A String of Beads (Jane Whitefield, #8)(109)

“Read the articles, and when I wake up again we can talk. There are still people looking for you. They just aren’t people who want to bring anyone back home for a trial.” She walked into the bedroom and closed the door.





28



Late the following night, Jane heard the sounds she had been listening for through the open window. A car passed at 3:00 am moving slowly along the residential street. It was unusual to hear the hiss of tires at this hour on a weeknight in quiet Hanover. The Dartmouth undergraduates wouldn’t be back until mid-September, and the local grown-ups weren’t much for carousing. The road to the hospital was three blocks away, and the car was moving too slowly to be heading for the emergency room at 3:00. Maybe it was a police patrol she had not noticed on other nights.

Jane stepped to the wall beside the window to watch the car receding. In the moonlight she could see it was a silver SUV, not a police car. The brake lights went on. The driver didn’t signal, but went into a right turn. A second person, a man, was visible in the passenger seat.

Jane picked up the laptop and looked up the state’s closing hours for bars. Last call had been changed about a year ago from 1:00 to 2:00 am. Maybe it had taken somebody a long time to drive home from a bar somewhere. Cops often spotted drunk drivers because they drove more slowly than sober ones.

Jane put the laptop in her backpack and exchanged it for the CZ 97 pistol, then moved her seat back from the window, where she could listen for more sounds from the street but remain far enough back to be invisible in the darkened room.

Five minutes later she again heard the hiss of tires on the pavement coming toward the apartment. It was the silver SUV again. The vehicle was going more slowly than five miles an hour this time, and the man beside the driver stared steadily at the apartment building. The driver nearly stopped as he leaned forward to see past his friend’s head. Then he looked ahead again and sped up to the corner.

Jane stood, closed and locked the window, and went into the room she shared with Chelsea and shook her. “Get up and get dressed and ready to move. No lights. We’re going to have visitors. Bring the shotgun.”

She stepped to Mattie’s room and shook her awake, and then went to the alcove where Jimmy slept on cushions from the couch. In about thirty seconds they had gathered in the dark kitchen. Jimmy whispered, “Are we going to fight?”

“No,” said Jane as she slung her backpack over her shoulder. “We’re going to run. Head for the house behind us, and make your way to my car.”

She quietly opened the kitchen door and beckoned. The others slipped out past her and down the steps while Jane locked the kitchen door. Jane caught up with them and moved ahead. They filed along the side of the backyard and into the kitchen garden of the next yard. She directed the others past her and along the side of the next house toward the street.

Jane stopped and crouched to watch the building they’d just left. First one, then another, and then another silhouette, each of them bent over to keep from letting his head rise to the level of the windows, ascended to the back porch.

Jane pivoted and moved quickly after her companions. When she emerged from the yard she looked for the silver SUV she’d seen coming past the apartment, but it wasn’t there. She had been hoping to find and sabotage it, but there must be a driver who was still cruising the neighborhood waiting for a pickup call. She couldn’t afford to watch any longer.

She ran to the spot where she’d parked the Volkswagen Passat, and started it while the others got in. As soon as they were inside she pulled ahead, made a left turn onto Wheelock Street, and headed toward Route 120 out of town. As she passed the corner of Chambers Street where their apartment was, she saw the three men trotting out the front door of the apartment toward the waiting SUV. They must have come in quickly, seen that everyone was gone, and called for their getaway car.

“That’s bad news,” she muttered. She sped up and turned onto Route 120.

Jimmy said, “Where are we going?”

“I’m trying to get to Interstate 89. The main thing is to get out of sight before they pull themselves together.”

“Who are they?” asked Chelsea.

Mattie said, “Could they have been the police?”

“No,” Jane said. “When the police come for someone they think might resist, there are a whole bunch of them and they identify themselves.”

Chelsea said, “This is my fault. They’re after me.”

Jane said, “That train of thought doesn’t do anything for you right now. They were after all of us.”

“This time it has to be about me. And—oh my God. I forgot the shotgun. You told me to bring it, and I was half-asleep, and I saw it, leaning in the corner near your side of the bed, and I just forgot.”

Jane said, “It’s okay. We don’t need a shotgun right now. And it doesn’t matter which of us they want most. They have to get all of us or they risk getting caught. Now calm down, but stay alert.”

Mattie said, “There’s a set of headlights way back there.”

“Let’s see if it’s them,” said Jane. She pushed down on the accelerator and added speed steadily. She kept glancing in the mirror to judge the effect on the vehicle behind them.

“They’re speeding up too,” said Jimmy.

Jane looked in the rearview mirror. “I see them. We’ll make it to I-Eighty-nine, but we can’t lose them on a six-lane highway. The road Mattie and I took on Saturday—Route Four—is the kind of road we need. That SUV has a higher center of gravity than we have, and it’s far less maneuverable than this car. We’ve been on that road, and they probably haven’t.”