Run Rose Run(92)

That was why she was hitchhiking back home, to the place she said she never wanted to go again. Ethan would bet anything that he was right. Caster County, Arkansas. All he had to do was follow and find her.

He really believed he could do it.

The light changed to green, and the line of cars surged forward. Ethan watched them, wondering what sort of drivers had stopped for AnnieLee. Where, exactly, was her final destination? And what did she plan to do when she got there? These were the questions that set his teeth on edge.

“Found the culprit, sir,” said a voice.

Ethan turned around to see Bobby holding up a two-inch screw.

“Sucker went right through your tire,” he said. “But she’s all patched up now, and you’re good to go.”

It was after 6 p.m. by the time Ethan was back on the highway. He figured he could go for another seven or eight hours before he needed to stop. As he drove, he thought about everything else he knew of AnnieLee, and about how little it added up to. She was stubborn and funny and beautiful, and her singing voice could give him chills. But he still knew more about his damn dentist’s life than he did about hers.

So how was it that he loved her the way he did? How had she become as necessary to his life as oxygen? He opened his second bag of potato chips. The world was full of mysteries, he supposed, and the human heart—his human heart—had turned out to be one of them.

As Ethan was pondering it all, a red Ford pulled alongside him in the left-hand lane. For a mile or two, the truck stayed there, matching its speed to the Ram’s. Ethan, finally glancing over to ID the incompetent driver, saw a man pointing and gesturing at him in some kind of wild pantomime.

What the hell? Ethan thought.

The man finally made a comprehensible motion: Roll down your window.

Ethan did, and the man screamed across the dotted line at him, “Your tire!”

Startled, Ethan realized that the steering wheel was vibrating, and the Ram was pulling to the right.

Another flat. Furious, he took the next exit off the highway.





Chapter

83


After saying goodbye to Foster Barnes, AnnieLee had wasted no time catching a ride to Fort Smith, Arkansas. But that was where her hitching luck had run out—not that she would have expected anything different from a state that’d ground her up and spit her out the way it did.

No siree, there was no place like home.

She’d walked east along Grand Avenue toward the university, hoping to find a college kid heading out of town for the weekend. But she’d waited for three hours now, and it was getting dark.

“Driven to insanity,” she sang softly, “driven to the edge…”

Paying for another motel room would nearly clean her out, and anyway, she was determined to keep going. She started walking again. She felt rattled, jumpy; she had felt this way ever since she crossed the state line. She couldn’t tell if the tightness in her chest came from anticipation or dread. Probably it was both.

Hearing the low hum of traffic from I-540 up ahead, she broke into a light jog. It was never a good idea to hitch at night, but right now she didn’t even care. Whatever she had to do—beg, hitch, or crawl the whole way on her hands and knees—she’d do it.

Vengeance was one hell of a motivator.

Twenty minutes later, AnnieLee was scrambling up the embankment to the interstate. Cars rushed past as she stood on the gravel shoulder, forcing a smile no one would be able to see in the darkness.

When a woman in an old white Pontiac finally pulled over, AnnieLee got in and let herself be scolded for hitchhiking, for being out alone at night, for not having a proper coat, and for every other wrong choice the woman seemed to think she’d made in her life. AnnieLee just nodded gratefully, promising she would start going to church and turn herself around, and two hours later she got dropped off on a rural road barely twenty miles from her final destination.

She fingered Foster’s money in her pocket. He’d said If it means you can take a cab…

But there weren’t any cabs in the boondocks, or at least not any that she knew how to call on a phone she didn’t even have. And so she put out her thumb again. She hoped a kind and decent stranger would stop for her. In a place so small that everyone seemed to know everyone else, she just needed a person who wouldn’t recognize her. Someone who’d believe her name was Katie—or even AnnieLee Keyes.

She walked along the side of the road, sticking out her thumb whenever she heard a car approaching. After an hour or so, a battered Chevy passed by and screeched to a halt twenty yards in front of her. She ran up to meet it.

When the man—he was around her age, and alone—pushed the passenger door open, AnnieLee felt a humid cloud of beery air spill out and surround her.

She’d never seen him before, and this was such a relief that she overlooked the fact that he’d been drinking, and that she’d just promised that nice old lady that she wouldn’t ever take a ride from a random man again. She got in. She was so damn close to where she needed to be, and she didn’t know when the next car would stop, and already it felt like she was in enemy territory. She needed to keep moving.

“I thought you were a deer at first,” he said. Then he laughed. “Shoot, woulda hit ya and turned you into steaks.”

“Not a deer,” AnnieLee said. She looked down at the empty beer cans in the cup holders. “You’re going to keep us between the ditches, right?” she asked, buckling in. She pulled the man’s coat out from behind her back and tucked it down by her feet.