Judith McNaught (19 page)

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her and wasn't entirely sure what route would intersect with the interstate or if she was taking her passenger so far out of his way that he'd prefer to try to hitchhike with someone else, she decided to look at his map. She glanced at him in the phone booth, intending to hold up the map and ask his permission, but his shoulder was turned to her and he seemed to be speaking into the phone. Deciding he couldn't possibly object, Julie folded the typewritten instructions back and opened the map he'd been studying.

Spreading it across the tailgate, she held the ends down while the wind tried to whip them out of her hands. It took a full moment before she realized it wasn't a map of Texas, but of Colorado. Puzzled, she glanced at the neatly typed instructions attached to the map:

"Exactly 26.4 miles after you've passed the town of Stanton," it said, "you'll come to an unmarked crossroads. After that, begin looking for a narrow dirt road that branches off from the right and disappears into the trees about fifteen yards off the highway. The house is at the end of that road, about five miles from your turnoff, and is not visible from the highway or any side of the mountain."

Julie's lips parted in surprise. He was heading not for a job in some unknown Texas town, but for a house in Colorado?

On the radio, the announcer finished his commercial and said,
"We'll have an update on the storm
coming our way, but first, here's some late breaking
news from the sheriff's department…"

Julie scarcely heard him, she was staring at the tall man using the phone, and she felt again that strange, slithering unease … of shadowy familiarity. He'd kept his shoulder turned to her, but he'd removed his sunglasses and was holding them in his hand now.

As if he sensed she was staring at him, he twisted his head toward her. His eyes narrowed on the open map in her hands at the same instant Julie had her first clear, brightly lit view of his face without the concealing sunglasses.

"At approximately four o'clock this afternoon,"said the voice on the radio,
"Prison officials discovered
that convicted murderer Zachary Benedict escaped
while in Amarillo—"

Momentarily paralyzed, Julie stared at that rugged, harsh face of his.

And she recognized it.

"No!" she cried as he dropped the phone and started running toward her. She bolted around her side of the car, yanking her door open and diving across the front seat, slapping at the lock on the passenger door a split second after he yanked the door open and grabbed for her wrist. With a strength born of pure terror, she managed to wrench her arm free and throw herself sideways through her open door. She hit the ground on her hip, scrambled to her feet, and started running, her feet sliding on the slippery snow, screaming for someone to help, knowing there was no one around to hear her. He caught her before she'd run five yards and yanked her around and back, trapping her against the side of the Blazer. "Hold still and shut up!"

"Take the car!" Julie cried. "Take it and leave me here."

Ignoring her, he looked over his shoulder at the map of Colorado that had blown against a rusty trash container fifteen feet away when she dropped it. As if in slow motion, Julie watched him remove a shiny black object from his pocket and point it at her, while he backed toward the map and picked it up. A gun. God in heaven, he had a gun!

Her entire body began to tremble uncontrollably while she listened in a kind of hysterical disbelief to the

newscaster's voice belatedly confirming that fact as the news bulletin came to an end:
"Benedict is
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believed to be armed and he is dangerous. If seen,
his whereabouts should be reported

immediately to the Amarillo police. Citizens should
not attempt to approach him. A second
escaped convict, Dominic Sandini, has been
apprehended and taken into custody…"

Her knees threatened to buckle as she watched him coming toward her with a gun in one hand and the map and directions blowing from his other hand.

Headlights crested the hill a quarter of a mile away, and

he slid the gun back into his pocket to keep it out of sight, but he kept his hand there with it. "Get into the car," he ordered.

Julie flashed a look over her left shoulder at the approaching pickup truck, frantically calculating the impossible odds of outrunning a bullet or even being able to attract the notice of the vehicle's driver before Zachary Benedict shot her down. "Don't try it," he warned in a deadly voice.

Her heart thundering against her ribs, she watched the pickup turn left at the crossroads, but she didn't disobey his order. Not here, not yet. Instinct warned her that this deserted stretch of road was too isolated to succeed in anything but getting killed.

"Get moving!" He took her arm and headed her to the open door on the driver's side. Cloaked in the deepening dusk of a snowy winter evening, Julie Mathison walked unsteadily beside a convicted murderer who was holding a gun on her. She had the chilling sensation they were both living a scene from one of his own movies—the one where the hostage got killed.

Her hands shook so violently she had to grope for the keys in the ignition, and when she tried to start the

car she nearly flooded the engine because even her legs were jerking with fright. He watched her unemotionally from the passenger seat. "Drive," he snapped when the engine was started. Julie managed to turn the car around and guide it to the end of the parking lot, but she stopped at the main road, her mind so paralyzed with terror that she couldn't think of the words to ask the obvious question.

"I said drive!"

"Which
way?"
she cried, hating the timid, pleading sound of her voice and loathing the animal beside her

for making her experience this uncontrollable terror.

"Back the way we came."

"B-back?"

"You heard me."

Rush hour traffic on the snowbound interstate near the city limits was moving at a crawl. Inside the car, the tension and silence were suffocating. Trying desperately to calm her rampaging nerves while she watched for some chance to escape, Julie lifted her shaking hand to change the radio station, fully expecting him to order her not to do it. When he said nothing, she turned the dial and heard a disk jockey's voice exuberantly introducing the next country/western song. A moment later the car was filled

with the cheerful sounds of "All My Ex's Live in Texas."

