“Both hands on the wheel!” I yelped, gripping the dashboard.
She slewed the car into our lane at the last second and shot me an amused look. “I’ve been driving since before you were born, Grace Ann, and nothing terrible’s happened yet. Have faith.”
Althea’s guardian angel must be nearly dead from exhaustion if it’d been keeping her out of accidents for almost fifty years. I hoped mine would pick up the slack. After a couple of minutes, it looked like we were gaining on Lonnie, mainly because he didn’t seem to know we were following him and was tooling along at a reasonable—safe—pace, unlike us. The old LTD might not have been much to look at, but the engine purred like a satisfied tiger as we cruised along at eighty, Althea hunched over the wheel. I loosed my fingers from their grip on the dash and let the blood tingle back into them.
“What are you going to do when we catch up to him?” I asked. “We can’t just run him off the road.”
Big mistake. Althea was incapable of talking without looking at the person she’s conversing with. She swiveled her head now to say, “Why not?” The car drifted right and bumped along the shoulder for a moment before she swung it back onto the asphalt.
“His truck’s bigger than this dinosaur,” I said, patting the LTD’s dash.
“Hm. You might be right about that. I wouldn’t want my baby to get dinged up.” She pursed her lips thoughtfully. “You can write him a note and we’ll hold it up to the window. There’s a notepad and a pen—or maybe you’ll have to use a lipstick—in my handbag.”
She started to rifle through her purse, but I stopped her with a screech as the car aimed itself at a telephone pole. “Watch the road. I’ll get it.” With trembling fingers, I found the notepad and a black pen and wrote “PLEASE PULL OVER.” Looking at it, I felt fairly stupid and wondered what the heck we were doing out here, chasing down a teenager in a pickup truck who might or might not know anything about Braden’s death. As Dillon would surely tell me, this was the police’s job. Maybe, I thought with a glimmer of hope, Dillon wouldn’t have to know.
Lonnie’s truck, now only a quarter mile ahead of us, seemed to slow. “Is he—? Yes,” I said, “he’s turning left.”
“I’ve got eyes in my head, don’t I?” Althea said, clicking on the blinker. She braked and waited for an RV to trundle by in the oncoming lane, slowed by the Ski-Doos on a trailer behind it.
“Uh-oh.” Lonnie’s truck had not only slowed, it had come to a stop beside a green metal mailbox, facing back the way we’d come. And Lonnie had gotten out. All six foot four, two hundred pounds of him. He stood with feet spread wide, leather jacket flapping open, looking like a pillar of muscle in jeans that outlined his quads and with the wind flattening his tee shirt against ridged abs. For a moment, I thought he should abandon the whole football thing and consider trying to make it as a Men’s Health model. He’d have to work on his expression, though; sultry sold more magazines than surly. Or was that fear on his face? Before I could make up my mind, I saw the gun. It was big and silver and he gripped it in his right hand, half hidden behind his thigh.
“Go, go, go,” I yelled at Althea. “He’s got a gun.” Reaching my left foot over, I pressed down on her foot where it was letting off the accelerator.
“Wha—?” Althea’s head whipped to the left. I leaned over to grab the wheel as the tires spun and we lurched toward Lonnie. His eyes widened and he stumbled back when it looked like we were going to plow into him. Then, I cut the wheel and steered us back into our own lane, losing sight of Lonnie as I concentrated on getting us out of there.
Half a mile down the road, Althea recovered enough to push me aside and take over the driving. “I cannot believe Loretta Farber lets that boy have a gun,” she said. “I’m going to have to give her a piece of my mind.”
I doubted Lonnie had consulted his aunt on the gun purchase. “I think we need to have a word with the police,” I said.
We rode in silence, working our way west on rural roads until we reached I-95 and Althea merged onto the northbound ramp so we could return to St. Elizabeth without having to cross paths with Lonnie Farber again. The sight of Lonnie with a gun had jolted me so badly that riding on the freeway with Althea at the wheel didn’t even faze me now. When the St. Elizabeth exit came into view, Althea said airily, “I don’t think we need to mention any of this to Vi, do you?”
The thought of my mom’s reaction to our car chase and almost confrontation with a gun-wielding teenager made me shudder. “Absolutely not!”