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“Let’s get out of here,” I said. “I’m going to his trailer in about an hour.”
“He has a vehicle we can use?”
“Dunno yet, but at least he’s willing to talk to me.”
We returned to where the car was parked on the perimeter of the lot, and I settled in the back with Naomi. Philip climbed into the front passenger seat, then tossed a small handful of cocktail napkins onto the dash before giving Kyle a sly look.
“Seven, in under three minutes.”
Kyle gave a dry chuckle. “Nice.”
Naomi frowned. “Seven what?”
I leaned forward to peer at the napkins, then laugh-groaned. “Phone numbers of girls who thought Philip was a filet steak in a room full of cafeteria hamburgers.”
“Good lord,” Naomi breathed. “I’m surprised he made it out alive.”
“It was touch and go for a minute there,” Philip replied. “Or rather, I felt touches where I didn’t want them and knew it was time to go!”
And on that note we got the hell out of there.
Once we were away from the bar and headed to the highway I downed some dehydrated brain chips then filled the others in on the conversation with Randy. Naomi remained fairly quiet while I spoke, and I figured she still thought it was a bad idea to ask Randy for help. Hell, she was probably right, but no one else had come up with a better solution. And, no, stealing a random car was not a better solution.
“He was cool?” she finally asked. “No jealousy crap?”
“He was cool,” I replied. “I think he got turned on when I knocked his girlfriend on her ass.”
Kyle made a noise that sounded almost like a snort of laughter, but when I looked at him his face was as stoic as ever.
I gave Kyle directions, a little surprised when he knew the roads. Randy didn’t exactly live in a high-traffic area of St. Edwards Parish.
At least I thought he knew them. I straightened when he made a right instead of a left onto Locust Lane. “Hey, you went the wrong way. You need to go toward the river.”
His gaze was on the rearview mirror but he wasn’t looking at me. “Tail,” he said and it took me a couple of seconds to understand.
“Shit!” Immediately I craned around in my seat to peer behind us. “How do you know? Maybe it’s just someone else going the same way?”
He was nice and didn’t give me an Are you fucking kidding me? I really do know what I’m doing look and simply said, “Made two turns with us plus this one.”
Fair enough. If Kyle said we had a tail, we had a tail. “Can you tell who it is?” Saberton or Tribe? I didn’t need to say it. We all wondered the same thing.
“Headlights,” he said simply. “No details.” Then, “Hang on.”
He made a sharp turn and floored it, but the other car obviously had a better engine. Within seconds they were right behind us. I clung to the seat, utterly certain that our pursuers were about to ram us and send us flying off the road.
Kyle abruptly did something that I couldn’t follow at all. I only knew it involved brakes and tight turns and skidding, and at one point we were going backward at what had to be sixty miles-per-hour, but when we straightened out we’d miraculously gained a substantial lead.
“Holy shit, I know this area!” I said as I realized where we were, practically flapping my hands in excitement. “There’s a game trail I used to take back in junior high and high school when . . .” I hesitated, then realized these guys wouldn’t hold my past against me. “It leads to a clearing where some of us used to smoke pot. It goes on through to the road that runs past Randy’s property.” I’d met Randy for the first time in that clearing.
Philip’s frown was reflected by the other two. “We’re more vulnerable on foot,” he said.
“But we’ll be off road,” Kyle put in. “I doubt they’ll have dogs to track us.” His eyes met mine. “You sure you can lead the way and not get us stuck in some godforsaken bog?”
“I only know nice god-sanctioned bogs, I promise,” I replied. “Turn at the broken signpost right up there.” Kyle made a turn that left my stomach behind, and we bounced over rutted and winding dirt road for about a minute. “Here! Stop here!”
Kyle did so, and we quickly grabbed everything we had with us, which wasn’t all that much, thankfully. As we bailed out of the car, Philip snagged his jump bag from the trunk, and Kyle looked back toward the main road. “They went past,” Kyle said. “The brush is high enough to hide the car from the road, but they’ll be coming back to see where we turned off. We have about two minutes to get some distance and then go to ground.”
“Not a problem,” I insisted, then took off into the chest-high grass with the others close behind. Less than a minute later we heard the sound of tires on the bumpy road.
