She inhaled the night air. No more counting. She jogged the remainder of the way to the motel, not stopping till she reached the asphalt parking lot. She stopped by a white Toyota, to catch her breath, when she heard a noise around the side of the motel. The woman? She darted to the side of the building and scurried along the wall. She was a spy after a secret. She felt like a teenager. Her blood started delivering more oxygen to her brain as her heart accelerated. She was exhilarated. Excited. Nothing should come in the way of a secret.
She stopped at the corner, took a silent breath and inched her head along the wall toward the edge, her cheek brushing against the cool stucco. She wondered who it was, this old woman that peeked in motel windows. Who was she and what did she see?
She poked her eye around the ridge.
There was no one there and all of the bathroom windows were closed.
“ Damn,” she whispered, turning away from the motel. She started across the parking lot, and at a fifty-eight steps back toward the car, she stopped and gazed at her beauty. Long, low, sleek, and red. The kind of car she’d wanted all her life and only dreamed about. If only Miles, and his Volvo mentality, could see her now. At seventy steps, she stopped again.
She thought she saw movement on the other side of the car. She took five cautious steps forward, squinting through the night. “Is somebody there?” Five more steps, slower than the last, eyes straining, heart again beginning to race. “Who’s there?” Still no response.
“ You better not hurt my car,” she said. What a stupid thing to say, she thought. “Did you hear me? Get away from the car.” She was shouting as she took ten more steps toward the Corvette.
She stopped again. She was well over halfway back to the car, no longer protected by the bright overhead lights of the motel. A small part of her worried about who could be waiting for her, hiding behind her car, like a mugger. But that’s ridiculous, she thought. There were no muggers in Palma or Tampico.
“ I said, get away from the car.” She took five more cautious steps, thought about the highway, and stopped again. Whoever was hiding behind her car may not be from town at all. He may have come on the highway.
She saw movement again. Her car door opened and someone got out. He called her name in a raspy, throaty voice that sent shivers crawling along her skin. She turned and fled, because she knew that whoever he was, he was coming after her.
She stumbled, fell, and scraped her knees. She jumped up and continued running. She heard great clomping, stomping steps as it got closer. Thud, thud, thud, big feet pounding the earth. She felt like her lungs were going to pop. She gasped for air and struggled to keep running. She felt hot breath on the back of her neck as she plunged onto the road.
She was blinded by the lights of the huge metal monster bearing down on her, blaring its horn, as it roared off the highway. She screamed as a huge hand grabbed her by the arm, jerking her out of the way of the tanker truck carrying gasoline to the service stations of Palma and Tampico.
She got out the beginnings of another scream, before a strong hand clamped across her mouth, cutting it off, choking her. She bit it and the attacker jumped back, releasing her.
“ Shit, you bit me,” the voice rasped.
Once free, she whirled around to flee.
“ It’s okay, Sarah, I won’t hurt you.”
“ You?” she said. This was a man that would never cut and run. She looked into his eyes and saw the pain there. He was a worried man. She was both afraid of him, and fascinated by him, and she was hopelessly drawn in to the churning green sea behind those troubled eyes.
“ Yeah.” He released his hold on her arm.
“ You chased me.”
“ I had to stop you from killing yourself.”
“ What are you talking about?”
“ The truck.”
“ Oh, that.” She turned to look at its taillights fading in the distance. The truck went around the first bend and the lights were gone. For the second time in less than twenty-four hours she was almost killed by a tanker truck.
“ Yeah, that.”
“ You scared me,” she said.
“ Didn’t mean to.”
“ Well, you did.” She crossed her arms against the cold, while she took in his battered and scabbed face. What she couldn’t see in the dark last night was hauntingly surreal in the moonlight as he led her back to her car. He was rugged handsome, with the same crooked smile carried by his daughter.
“ I’m sorry about that,” he said when they reached the car, “but I’ve always wanted to own one of these. When you walked away from it, I couldn’t resist. I just wanted a few seconds behind the wheel. I wasn’t going to steal it.”
“ I didn’t think you were.”
“ Occupational hazard,” he said, and she laughed.
“ Were you always a thief?” she asked, remembering what he’d told her last night.
“ Always.”
“ No, really. How’d you start?” She smiled at him and got in the passenger side of the car.
“ I’ve been a thief ever since I can remember.” He looked down at her.
“ Why?”
“ I don’t know. I don’t have the kind of conscience most people seem to have. It doesn’t bother me. I used to think I did it because it was easier than working, but stealing’s a job, like any other.”
“ I can’t believe I’m having this conversation. Yesterday I was a married, mild mannered school teacher with a ten-year-old VW. Today the yellow bug is history and I’m single again. And I’m out here in the middle of nowhere-”
“ Talking to the kind of man you would have passed by without a glance before,” he interrupted.
“ I’d have given you a glance.”
“ How much they give you for the Volkswagen?” he asked, changing the subject.
“ How do you know about that?”
“ I followed you.”
“ How? I didn’t see you?”
“ I must be better at it than you.”
“ You saw me?”
“ After you gave up, I turned around and followed you.”
“ All the way to Eureka?”
“ All the way.”
“ When I went to the bank?”
“ I was right outside.”
“ When I bought the car?”
“ I was looking at a new station wagon.”
“ Why?”
“ You came around checking me out. I was curious.”
“ You wanna drive it?” She rubbed her hands on her knees against the cold.
“ Sure you want me to?”
“ I think I might like it.”
He grinned and moved around to the driver’s side, trailing a hand along the car as he went.
“ You ever driven one of these?” she asked.
“ In my kind of work you can’t afford to draw too much attention to yourself.”
“ Of course,” she said as he started it up and revved the powerful engine.
“ Started for me,” he said.
“ It would,” she said.
“ It’s a guy thing,” he said. Then he looked up, checked the road, shifted into first, popped the clutch, and held on to the wheel, as dirt and small rocks shot out from the spinning tires. The Corvette sprang out from the dirt, fishtailing, till Coffee wrestled it onto the road.
Sarah pulled her seatbelt on as Coffee accelerated. She gulped air as the tack redlined in second, then again in third, then fourth. She glanced at the speedometer and gasped as the needle pushed a hundred, before Coffee threw it into fifth.
She ran her fingers through her hair, massaging her scalp. He was driving like a man possessed and he was invigorating her, making her come alive like she hadn’t been in years. Doing for her in a few seconds what no man had ever done. And he’d hardly touched her.
And she was afraid he never would. He was a self-confessed thief. Of what she didn’t know. But he was definitely not the kind of man she wanted anything to do with. However she found herself running her hand along the back of her neck to quiet the chills that shivered there when she thought of him.