Sealed with a Lie (11 page)

Gustav raises his face from the snow.
“Une fille?”
he says. He starts to laugh.

Then he rolls suddenly to the side, knocking me off-balance and back onto his chest. “A
pretty
girl.” He grins. It’s the dirtiest, most disreputable grin imaginable, not least because it’s surrounded by a lot of beard stubble. Duvernay hasn’t seen a razor in a while, and he has wicked, dancing green eyes rimmed by long, sooty lashes.

“My luck has changed! What better place to be, zan out of jail and between a pretty girl’s legs?”

I’m completely mortified. But oddly paralyzed. I’m not even sure how much time has gone by when a male throat clears somewhere above my left shoulder. “You want to get off our new friend, Kari?” Evan’s voice is dry.

“
Vraiment
, zere is no need for her to move, if she is comfortable.” Gustav’s eyes twinkle, and his grin gets even filthier—if that’s possible.

My entire body flash-fries—from the tips of my ears down to my toes. I jump up so fast that I kick snow into
his face. I am positively pulsing with embarrassment. And our buddy the thief is enjoying it.

Strangely enough, Evan isn’t the slightest bit amused. “Gustav Duvernay, I presume? Thief at large?”

“How do you know I am a thief?” Gustav demands.

“How did you choke out the guard?” Evan asks at the same time.

Gustav lifts an eyebrow and holds up his handcuffs, which flash silver again in the moonlight. “Zey are both a hindrance and a help.”

“We know you’re a thief because we’ve been assigned to break you out,” I inform him. “By some very bad people who are holding my little brother hostage and threatening to dismember him.”

Our new friend’s full lips compress and flatten into a straight, uncompromising line.

“They said that you’d know what to do next,” I add. “They want us to steal something, with your help.”

“Merde,”
he says under his breath.

Okay, so in addition to
“douche”
and
“moi,”
I know the word
“merde.”
It means “shit.” See. My French improves every day.

“What time is it, Evan? How can we let the kidnappers know that we have Gustav?”

“I’m sure they’ll call us.”

I stare at him, suddenly petrified. “They can’t! Oh my God! Evan, Rita’s knocked out the cell coverage. We have to go—we have to get to an area where they can reach me!”

As if on cue, police sirens split the predawn air.

Evan hauls Gustav to his feet. Then he recovers the gun from a few feet away.

“Matthis!” I scream. And we all start running.

Running for Charlie’s life, for our liberty, and in pursuit of whatever it is that Gustav will help us steal.

The sirens are getting louder, meaning the cops will be here any second. Spot the Dairy Truck is incapacitated. We’ve got to borrow a car—
now
.

My breath comes in ragged gasps as we tear through the snow. We must get to a place with cell phone coverage. Immediately.
Yesterday.
My body shakes as I think about the consequences to Charlie if the kidnappers call and I don’t answer.

Turns out Matthis is quite the sprinter. I think he could give Luke a good run for his money. Evan and I can barely keep up with him, even in our full-on panic, as we hurdle a sagging, weathered fence and go flying up the gravel drive of one of the farmhouses.

We scare a couple of hens and a goat in a small pen near what’s probably a vegetable garden under the snow. Unfortunately, as we might have guessed, most
farmhouses come complete with a farmer inside, and this one is no exception.

We spot an old Saab sitting near the house, and Evan wrenches the driver’s side door open while Matthis and Gustav scramble into the backseat. I go for the shotgun position next to Evan.

“Bon, on se casse!”
says Gustav.

I stare at him. “Huh?”

“Let’s get out of here!” he translates.

An old man with crazy white hair comes running out of the kitchen in his bathrobe.
“Halt!”
He yells.

Evan pulls the guard’s gun on him and takes aim as he responds. “Go back inside! We won’t hurt you. We just need to take the car. Okay?”

The man stops in his tracks and puts his hands in the air. He babbles something incoherent.

“Back into the house!” Evan repeats. “Kari, get this thing hot-wired. NOW.”

I look down. “The keys are in the ignition, genius.”

Gustav snorts.
“Andouille.”

Huh? What does sausage have to do with anything?

“Right,” Evan says, handing me the gun and starting the engine. He glances at Gustav in the rearview mirror.
“Branleur.”

