I took off after them.
It was like a nightmare. Branches lashed back at me as I ran, leaving stinging welts across my face, my arms. More than once, my foot caught on a tree root and sent me sprawling, and when I picked myself up, they were that much farther away. I remembered, suddenly, being a kid in a wood like this one, playing a game of ghost tag in the dark. I’d hidden myself in a burned-out tree trunk, and I remembered the hand reaching in to tag me, a white flash in all that darkness. I’d screamed myself hoarse.
Tonight didn’t feel all that much different.
Holmes pulled farther and farther ahead of me. She didn’t trip. She didn’t fall. She moved like a cat through the night.
And then I couldn’t see her anymore.
“Come back!” I shouted, finally skidding to a stop. “Give it up!” I could hear him, faintly, still crashing through the bushes. We weren’t going to catch him. Besides, what would we do with him if we did? I didn’t have any weapons. I didn’t know how to threaten someone with anything but my fist.
In the far distance, I heard sirens.
“Holmes!” I shouted again. “Someone called the police!”
“Jesus, Watson,” her voice said a little bit ahead of me. “I’m right here.”
She’d stopped to catch her breath. In the dim light, she looked as terrible as I felt, scratched and grim, but I saw her eyes gleaming with the thrill of the hunt.
“We have to get back to the car,” I said. “Now.”
When we got back to the road, the cops were still out of sight, though the sirens were getting louder. We were a long way from anything, out here.
As I started Lena’s car, Holmes quickly rummaged through the dealer’s sedan, taking pictures with her cell phone, touching everything through the cloth of her shirt. Careful, I knew, not to leave fingerprints.
“Come on,” I hissed.
As she climbed back in, she tucked something small into her pocket. “Pull around to the back of the petrol station. Park next to the owner’s truck, turn it off, and duck down.”
I did as she said, and not a moment too soon. Red-and-blue lights flooded in through the rear window. I held my breath as the cop car circled the gas station, slowing down behind us. A door opened, closed. Footsteps padded up to our back window.
If he shone a flashlight in—if he even glanced in—he’d see us. I thought I might throw up.
And then a sound of something big thunking onto metal, as if he’d dropped his bag onto the trunk of our car.
“I need to get my gloves out,” the cop said, his voice muffled. “I know they’re in here somewhere.”
“Well, hurry up,” the other cop replied.
“My hands are ass-cold, man. Give me a second.”
“We’ve got a single-car crash and a drunk wandering somewhere in these woods, Taylor. We better get to it.”
Taylor must’ve found his gloves, because there were footsteps again. Retreating. The cruiser ambling back out to the road, and the officers getting out to look again at the sedan.
Holmes turned to me with a look of morbid satisfaction. She had been right. We hadn’t been found. Crouched below the steering wheel, I rubbed my face with my hands. One way or another, this year was going to kill me.
I could hear the pair of officers talking as they examined the black car, though I couldn’t make out their words. An endless hour passed while they dickered about something. Their lights kept flashing; I fought to keep my eyes open. Holmes had folded herself down to the foot of her seat, still alert, somehow. Our wild chase hadn’t exactly been subtle, and if someone had called it in to the police, they would know there was another car. What if they came back around again, searching for us? I dug my hands into the seat, trying to steady my nerves.
Then finally, finally, we heard it. The unmistakable groan of a tow truck as the sedan was hauled away. The cop car following after.
When I shut my eyes, I could still see the flashing lights pulsing against the darkness.
It was another half hour before Holmes gave the all clear. “We should wait longer,” she said, her voice even hoarser than usual, “but the petrol station will be open any minute now, and I don’t want us to get caught back here.”
Every joint in my body cracked as I climbed back into the driver’s seat. I caught a glimpse of my face in the rearview mirror, scored here and there by the sharp fingers of branches.
“Jesus,” I said, with feeling. Holmes cracked her neck. “All that for the campus dealer. Some paranoid freak who probably just ran because we were chasing him.”
“Not a dealer,” she said. “Something worse.”
My heart hammered in my chest. “Like what?”