Saved by the Outlaw(4)
Terrified, the rat-man starts to ramble very quickly. “I-I heard from my cousin Vic that his podruga’s sister knows a guy who got p-picked up by the politsiya about the LaBeau case!”
At the mention of my own last name I let out a startled gasp and drop my boots to the floor with a resounding, echoing clunk. My eyes go wide as all three men swivel around toward the sound — toward me.
“What the hell was that?” snarls Lukas, looking around with narrowed eyes.
“Help! Help!” the rat-man starts squealing, desperately thinking I might be a cop or someone here to rescue him from his chained interrogation.
“Zatk’nis, mu’dak!” roars Lukas, jabbing a right hook into the rat-man’s face.
“Who’s there?” calls out Leon, walking briskly toward me, squinting.
Oh no.
He’s going to find me. I’m going to die. They’re going to chain me up and beat the hell out of me like they’re doing to the rat-man. It’s all over.
Just then, my fight or flight instinct kicks in. Flight takes the reins.
With a terrified little squeal I stand up, tuck my boots under my arm, and bolt away as fast as my nearly-bare feet can carry me, my heart pounding in my ears.
“Stop! Stop right there!” Leon shouts, his voice running chills down my tingling limbs. I can hear his heavy footsteps quickening behind me. He’s chasing me.
“Boss?” Lukas yells.
“Stay back! I’ve got this!” Leon calls back in response.
He’s got this.
He’s got me.
2
Cherry
My head is pounding and my entire body aches, my legs having gone numb from running so far, so fast, in the cold air. My feet are frozen by this point, my toes totally without feeling. I’ve still got my boots tucked up under my arm, which is trembling but paralyzed in a kind of vice grip. The muddy, slushy earth beneath me splatters and smacks with every frantic step I take. I have not dared to look behind me, and I can’t hear much beyond the booming of my heart beat and the blood rushing in my ears. I am not a runner by any means, and in fact my gym membership card was little more than a shiny, colorful little decoration on my dresser back at my apartment in the city. I went a few times, but it was never a priority for me. The work I did, the kind of profile I kept, required me to be pretty and slim, but certainly not buff.
So this is probably the most physical exercise I’ve had in years. And it shows.
My lungs are in constant pain, causing me to wince with every labored breath. I don’t even know how long I’ve been running now. It could be fifteen minutes or it could be five hours — either way, I cannot wipe the fear out of my mind that my would-be attacker is just a few steps behind the whole way. I hope, vaguely, that I am running in the direction of help. Out here, in as close to the middle of nowhere as you can possibly get in the industrial state of New Jersey, it’s hard to find your way back to the road. At first, I took off into the woods, not thinking clearly enough to have a real destination in mind. But slowly, cautiously, I’ve made my way back in a loop toward where I think I parked my rental car.
Somewhere in the back of my brain, there’s a shrill voice screaming at me. How could you possibly lose your car? What kind of idiot are you? But at last the glint of something like polished metal flashes in the watery sunlight just ahead and my heart soars.
A sleek, unobtrusive, little green Ford Focus. My rental car. Thank God!
Somehow I manage to wrangle my aching, half-responsive arm into the back left pocket of my jeans to fish out the keys. With all the momentum I’ve been building up, I all but slam into the driver’s side door, shaking violently as I fumble to fit the key into the door. Finally I allow myself to look around, my eyes blinking and wide as I scan the area for my pursuer. He’s nowhere in sight, but that does little to satisfy my fear.
“Come on, come on,” I mumble nervously. Then the key wiggles into the hole and I turn it to unlock the door and fling it open. “A-ha!”
A-ha? What are you, a magician? I think to myself in annoyance. I jab the key into the ignition and turn the engine over, immediately throwing the car into reverse and peeling out in a sharp, backward semi-circle before switching to drive and jerking forward. With my basically-bare foot shoving the gas pedal down to the floor, the Focus plows down along the dirt road I took to get here, barreling away from the warehouse, away from this nightmare.
The trees blow past, leaning narrowly into the pathway as though half-heartedly trying to guard me from leaving. As I drive along at a definitely-illegal speed, I notice that my toes are regaining feeling — and that the thin hosiery has worn through. It probably disintegrated some ten or fifteen minutes ago from being pounded into the wet, rocky ground. Another pair of pantyhose ruined in the name of journalism. What a shame.