Gustav laughs.

Evan sees my puzzled expression and explains, “He called me a dork. I called him good-for-nothing.”

“Like we have time for insults?” I throw up my hands.

Then the car’s in gear and we’re hurtling backward, spraying gravel at the unlucky, bewildered farmer, who
gets only three steps toward his kitchen door before his plump, enraged wife runs out, yelling.

Evan wrenches the wheel to the left, fishtailing the Saab, and then hits the gas. We zoom down the dirt road that leads away from the farmhouse, just as two German police cars fly by.

Though I personally think it would have been better to drive normally and not attract attention to ourselves, Evan careens onto the main road and takes the speedometer from forty to eighty kilometers per hour in a few seconds—pretty impressive for this old Saab. It’s got to be at least twenty years old and stinks of mildew and motor oil.

The sun is coming up, and it’s blinding as it hits the layer of grime and ice on the windshield that we’re trying to scrape off with the wipers. Evan has to stick his head out the window to see as we head back to A95 and Munich.

“Why are you driving toward the highway?” I yell. “We have a better chance of outrunning or losing them on rural roads.”

“Really?” Evan shouts back. “On
icy, mountainous
rural roads? And what happens if we collide with something or smash through a guardrail and fall to our deaths? No thanks. We’ll take our chances in the city, and we’ve a better chance of escape there once we abandon the car.”

Mr. Know-it-all puts the pedal to the metal, and I fumble for a seat belt. Okay, so he’s got a valid argument. And there will be better cell coverage in Munich. I check my phone every five seconds, praying that the
little bars will return—the bars that mean I have a connection. Nothing so far.

We get to A95 without incident, and about ten minutes down the road, I almost cry with relief as the bars return and there’s no message indicating a missed call.

I calm down a bit as we go a good forty-five minutes without seeing a single
polizei
car.

But my worries about how we shouldn’t have called attention to ourselves are valid, because one of the German police cars we saw must have radioed to buddies outside Munich. A cruiser gains on us rapidly, sirens wailing.

“Evan, he’s right on our tail!”

“Yes, I can see that.” We’re nearing the outskirts of the city. Evan wrenches the wheel left, taking us onto the Fraunhoferstrasse, and then right onto Mullerstrasse. Gamely, the German cop follows. Evan zooms left down Corneliusstrasse and then careens right onto Blumenstrasse. We’ve now entered the circuit that runs around historic old Munich, since this street turns into the Ringstrasse.

In the backseat, Matthis has landed on Gustav, who unceremoniously shoves him off. “I prefer girls,” he says, winking at me and producing that dirty smile again.

Matthis squints at him and mumbles, “Don’t flatter yourself, man.”

The Ring is crowded with cars and buses, despite the early hour. We get stuck in traffic, and the German cop wrenches open his door, clearly intending to jump out and confront us.

“Merde!”
yells Gustav as Evan spins the wheel to
the right, rocketing the Saab up onto the sidewalk and through a sea of bistro tables and chairs outside a café. Luckily, only a couple of people are sitting out there—it’s too cold.

A woman shrieks, grabs her dog, and jumps out of the way.

We lurch forward, two wheels on the sidewalk as business owners blanch, scramble into their doorways, shout, and point at us.

A quick glance back reveals that the cop is stunned and slack-jawed but pulling onto the sidewalk after us.

“Go, Evan!” I shout.

Matthis makes a noise of sheer terror before ducking his head and assuming a crash-landing position in the backseat.

Gustav, however, seems to be enjoying himself. His eyes hold a certain sparkle, and an odd smile plays around his lips. I realize that he’s an adrenaline junkie.

I’m distracted from my observations about our new buddy, though, when Evan takes us screaming, on two wheels, into a hairpin left turn into a crowded food market. We literally run over a pedestrian’s foot. I wince as the guy screams in agony.

“Bollocks,” Evan mutters before diving suddenly right, down a side street. That’d be a great move, except that it’s a one-way side street, and we are flying down it in the wrong direction. Toward a city bus, no less.

Matthis chooses this moment to pop his head up. He screams, a high unnatural sound that comes close to rupturing my eardrums.

The bus is huge, it’s bright green, and it’s about to flatten the Saab.

