Burning Bright (Peter Ash #2)(18)
“Don’t worry about the car,” he said. “Drive it like you stole it.”
She flashed that same fierce wild grin he’d seen in the tree. “I can do that.”
He patted her shoulder, then reached up and pushed the sunroof back. Got the bow where he could reach it. Put one end of the long box of arrows down by his feet, the other end propped up by the emergency brake. He looked up the road toward the trailhead parking lot. He thought he heard the rumble of a big engine starting up, but it might have been his imagination. “Better get moving,” he said.
June wore hiking pants that converted to shorts by unzipping the pantlegs at mid-thigh. At some point she’d removed the lower sections. Her legs were tan and sleek. She popped the clutch and cranked the car around the corner, spitting gravel from all four tires, shifting into second while they were still sliding.
Yeah, Riot Grrrl could drive. But he should have expected that from the way she attacked that zip line.
He turned in his seat to look out the back window, holding on to the lip of the sunroof for leverage. It was too wet for another car to raise a dust cloud, so he wouldn’t have much notice. Just the nose of the vehicle coming around the curve behind him.
He was assuming that the hunters would have a big American SUV, something like a Chevy Suburban or a GMC Denali, because that was what a lot of federal law enforcement people drove. Something big and powerful, great for eating up the highway, but also kind of a boat. Not particularly suited to a narrow twisting lumpy gravel road barely wide enough for two cars to pass at a crawl. He was hoping the little Subaru’s scrappy off-road handling would force the hunters to make a mistake. Lose it on a curve, maybe even end up in the ditch. That was best case. A hope, really.
If they came to a long paved straightaway, they were screwed.
Peter hoped it didn’t come to plan B.
He looked over at the speedometer. She was going about forty, both hands on the wheel. Already too fast for the road, but not fast enough. “How far to pavement?”
“About ten or fifteen miles,” she said. “Along the river the whole way. But the road gets better before that, maybe six or seven miles.”
Then he saw it, the big black vehicle coming around the curve behind them, the tires chunking up into the wheel wells with each bump, the red Chevy logo on the radiator grille getting larger by the second. It looked like a Tahoe, the short-frame version of the Suburban. Better turning radius, less likely to bottom out. A big engine.
“Here they are,” he said. “Punch it.”
June’s eyes angled up to the rearview for just a moment, and the Subaru’s little power plant wound up as the old car responded. She still had it in third, which wasn’t the worst way to go, especially if you didn’t care much about the engine. She could brake just by letting off on the gas, and the torque would let her build up speed again quickly. He looked out the back again and saw a man lean out the passenger-side window with a rifle.
Before Peter could say anything the man fired, three-shot bursts, takatak, takatak. He missed more than he hit, but still Peter heard the familiar unwelcome thunk of a bullet puncturing sheet metal. Then the passenger-side mirror exploded.
“Motherfuckers,” said June, and she rammed the shifter into fourth, powering ahead. She was using the whole road now, taking the curves on the inside, slaloming around the worst of the ruts, hammering the car on the washboard sections. At higher speed they almost floated above the washboard. Not a lot of traction there.
The hunters weren’t losing any ground. The Tahoe’s beefy suspension ate up the road. The driver clearly had some training, and thirty years of automotive advances made a difference. The shooter fired low, going for tires, Peter figured, if they wanted to capture her alive. Although at this speed on this road, losing a tire might be fatal.
Fuck this, he thought. Plan B. He picked up the compound bow in one hand, took the lip of the sunroof in the other, and stood on his seat.
Peter and his dad had set up a practice range in the barn for his fourteenth birthday. He’d no shortage of practice in high school, but he hadn’t pulled a bow in ten years. He told himself it was like riding a bike.
The man with the rifle looked a little startled to see Peter pop up through the sunroof. Clearly the man hadn’t grown up on Dukes of Hazzard reruns, although the little Subaru was nothing like that hopped-up orange Dodge Charger. Peter had changed out some of the arrows on the snap-in quiver, and he now had one broadhead and three of the ball-headed shafts June had used to get a line up into the trees. He notched one of the ball-heads. It would hurt like hell if he hit anyone. He’d be lucky just to spiderweb the windshield with this crappy road and the madwoman behind the wheel. Hell, he’d be lucky to hit anything at all.
He drew the bowstring back to his cheek and aimed, waiting for a moment of calm, the tension still familiar on his two fingers. The ride smoothed out for just a moment, and he released.
The arrow left the bow very fast, but the heavy ball-head dropped faster than he’d thought, skittering off the hood of the trailing Tahoe and skating up the windshield with barely a scratch. The shooter smirked behind his sunglasses and raised his gun.
Peter had another arrow notched and drawn before the shooter could get himself stabilized in the window. The road was forgiving for just that moment as he aimed and released.
The ball dropped again, but this time Peter had corrected. It punched right through the center of the hunters’ windshield with such velocity that it made a relatively clean hole, albeit one the size of a baseball.