Better Run

by Shel Stone

  Why not? If not now, then when? What was he waiting for?

  All her stuff was back there, but they weren’t going back for it. She was probably not going to need any of it. Would just disappear, and some stranger would eventually pack it up and throw it away.

  Chapter 19

  IT FELT STRANGE HAVING her in the car. He hadn’t expected the way she smelled, exotic with a hint of spice. They were in utter darkness now, only the headlights casting ghostly orbs in front of them. This far out, the stars revealed themselves. Miami was too bright to see the stars.

  Beside him, she shifted slightly and made a shuddering sigh. She was scared and had every right to be. Her blond hair was wild like a mane and her eyes sparkled in the darkness.

  At some point she would fight, but not yet, and not while the gun was in his lap. That she was a fighter he’d known from the moment he’d met her.

  In all honesty, he didn’t exactly know what he was going to do—hadn’t thought beyond catching her. Obviously he’d wanted to catch her, but beyond that, he was doing things he needed to do more than wanted to.

  “Where are you taking me?” she finally asked.

  “Back to Miami.”

  “What, we’re driving all the way back to Miami?”

  He didn’t bother answering, having already told her.

  “Why?”

  “Well, the problem you’ve caused me is back in Miami, not here.”

  For a while, she quietly took that in. “That’s insane. Are you afraid of flying or something?”

  “Considering the circumstances, flying would involve too many eyes.” If she understood, he had no idea.

  “I would have been gone in a couple of days,” she said. “How’d you find me?”

  “A radio jingle. Pinpointed the city.”

  “Always hated those jingles,” she mumbled.

  Looking over, he saw a frown drawing together her eyebrows. She was worried and upset, which was hardly surprising.

  “I never intended on hurting you,” she said after a long stretch of silence.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he replied. “The point is that you were involved. But then you would say that, wouldn’t you? I do, after all, have a gun in my hand, and I am taking you back to where you ran from. So you might as well sit back and get comfortable, because it’s going to be a long drive.”

  Shifting in her seat, she exhaled slowly through her nose. Palmer returned his attention to the road. They were driving through the desert. This wasn’t something he’d done before, a long road trip like this. Had never had reason to. Then again, no one had ever really made him a victim before. With force, he gripped the steering wheel harder. It still deeply angered him.

  The silence between them stretched. It wasn’t as if they had anything to talk about, and he was deeply grateful she wasn’t the kind of girl who talked incessantly and couldn’t handle a moment of silence. They weren’t friends. Anything but. However, there was no reason this couldn’t happen with some degree of civility.

  Beside him, she stifled a yawn. It was past her normal bedtime.

  “You might as well sleep,” he said. “Nothing exciting is going to happen for quite a while.”

  “I dread to think what you deem exciting,” she said bitterly. The panic and shock were starting to ease with her and now he heard more of the girl he’d talked to on the phone. The dry sarcasm she’d likely used as a shield all her life. He knew her—knew what drove her. They had come from the same kind of place, but they chose to deal with their setbacks very differently. And now they were being brought to the same place.

  Taking his advice, she closed her eyes, her hands relaxed their tight grip in her lap. Her breathing slowed. If a man with a gun was taking him away from his home with the promise to kill him, he wasn’t sure he would sleep in their company, but there wasn’t much else she could do.

  They were already in Arizona and they’d hit Albuquerque some time in the morning. His plan was to pass through cities and stay in small towns where there were less surveillance cameras. Not that the likelihood of anyone ever looking at their progress across the country was high. People overestimated how much attention was paid by anyone, but that didn’t mean he wanted to do stupid things.

  Small towns and shitty motels was the plan. It had its drawbacks in that they would both be noticed, but they would be seen simply as strangers passing through town, like so many others—provided she behaved, which he expected she wouldn’t when she saw a chance to run. She had nothing to lose at this point. Either she didn’t know what to do, or she figured there would be a better place to escape than out in the middle of the desert. Might have a point there.

  Hours ticked by and the sun was cresting in the distance. First blue and then a symphony of colors. It was quite beautiful. And it was cold in the desert. He’d stepped outside to stretch his legs for a moment when he’d gotten tired. It had been a long time since he’d slept and he was going to have to at some point.

  As the sun became brighter, the girl woke up, looking around groggily for a moment, then stretching her neck and tense shoulders. “I need to go to the bathroom.”

  “There’s a town coming up.”

  It took about half an hour to reach the town he intended staying at. It was a hick place with not much going for it. It wasn’t a place he’d been before, but it looked like the kind of place no one would ever come asking questions.

  A gas station, a supermarket and a row of empty stores that looked like they’d shut decades ago. Why the hell would anyone choose to live in a place like this? And then a diner where the truckies seemed to stop. Palmer pulled into the dirt parking lot and turned off the ignition.

  “Now,” he said, turning to the girl. “What do you think I’m going to do if you start screaming in there? Do you think I’m going to put my hands up because some hick trucker decides to play hero? What do you think I’m going to do? Because I’m telling you now, that I’ll leave bodies behind if I have to. And in most ways that count, it will be your fault. Do we understand each other?”

