Wisdom Spring (15 page)

We’d had a stressful day and were both tired. We cleaned up the remains of the food and I took a shower, then joined Jess in bed, where we made love before passing out.

*****

We were up early the next morning, anxious to get on our way. I gave Joe a quick call to let him know we might be going into an extended stretch of no cell service. He appreciated the call and said he had no news to pass on. He told us to be cautious and to call him when we could.

We got on the road, figuring we’d stop for breakfast after we’d driven for a while. At about 9:30, we came up to a service area. I pulled in and was about to park when I saw a familiar black SUV in a parking spot in front of the restaurant. I stepped on the gas and kept going out of the lot and right back onto the highway.

Jess looked confused. “What’s going on?”

“Our friends were in the restaurant. I’m going to get off at the next town and lay low for a little bit.”

“Do you think they saw us?”

“Don’t know. I didn’t see them, but if they were sitting on that side of the restaurant, they could have. I think it’s time to change the plates. We’ve been fortunate that—to my knowledge anyway—they haven’t gotten my license plate number. The car has never been parked so they could see it. If I’m going to stay anonymous, it’s time to stop taking chances.”

We passed a road sign that told us we were close to Edmonton.

“Nothing like a big city to get lost in,” I said, while Jess craned her neck to keep watch out the back window.

We pulled into a restaurant parking lot and I located the most remote corner behind the kitchen. Looking around and seeing no one, I took the stolen plates out from under Jess’s seat and hurriedly replaced my Massachusetts plates with those from Utah.

“What do we do if we get pulled over?” asked Jess.

“I don’t know. I’ll do everything I can to follow the law and not get pulled over.”

I got out and opened the trunk to retrieve my gun.

“You still have yours?” I asked when I got back into the car.

“I do.”

“Let’s just hope we won’t have to use them.” I put mine under my seat.

It seemed Jess was destined not to have a sit-down meal. We finally stopped at a fast food place just as they finished serving breakfast grease and had just started serving lunch grease. Oh how my eating habits had deteriorated. While we ate, parked in the parking lot, I studied the road atlas. Jess was quiet as she let me plan.

“Here’s what I think,” I said finally, pointing to the map. “The quickest way out of here and the way I had figured we’d go is over to Route 43, then to the Alaska Highway. But if we go up through St. Albert and catch a little road across to 43, maybe they won’t be looking there—especially if it’s only the two of them.”

Jess agreed and we headed out. We had just started when I noticed we needed gas, so I pulled into a self-serve station and pumped the gas. When I was finished, I got back into the car and shut my door. The instant I did that, the back passenger door opened, and the pasty guy slid in. In his hand was a gun.

“Just drive,” he said.

Chapter 15

He kept the gun down low, but pointed between the seats at stomach level.

“A hooker, huh?” he said, looking at Jess. He glanced back at me. “You had us fooled. If you hadn’t pulled into that restaurant parking lot, you would have gotten away with it. We got lucky again when you decided to take this route out of Edmonton. I knew you’d try something sneaky, so we headed up this way. God was smiling on us today. He was shitting on you though. You didn’t even see us, did you? We were parked two lanes over in the gas station. I saw you drive in and I thought we’d won the lottery.”

I cursed myself for putting the gun under the seat and not having it in my belt. But my gun wasn’t small like Jess’s, and it was uncomfortable to drive with.

He was looking at Jess. “So you’re the famous Jessica Norton. You have any idea how many people are looking for you right now? And I’m the one who found you. After I saw your car at the restaurant, I contacted the people who hired me. They just about shit their pants. Who knows how many people they’ve just sent up here.” He turned his attention to me. “My buddy back there is calling in your license plate, so we’ll finally know who you are.”

Thank God I’d just changed the plates.

“You’ve been a real pain in the ass,” he continued. “My guess is she’d have been caught back in Texas if you hadn’t come on the scene.”

“Does it really matter how many people they’re sending up?” I asked. “You’re just taking us to a good spot to kill us, right?”

