserted at night, backed the truck to the edge of the water, climbed into the cargo bay, and dragged the first body, which was the woman’s, along the floor, and pushed it out the back of the truck into the water.
Then she got into the water to drag it out away from the boat launch ramp.
Karen joined her and helped her to unload the bodies of the three men.
Then she got into the water with Jane to drag them out as far as she and Jane could pull them.
They ducked under the water and washed the blood from themselves and most of it from their clothes.
They got back into the truck dripping wet, and Jane turned on the truck’s heater to dry them.
She turned onto Route 68 because there was a sign that said it led to Interstate 40.
When they were dry, they stopped and put on some of the clothes that the dead woman had stolen from Karen’s closet.
Before dawn, they stopped again at a gas station outside Kingman, Arizona, filled the gas tank, and drove on.
When it was daylight, they parked a few blocks from a supermarket and walked to the store to buy food, bottled water, and over-the-counter wound medication with some of the money Jane had taken from the dead men’s wallets.
When they returned to the rented truck, Jane started the engine and said, “Try to get some sleep. I’m going to need you to take the wheel in a couple of hours.”