A String of Beads (Jane Whitefield, #8)(47)

Jane woke when the car lurched hard to the side and skidded, throwing her forward against the restraint of her seat belt. She clutched the armrest but the car fishtailed as Jimmy struggled to keep the wheels headed forward, then hit the brakes. She saw a set of taillights to the left, and then a series of them flashing past to the right. Jimmy shouted, “That guy tried to hit me!”

“Pull to the right, away from him.” She punched the emergency blinker switch on the dashboard so it began to tick and flash, lowered her window, and stretched her arm out to signal to the cars coming up, half leaning out to look into their headlights. “Go now!”

Jimmy moved over one lane and kept going. Jane kept her arm out the window as she watched for an opening, then said, “Now!” Jimmy made it to the right lane. “Take the next exit, and get there as fast as you can.”

As he reached the exit a few seconds later and guided the car to the ramp, Jane held on to the back of her seat and stared out the rear window of the car. “He doesn’t seem to have made it over to the exit, but he’ll take the next one.”

“He was actually trying to hit me,” Jimmy said. “It was as though he wanted to slam us into the rail.” He stopped at the bottom of the ramp and then pulled cautiously into the traffic moving to his right on the road.

“Pull into that lot up there—the hotel—and around the building to the back.”

Jimmy pulled off the road and into the large parking lot that surrounded a twenty-story hotel. He drove up an aisle filled with cars and around the building, then pulled into one of the empty spaces at the rear of the building where their car could not be seen from the street.

“Leave the motor running. This will only take a minute.” Jane got out and walked around the car, and then knelt beside the driver’s side door. After a few seconds she swung the door open and Jimmy got out.

“You didn’t find anything, right?” Jimmy said. “The SUV didn’t actually hit us, but he would have if I hadn’t seen him in time.”

“The driver wasn’t trying to smash into us.” Jane pointed at the bottom of the door just above the rocker panel. There was a small round hole punched in the sheet metal of the door. “That’s a bullet hole. There’s another one here. The shooter in the passenger seat must not have been prepared for you to drop back so suddenly. When you stomped on the brake he had to take his shot after he was ahead of you with his arm trailing out the window.”

“Why would cops shoot at me?”

“They weren’t the police. Cops give you a chance to let them take you the easy way. They don’t just open up on a car going seventy in traffic. I also think the shots weren’t loud enough, so the gun must have had a suppressor. The police don’t use them.”

“I don’t get this.”

“I don’t either. But from the look of the holes, I’d guess he could have been aiming for your left front tire to get us to pull over. He could also have been aiming at you.” She sat in the driver’s seat. “Get in. They’ll be taking the next exit about now. We’d better be gone before they get back here.”

Jimmy got in, and Jane backed out of the space and drove around the big building. “We’ll change course and stay off the interstate. While you’re watching for the black SUV, also watch for a sign that says Route Eleven. It’ll be one of those white state highway signs.”

“Okay.”

Jane drove aggressively, not breaking any laws except the speed limit, but changing lanes frequently to avoid being trapped behind slow cars and trucks.

Jimmy said, “What kind of person would be coming after me with a gun with a silencer? Who even has a silencer?”

“Last time I looked it up there were thirty-nine states where it was legal to own one, and Ohio was one of them. You pay a two hundred dollar transfer tax to the ATF, and wait for them to process your application. If you’re somebody who can legally own a handgun, eventually you’ll get your silencer.” She kept her eyes on the road, trying to use each moment to get as far as she could from the highway exit they’d taken.

She looked into the rearview mirror and said, “If I were you, I wouldn’t be thinking about hardware. I’d be trying to bring back anything I could about Nick Bauermeister, or his lawyers, his friends, family, or anything else that would tell us why somebody in another state would be looking for you.”

“I don’t know. I told you I didn’t kill him. I don’t know anything about him except that he was a drunk taking a swing at me in a bar. Maybe he had a relative or friend who’s a badass and doesn’t trust the police to get me.”

“This isn’t one man,” Jane said. “I saw two men at the hotel, and just now there were a driver and a shooter. The only way anybody could have found us in Ohio was by looking at your mother’s phone record. That narrows things down.”

“I thought you said it wasn’t the police.”

“Now I’m sure it isn’t. But there could be somebody who works for some police agency who’s doing a favor, or somebody in the phone company. There are also data brokers you can reach online who might get a list of calls made to your mother’s phone. Nick Bauermeister’s angry cousin isn’t likely to have done these things. Angry amateurs lose control and try to strangle you in court. They don’t hire pairs of killers to hunt you down two states away.”