“You got that right. You’re a smart guy. No sense in lying to you. Our boss wants us to hold onto you for him. He wants the credit for killing you. No fucking way! You’re mine. If anybody is going to get the credit, it’ll be me. But hey, you gave it a good ride. You made it to the middle of fucking nowhere. And that’s where you’re going to die.”

Jess had discreetly pulled the gun out of her pocket.

I said, “So this is the spot in the movies where the bad guy figures that since he’s going to kill them anyway, he can tell the good guys the whole story of who hired him and why.”

“How the fuck do I know?” he answered. “The guy I work for was contacted by the guy he works for, who was contacted by someone else. I don’t know who wants you dead. All I know is that they’re paying me to get a job done.”

“How much are they paying you?” I asked.

“None of your fucking business.”

“I’ll give you a hundred thousand to walk away.”

“Yeah, right. Like you have it on you?”

“Of course not. But I can get it fast.”

It looked to me like he was giving it a fleeting thought, but not much more than that.

“Nah, I’ll get a bonus for this. For all I know, it might be a hundred grand. Besides, I don’t want the same people looking for me who are looking for you.”

Dense woods lined the road and I could see pasty guy looking around for a good spot to pull over. I glanced over at Jess and saw she had her eyes closed. She was working up the courage to do what she knew had to be done.

“Up there,” he said. “Take that dirt road.”

I slowed and turned down the road. He had a good killer’s instinct and had picked well. It wasn’t so much a road as a path, one that led directly into the woods. I couldn’t believe he actually saw it. I would have passed it right by. It was secluded and literally in the middle of nowhere, like he said. He directed me to pull into a batch of trees totally hidden from the main road.

I had often wondered why people allow themselves to go with someone who has a gun. You have to know that the outcome isn’t going to be good. My feeling was that you fight back, even if you got killed in the process. It would still be better than what’s waiting for you at the other end. But here we were, in a car with a man holding a gun on us. In this case though, we had a fighting chance. I don’t think it even occurred to him that we might be armed.

I stopped the car and looked at Jess. Instantly I knew it. She was getting direction from The Voice. I could just tell. She was going to be told when to fire. The SUV pulled up in back of us and the other guy got out. As he started to walk toward us on my side of the car, pasty guy opened the back door and was about to get out when Jess shot him. She aimed her first shot through her seat and it caught him in the arm. He was too surprised to shoot. Then she turned to face him, aimed at him over the seat, and coolly pulled the trigger five more times. The noise was deafening in the enclosed space.

As she was shooting, I grabbed my gun from under my seat and was out the door. The other guy was reaching for his gun when I shot him. He was about twenty feet away—an exceptionally easy shot for me with all my gun range practice. Except, most of my experience was with a paper target. Shooting at a real body was a lot different. However, I had a vast amount of experience now that I had already killed once, and it seemed to be easier the second time. I put two more bullets into him as he fell, then checked him. He was dead. I went back to see about Pasty, but I needn’t have bothered. He was riddled with Jess’s six bullets. There was no doubt as to his status.

I looked in on Jess, vividly remembering her complete breakdown when I killed the guy at the overlook. But it was a very different reaction this time. She was still sitting in her seat, but other than some shaking, she seemed calm—almost at peace. I knew The Voice had something to do with that.

“You okay?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

“Yeah, I am,” she answered, putting her hands to her ears to stop the ringing. “You know what I am? I’m tired and I’m pissed. Let them come and get me. They’re going to have a fight on their hands.”

I smiled at the change. I could tell she was still scared—that wouldn’t go away anytime soon—but there was something else now. Slowly the fear was being replaced by anger, and I knew that it might just help keep us alive.

“Let’s pull these guys into the woods,” I said. “I bet they have bears or wolves or coyotes up here. If we’re lucky they’ll stay hidden long enough to get eaten.”

There was quite a lot of blood and I watched Jess for signs of cracking, but she was fine, for now anyway. I didn’t exactly know what it was, but I had no doubt that The Voice was the source. It had gone from guide to confidante, of that I was sure, and at some point she would tell me more about it.