I open my own mouth to shriek—can’t help it—when Evan wrenches the wheel right and we go barreling into a small parking garage next to an office building. The bus, its driver leaning savagely on the horn, misses us by maybe three inches.

Gustav cackles maniacally from the backseat.
“C’est ouf!”

“That’s crazy!”
My brain supplies the translation automatically. I guess I’ve picked up more French than I thought. Who knew?

A corner of Evan’s mouth lifts. “Thank you,” he says—before our next big problem comes into view. A car is slowly backing out of a slot, right into our path.

Evan can’t slow down—there’s no time.

We hit the oblivious driver, smashing him right back into his parking place and shattering a taillight.

“Oops,” Evan says.

We fly up the ramp without stopping, circling round and round the garage.

I’m cautiously optimistic that we’ve lost the German cop, but I’m wrong. As we take the next turn, I’m able to look down a couple of levels. I spot the officer’s car, still in dogged pursuit.

“He’s still behind us! Guys, the only way we’re going to lose him is to switch out the car,” I say. “Evan, pull into the next spot you see. Then everyone rolls out. Stay down. Crawl under at least the next three cars, okay? Then I’ll find one that we can steal.”

Evan thinks about it, then nods decisively. He jerks his head toward Gustav. “Watch him, though. He’s still hampered by the handcuffs, but he may try to run again.”

“Mais non!”
Gustav protests. “I’m ’aving too much fun weeth you.” He says this with a delighted smile.

Evan squeals the poor abused Saab into the next slot he sees, and we open the doors, slide out, and belly crawl. Gustav has a harder time than the rest of us, given that he’s doing it in cuffs, but he’s surprisingly agile.

We shimmy under a Peugeot, a Volkswagen, and a weird little car I can’t identify. The one after that is a BMW 7 Series.

“Let’s have that one, shall we?” Evan inclines his head toward it.

“Fine.” I pop up, slim jim already in hand. It takes me about three seconds to get the door open and pop the other door locks.

“T’es trop fort!”
Gustav says, admiration in his eyes.
“Je me la ferais bien.”

I don’t know what this means, but clearly the guys do.

Matthis blushes.

Evan’s mouth tightens, but he says nothing.

Gustav’s green eyes dance as we scramble into the Beemer.

Evan’s back in the driver’s seat, but thoughtfully he turns to me. “Kari, you drive. I’ll duck down in the front seat. You too, guys,” he tosses into the back. “That way she’ll appear to be a woman alone. The cop will be looking for four of us.”

This change of plan necessitates Evan and I switching
places. We don’t have time to get out of the car—the cop might spot us, and he’s close behind. So Evan grabs me, hauls me into his lap, and then slides out from under me and into the passenger seat, depositing me into the driver’s. I’m both annoyed and secretly . . . thrilled? Turned on? What’s the word? . . . at the ease with which he picks me up.

Stop it, Kari.

Then he somehow folds himself into position on the floor so that he’s hidden from a casual observer.

I get down to business and hot-wire the car, but my anxiety surges again.

When will the kidnappers call?
When?
We’re twenty minutes past the twelve-hour window they gave us. My throat tightens.

Focus, Kari. Focus.

“Twist your hair up into a knot,” Evan orders. “You want to look like a businesswoman, not a schoolgirl.”

I do that, then slowly back the BMW out of its spot, conveniently right into the path of the German cop. What timing!

He leans on his horn.

I fake being startled and throw up my hands. Then I pull back into the spot and he screams by me in his blue-and-silver-painted cruiser.

“Bye-bye,
polizei
,” I murmur. Then I reverse again and drive us all out of the parking garage. We’re clear.

“That cop’s not too bright if he cruised right by the parked Saab,” Matthis observes.

“He’ll figure it out within a matter of minutes,” Evan
says tersely. “Kari, get us back out to the Ringstrasse, and cross Maximilianstrasse, the luxury shopping street. Go right onto . . .”—he consults the GPS on his smart phone—“Burkleinstrasse, then left on Saint Anna. Get us good and lost over there before he remembers that the BMW is the car that left the garage. Okay?”

“Yep.” I concentrate on driving. The streets are narrow and bustling with activity. All around us, modern life is oddly juxtaposed with history—part of Europe’s charm.