  She nodded, her mouth drawn tightly together.

  “Good, now there’s the toilet,” he said, pointing to a green metal door along the outside of the building. It had no internal windows she could climb out of as far as he could see. “Better get to it.”

  Without saying a word, she got out, taking her bag with her. Might not have said much, but the look she threw him was filthy as she walked toward the ladies and went inside.

  With a sigh, Palmer sat back and waited. If his threat had any impact on her, he didn’t know. She’d given up the product to save her mom, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t take her chances with the lives of strangers. He wouldn’t know until they went in there.

  No one went in after the girl and he was about to lose patience when she finally opened the door, looking better with her hair brushed and her makeup reapplied. Palmer snorted. At times, he didn’t understand women.

  Getting out of the car, he locked it with his key transponder and walked over to her. There was defiance in her face as he moved closer, but he didn’t know how far that defiance would stretch. With his hand at her elbow, he led her toward the diner, which looked exactly like every diner seen on TV. Pastel colors from the fifties, waitresses in uniforms and comfortable shoes.

  A booth was free and he led her there. Her back was straight and her head high as she sat down where he wanted her to. His seat had the car and most of the restaurant within sight.

  A few looks were thrown their way, by plaid dressed truckers in baseball caps and with jeans they spilled out of.

  The waitress came over and poured water out of a coffee jug and gave them two menus without saying anything. Her face was dour as if she didn’t want to deal with more people that morning.

  “If you had been her, I probably never would have found you,” he said when they were alone.

  Nook didn’t look up from her menu. “If I was her, I’d probably kill myself, let alone wai
t for you to catch up.” She looked around. “Why would anyone want to live here?”

  “To hide from people like me?” he suggested. It was the only reason he could think of—because they had to.

  “A fate worse than death.”

  “Are you tempting me?”

  Her eyes snapped to him. “Is that an option?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then, thanks for bringing it up.”

  The waitress returned, taking out her notebook and a pen. Her sigh was audible. “What will it be?”

  “Full breakfast,” Palmer said. He didn’t normally eat a grease fest like this, but it had been a long night and a longer day before. And although the Michelin star meal he’d had last had tasted divine, it hadn’t been all that filling.

  “Can I have avocado with ranchero eggs?” Nook asked.

  “Does it look like we have any avocados around here?” the waitress replied.

  “Spinach? Kale?”

  “Cook might have something in the freezer,” she said, looking nauseated by the suggestion.

  “Kale?” he said when the waitress retreated.

  “I like to eat healthy. Sue me. You eat crap, you age like you’ve eaten crap most of your life. It’s a scientific fact.”

  Truth was, she wasn’t going to get the chance, but that didn’t dissuade her.

  “Not sure it’s a good idea to eat something they don’t normally serve in a place like this,” he said.

  “How can they not have avocados? Who doesn’t have avocados these days?”

  Chapter 20

  THE FOOD WASN’T the best Nook had ever had. Her eggs came with some wilted looking spinach that was little more than green gunk. Nook chose not to eat it in the end as Palmer had planted the idea in her head that it might have been around in the freezer since before she was born.

  His plate looked like a carnival, filled with artery-clogging things. How did he look like that if this was what he ate? Because he looked tight and toned. The suit draped him perfectly and there wasn’t anything remotely soft about him.

  Intermittently, his eyes scanned the place, looking for trouble, but people left them alone. The waitress came back to refill their drinks, but otherwise, they were left to themselves. No one was particularly interested in them, and Palmer had purposefully placed her so she sat with her back to them.

  As he clearly expected, an errant thought in her head wanted to create a distraction so she could shoot out of the door, maybe quickly catch a ride with someone leaving, but she didn’t dare. She fully believed his threat. Palmer was not someone to give up because people got in his way, and then he’d probably shoot her in the back as she ran.

  Was that worse than what was to come? Probably not. She still couldn’t bring herself to do it. Having people’s deaths on her conscience wasn’t something he could cope with—even if that coping wouldn’t be all that long in duration. Her whole life had been set up so she didn’t have to make those compromises to herself. She didn’t want anyone’s badness to be her fault. Why couldn’t the world just respect that?

  Others didn’t feel the same way and she yet again cursed Sammie and Jax for getting her into this. They’d been the ones who felt fine about compromising themselves and they were dead because of it.

  Palmer had finished eating and leaned back with his arm down the backrest of the booth. “We should go,” he said.

  “You just drove through the night. Are you not going to sleep?”

  From looking outside, he now looked at her. It made her really uneasy. There was an intensity about him that she couldn’t fail to feel. Him falling asleep was the one hope she harbored. It provided opportunities. Maybe she could even grab the car keys and be long gone by the time he woke up.

  “You can’t just keep driving,” she reiterated. “You’ll run us both off the road. If I’m going to be murdered, I’d like to get there in one piece.”

  Shifting his head, he pursed his lips together, but didn’t say anything. From the looks of it, he wasn’t on drugs that would keep him up for days on end. She’d notice. Everything was perfectly calm and rational about him.