Meanwhile, we had a decision to make. After we had dragged the bodies deep into the woods and had covered them with branches until they were completely hidden, I looked at my car—my beloved Beemer. The back seat and windows were splattered in vast amounts of blood and the front passenger seat had a bullet-sized hole through it. It was time to abandon it. But how?

Plates or no plates, the car could be traced back to me through the vehicle identification number. Jess and I talked about the options and decided to leave the car where it was and take the SUV.

 “This road is old and looks like it’s rarely used. If we can get this car way into the woods, it could be a long time before it’s found. Hopefully by then the two bodies will have decomposed or have been eaten.”

“The other thing,” said Jess, “is that we took all the identification off those guys. If the police do find the bodies, they might assume one of them is you.”

We took everything out of the car and loaded it into the SUV, then I drove the car as deep into the woods as I could, and we spent the next hour hiding it and eliminating all traces of the car ever having been there.

Finally we were ready.

“Well, they were cleaner than the last guy who’s car I had to dispose of,” I said. “Not too bad for a couple of guys.”

“You must not have very high standards,” said Jess. She sniffed the air and frowned.

We turned around. The SUV was a big Nissan Armada.  It was owned by the pasty guy—Mitchell Becker—which might have explained why it wasn’t a pigpen. He took some pride in it.

We were on the road heading west toward 43 when Becker’s phone rang. I looked at Jess then down at the phone. It said “Unknown Caller.”

“What the hell,” I said. “Maybe he won’t know Becker’s voice.”

He didn’t.

“This Becker?”

“Yeah, who the fuck’s this?” I asked in my best Becker imitation.

“One of the many people who can fire your ass,” he responded. “So watch how you talk to me. We just touched down in Calgary. I got word that you’ve found her.”

“Yeah, we’re following her right now.”

“Where are you?”

I motioned for Jess to open the atlas.

“We are on Route 16 heading east from Edmonton. She’s gotta be headed for Saskatoon or Winnipeg. According to my map, if you head east on Route 1 out of Calgary, the two roads converge in Winnipeg. Maybe we can corner her.”

“Okay, that’s what we’re going to do. Call me back at this number if there is any deviation.”

“Will do.” And I hung up.

I looked at Jess and smiled. “Oh wait. A deviation. We’re going west, not east, and we’re not on Route 16.”

Jess laughed. I still couldn’t see any sign that she was bothered by the earlier events, but I knew it was something that could hit at any time.

“We may have just bought ourselves some time. I figure we can talk to him for the next few hours if he calls, then Mitchell Becker is going off the grid. Which reminds me. We should call Joe and let him know what happened.”

We didn’t know what the laws were in Canada about cell phones and driving, so Jess called him. If Joe was surprised that we had killed two more people, Jess said he didn’t sound it. She took him through it step by step and finished with us sending Hillstrom’s goons in the opposite direction.

Since we had talked to him not that long ago, he didn’t have any updates for us. He told Jess to be careful and they hung up.

We had two more calls that day from the unknown caller, and we let him know that Jess was still heading east, then I turned the phone off. Mitchell Becker ceased to exist.

We pulled into Grande Prairie that evening and found a decent-looking hotel. We had passed a couple of signs for Alaska, which had excited us. We still had a long way to go to get to Homer, and we had no idea what we would do once we arrived. But with Hillstrom’s people converging on Winnipeg, and us in a different vehicle, for the first time since I picked Jess up, we were beginning to feel safe.

Chapter 16

The next day we reached Dawson Creek, the official start of the Alaska Highway. The days following were the closest thing to peace we had experienced since the ordeal began. We drove through some of the most beautiful country I had ever seen, catching glimpses of moose, deer, bears, and even bison. We bought a small tent and spent the nights at some of the many campgrounds along the road. Still careful to keep Jess out of the public eye, we always chose the most remote spot to set up the tent. We were in no hurry, sometimes just pulling over and spending an hour or two looking out at the view. We made love each night, both of us so grateful that I had stopped for her on that rainy night in Texas.