They went past a sign that read “County Road E,” and Penny said, “I hope you’re right.”
“We gotta be,” Sherwood said.
Lucas: “When she gets far enough ahead, she’ll turn down a driveway, kill anyone in the house at the end of it, hide the Bronco in the garage, and take whatever vehicle they have. Then she’ll drive that to another farm somewhere else, someplace that she can see is isolated, while we’re looking around here, and kill those people and go on in another vehicle. She can get on her phone and maybe arrange a pickup by those Russian assholes in the Cities.”
Penny glanced at him and said, “You’re a real Mr. Cheerful. I mean, kill them all?”
“That’s what she does for a living,” Sherwood said.
• • •
Abramova wasn’t thinkingabout much except to get away. As she drove, fractional pieces of plans began trickling through her brain: find a place to turn off, to hide. If she could hide for an hour, she could make it out of this freezing landscape, even if she had to walk. There was hardly any snow on the roads, and with only a sliver of moon, she should be almost invisible after nightfall.
And she dismissed that idea. Walking out was absurd. At the sametime, she couldn’t keep the Bronco. She needed a different car, a problem this mission had been cursed with from the start. The way to get a new car would be to pick out an inhabited house—pick one out before the alarm went out, so she had to find one soon—eliminate the people inside the house, take their car and cell phones and run for the Twin Cities.
Once she had a phone in her hand, she could call Kuznetsov and get picked up. She could see a patch of hard snow covering the road up ahead, and she slowed to take the turn, and as she did, glanced up to the rearview mirror.
The pickup was still there and seemed to be moving fast.
“Fuck these people,” she muttered, and got back on the gas. She needed a road coming off the highway on a curve. She’d been poking at dashboard buttons since making it out of town and had finally brought up the navigation screen. The road she was on had plenty of curves for a couple of miles, and then the highway ran west, straight as an arrow. But just as it began the long straightaway, a narrow little road came off it. If she could stretch the distance between herself and the pickup, they would not see her leave the highway.
Had to take some risks.
She slalomed a series of turns and spotted the intersection coming up. She was breathing hard, as if she were running; and sweating. She ran fast right to the corner, slowed for the messy intersection, and once across it, accelerated up a hill, the Bronco rattling and bouncing up the loose gravel and ice. Three hundred yards up the hill, she braked into a hard turn to the left and, as she went around, looked into the mirror. There was no sign of the pickup truck behind her.
Had she lost them? Was it even chasing her? She didn’t have time to worry about it. She had to find a place to hide.
• • •
Lucas was onthe phone to the 9-1-1 operator. “We were on Rainbow Road but now we’re on a different one, I don’t what it is…”
“County Road E,” Penny said.
“We’re on County Road E, headed south right now and she’s well up ahead of us, but we’re afraid she’s going to get off…”
“We’ve got two Washburn County sheriff’s cars headed your way so keep talking to us, where you’re at, the Washburn boys will know all those roads.”
“How about a helicopter, we could use a chopper…”
“Not a chance. The state patrol has one, if you want to wait a couple hours,” the operator said. They went through a series of long curves and White was kneeling on the back seat pointing at the nav screen and she said, “There’s a spot she might get off, whatever it is…”
“If she doesn’t, we should be able to see her,” Doug said. “E is straight as a string past there. But there’s a house right there at the turn, with a bunch of outbuildings, if you think she might jump somebody…She could be out of sight in fifteen seconds, behind that farmhouse.”
“I dunno,” Lucas said.
On the satellite radio, Foreigner came up with “I Want to Know What Love is,” and Penny turned the volume a little higher. “Great song.”
“Go to high school in the eighties, Doug?” White asked.
“I did.”
“Drive faster,” Lucas said.
They came around a turn and saw a new sharp right-hand turn up ahead. They could look across open fields to the highway going west,but couldn’t see the Bronco. The side road came off the highway straight ahead, almost like an extension. There was no sign of the truck on the side road, nor could they see anything moving in any direction.
Penny: “What do you wanna do? Straight, right, look at the farmyard? Gotta tell me, quick.”
Sherwood said, “I don’t think she’d go to that farm, it’s too open. If she went in there, she’d be setting herself up for a standoff, which she’d lose. She’s gotta keep running to a place where she might get a car, and someplace where she’s broken away from us. No good if we see the new car. I think she went straight.”