  “Yes, I will sleep,” he said after a while. “The next town over. So if it’s alright with you, we’ll get going.”

  For a moment, she frowned thinking about getting back in the car again, and getting a bit closer to where they were going. She didn’t even want to guess what would go down then, but her feeling was that Palmer wasn’t some psycho who wanted to torture her for hours on end. Well, there was that, she supposed. Also, with him asleep, there was the possibility of her making a run for it. Finally, she nodded and he put fifty dollars down on the table, which was much more than the meal would cost. He wasn’t waiting for change. The waitress was getting a tip she wasn’t expecting. Lucky girl.

  It had warmed up quite a lot while they’d been inside the diner. The sun was bright and Nook closed her eyes for a moment and absorbed it. How many more times would she be able to feel it. It struck her that things were finite. Everything she did, it could be her last time. The last time she felt the dry heat of the desert, the last time she ate at a diner. Maybe even the last time she got into the car with a guy who intended on killing her.

  It literally took ten seconds to get out of town and then there were miles and miles of desert shrubs and raw earth. She’d never really gotten much of a chance to live in the desert. Had barely seen it in her time in Las Vegas. A shuddering sigh escaped her. Thinking like this was a heavy weight on her mind.

  The next town appeared in the distance. Slightly larger than the one they’d just left, but again, Nook couldn’t figure out what these people were doing out in the desert. How did they make a living?

  The motel looked like they had stepped back in time. There was a large, yellow sign out front that just said ‘Motel’. It didn’t even have a name, but the fence was made of knee-high white-painted wrought iron that just stuck out of the dirt. And clay birds decorating what could scarcely be called a lawn. Clearly someone thought this looked good.

  “Stay in the car,” Palmer ordered as he got out, taking the keys with him. Didn’t trust her in the car with the keys, it seemed. Such a shame.

  He spoke to an elderly woman with half-moon glasses on her nose, writing into a paper ledger. There wasn’t a computer in sight. Nook guessed there wouldn’t be any internet here, but it would hardly help her as she had that clamshell phone with no browser.

  It sat in her bag right now and she could whip it out when he wasn’t looking and text someone—but who and what would she say? She’d been kidnapped and was being driven through the desert by a drug dealer who intended to kill her. Her mom would never be able to cope with such a message. There was the police. Then again, shootout, people dead—likely her. Still, it might be something she had to do.

  Not now, though, as Palmer was walking back to the car and got in, driving them into the parking lot in front of door number five.

  “Out,” he said and waited for her at the hood of the car, again taking her by the elbow as he walked them to the door and unlocked it with a key that had some kind of ball attached. No swipe cards here—instead old-fashioned keys.

  The room was nice and cool as they walked in. Everything was white and green. Clean and decorated by that woman, who liked quilts and lots of flowers. It didn’t suit Palmer in the least. No, his apartment with its modern design and dark colors suited him. This place was very Midwestern craft. Even the teacups had flowers on them. There was a bowl of potpourri that smelled of roses and wood. For being a middle of nowhere motel, the owner clearly took pride in her work.

  Literally nothing could suit him less. “Nice,” she said. “You and this place look good together.”

  Palmer looked at her in confusion for a moment, but decided not to care. Walking over, he pulled the curtains, which plunged them into darkness. “Good curtains,” he said and walked back to the door, putting the chain on. Then he took his jacket off and hung it over a chair. His
shirt was white, reaching down into the waistline of his trim abdomen.

  Reaching for her unexpectedly, Nook tried to get away, but he was too quick. She hadn’t seen that coming. What was he doing?

  From out of nowhere, handcuffs snapped around her wrist. “Hey!” she shouted. “Whatever you’re—"

  “I’m a pretty light sleeper, but not that light. You can watch TV with the volume down, but you’re not going anywhere.”

  “What if I have to go to the bathroom?”

  “Hold it.”

  The other end of the handcuffs went around his wrist so they were linked together, and it pulled her with him as he walked to the bed. “I’m not getting in bed with you,” she said.

  “Suit yourself. You can sit on the floor.”

  Without a second thought, he lay down on the bed, pulling her wrist with him. He wasn’t getting under the covers, instead stretched out on top, while she stood there, awkwardly leaning over the bed but refusing to get in.

  Technically, he wasn’t dragging her in, or showing any interest in her. Also, he fell asleep literally within a minute of lying down.

  What was she supposed to do now? Stand there for eight hours or however long he slept? Being chained to him made for an awkward and uncomfortable position. The metal around her wrist pulled and it ached, as did her shoulders from her uncomfortable sleep.

  After a few minutes of standing there, and with him fast asleep, she sat down on the bed and reached for the remote. Daytime TV. Yay.

  Looking over at Palmer, she saw him facing away from her. Stubble along his cheek and the pulse down the side of his neck. He was so solid, his broad back under the white shirt. She wasn’t normally into guys who wore suits, had never found it particularly appealing, but there was something so contained about him, so intent on having everything together.