Rules of Protection(28)

“Doesn’t mean we won’t,” I said doubtfully.

We slowed down as we crossed an old one-lane, barrel-style bridge, then picked up speed until we neared the next curve. As we rounded the sharp left curve, Jake slammed on his brakes as two white-tailed deer darted across the road before us. I clutched my chest and drew in a deep breath.

“Scared?”

“I thought they weren’t going to get across before you creamed one. Why don’t you drive slower, Mario Andretti? This isn’t a race, and I’m in no hurry to die.”

“Everyone drives like this back here,” he replied. “You’ll get used to it.”

“Please slow down. The trees are right at the edge of the road. I have enough people trying to kill me without the car reaching out to hug one.”

Begrudgingly, he did as I asked. A few more miles up the road, he curved to the right sharply, then took another left.

“You went right back there,” I said with a smug grin. “Guess it’s not all lefts.”

“Doesn’t count.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s a curve. No other way to go.”

“Yeah, but…”

“Doesn’t count,” Jake repeated.

“You always make up rules as you go along. Like you saying no family reunions, then heading to your uncle’s house.”

“Those were your rules, not mine.”

After the next left turn, I spied an old pickup truck sitting on the side of the road with its headlights shining on two men as they strolled out of the woods carrying a rope and a shovel. It was the first sign of life I’d seen in the last twenty minutes. The men reached the front of the truck and stood in the headlights as we passed. I craned my neck to get a better look.

One of them had no eye in his right socket, while the other stared straight at me and gave me a toothless snarl. They were filthy, as if they’d been rolling in dirt. It reminded me of something out of Deliverance.

“Jesus,” I told Jake, swallowing a knot in my throat. “What the hell were they doing out there at night?”

“No telling. Probably hunting.”

“With a rope and a shovel? I don’t think so.”

Jake grinned but didn’t take his eyes off the road. “After this turn, I have to slow down.

“No! Keep going.”

He chuckled. “Oh, now you want me to drive faster.”

“Well, I sure as hell don’t want you to slow down. Those creepy guys might be coming this way.”

“Emily, I have to. Bonnie walks this road after sundown, and she’s blacker than night. I wouldn’t want to hit her. I don’t know how many times we’ve all threatened to slap glow-in-the-dark stickers on her ass, but she won’t stay off the roads.”

“Jake, that’s a terrible thing to say about someone.”

He smirked at me. “Bonnie is Mr. Hensley’s cow.” Jake maneuvered the left turn, which landed us on a bumpy dirt road. “Look, I bet that’s her up ahead. You can barely see her.”

Sure enough, a shadowy blob moved in the darkness. As we neared, the black cow stopped eating from the overgrown weeds at the side of the road, turned its head to look back at us, and switched its tail from side to side like a cat. I grinned as Jake maneuvered the Explorer around the living roadblock.

“Where does Mr. Hensley live?”

“House on the right with all the floodlights. He locks Bonnie up in a barn on the backside of his property, but he’s never been able to keep her there.”

Mr. Hensley’s house was old, rickety, and neglected. Plagued with vines and rotting trim, it looked condemned—abandoned, at best. Large, orange-colored half-moons stained the sides of the house, and something resembling grass grew on the roof. I peered through the dark trying to see the barn, but the building I saw was too small for something as large as Bonnie.

“You’re kidding me, right? Tell me that wasn’t an outhouse.”

“Okay, it wasn’t an outhouse.”

I recognized his monotone for what it was. “Oh, Jesus! Where the hell have you taken me?”

“Calm down. Mr. Hensley’s an elderly man who prefers to live by simple means. Where we’re staying is more like the Hilton than Mr. Hensley’s.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. “Sorry, I thought…well, I’m not sure what I thought.”

“Almost there. Another mile up the road,” Jake told me.

I glanced over at his moonlit face and slanted an eyebrow. “Let me guess, it’s on the left?”

He answered me with his silence and a wide grin.

When we turned into a long driveway, I snapped back to reality and had my first inclination that something wasn’t right. A large wooden sign with faded black letters, which said Miller’s Bird Farm, leaned against the barbed wire fence at the end of the driveway.

Jake drove slowly up the drive, passing a workshop on the right, a vegetable garden on the left. He pulled up onto a large concrete pad next to an old blue pickup.

Two houses faced the concrete pad. A large white one before us—the main house, I assumed—sat high enough off the ground that you could drive a truck underneath it. The siding was unfinished, and the porch rails were likely to collapse any moment from the bowed and battered wood. Unlit Christmas lights hung from the eaves, though it was late March.