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While George Strait sang, Julie looked around at the occupants of the other cars, homeward bound after a long day. The man in the Explorer beside her was listening to the same radio station, his fingers tapping

on the steering wheel, keeping time with the melody.

He glanced her way, saw her looking at him, and nodded sociably, then he returned his gaze to the front. She knew he hadn't seen anything abnormal.

Everything looked perfectly normal to him, and if he were sitting where she was in the Blazer, it would have seemed perfectly normal. George Strait was singing, just like normal, and the expressway was crowded with motorists who were eager to get home, just like normal, and the snow was beautiful, just like normal. Everything was normal.

Except for one thing.

An escaped murderer was sitting in the seat beside her, holding a gun on her. It was the cozy normalcy of appearances juxtaposed against the demented reality of her situation that suddenly shoved Julie from

paralysis to action. Traffic began to move, and her desperation gave birth to inspiration: They'd already passed several cars in ditches on both sides of the road. If she could fake a skid toward the ditch on the right and if she could throw the steering wheel to the left just as they went into the ditch, her door should remain usable while his might very well be trapped.

It would work in her own car, but she wasn't sure how the Blazer's four-wheel drive would respond.

Beside her, Zack saw her gaze flick repeatedly to the side of the road. He sensed her mounting panic and knew that fear was going to drive her to try something desperate at any moment. "Relax!" he ordered.

Julie's capacity for fear suddenly reached its limits and her emotions veered crazily from terror to fury.

"Relax!" she exploded in a shaking voice, whipping her head around and glaring at him. "How in God's name do you expect me to relax when you're sitting there with a gun aimed at me? You tell me that!"

She had a point, Zack thought, and before she attempted something else that might actually get him captured, he decided that helping her to relax was in both of their best interests. "Just stay calm," he instructed.

Julie stared straight ahead. Traffic was thinning out slightly, picking up some speed, and she began to calculate the feasibility of ramming the Blazer into the cars around her in an attempt to cause a major pileup. Such an action would cause the police to be summoned. That would be very good.

But she and the other innocent motorists involved in the collision would likely end up being shot by Zachary Benedict.

That would be very bad.

She was wondering if his gun had a full clip of nine shells in it and whether he would actually massacre helpless people, when he said in a calm,

condescending voice that adults use on hysterical children,

"Nothing, is going to happen to you, Julie. If you do as you're told, you'll be fine. I need transportation to the state line, and you have a car, it's as simple as that. Unless this car is so important to you that you want to risk your life to get me out of it, all you have to do is drive and not attract anyone's attention. If a cop spots us, there's going to be shooting, and you'll be in the middle of it. So just be a good girl and relax."

"If you want me to relax," she retorted, goaded past all endurance by his patronizing tone and her strained nerves, "then you let
me
hold that gun, and I'll show you relaxed!" She saw his brows snap together, but when he didn't make a retaliatory move, she almost believed that he truly didn't intend to

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harm her—so long as she didn't jeopardize his escape. That possibility had the perverse effect of subduing her fears and simultaneously unleashing her frustrated fury at the torment he'd already put her through. "Furthermore," she continued wrathfully,

"don't speak to me like I'm a child and don't call me Julie! I was
Ms. Mathison
to you when I thought you were a nice, decent man who needed a job and who'd bought those d-damned jeans to impress your em-employer. If it hadn't been for those damned j-jeans, I wouldn't be in this mess—" To Julie's horror, she felt the sudden sting of tears, so she shot him

what she hoped was a disdainful look and then glared fixedly out the windshield.

Zack lifted his brows and regarded her in impassive silence, but inwardly he was stunned and reluctantly impressed by her unexpected show of courage.

Turning his head, he looked at the traffic opening up ahead of them and at the thick, falling snow that had seemed like a curse a few hours ago but had actually diverted the attention of the police who had to deal with stranded motorists before they could begin to search for him. Last, he considered the stroke of luck that had put him not in the small rented car that had been towed away while he watched, but in a heavy four-wheel-drive vehicle that could easily navigate in

the snow without getting bogged down on the less traveled route he intended to take up into the Colorado mountains. All of the delays and complications that had infuriated him for the last two days had

turned out to be bonuses, he realized. He was going to make it to Colorado—thanks to Julie Mathison.

Ms.
Mathison, he corrected himself with an inner grin as he relaxed back in his seat. His flash of amusement vanished as quickly as it had come, because there was something about that newscast he'd

heard earlier that was belatedly beginning to worry him: Dominic Sandini had been referred to as

"another

escaped convict" who "was apprehended and taken into custody." If Sandini had stuck to the plan, then Warden Hadley should have been crowing to the press about the loyalty of one of his trustees rather than

referring to Sandini as an apprehended convict.

Zack told himself that the information on the newscast had simply been jumbled, which accounted for the

mistake about Sandini, and he forced himself to concentrate on the irate young teacher beside him instead. Although he desperately needed her and her car right now, she was also a serious complication to his plans. She probably knew he was heading for Colorado; moreover, she might have seen enough of that map and the directions with it to be able to tell the police the vicinity of Zack's hideaway. If he left her at the Texas—Oklahoma border or a little further north at the Oklahoma—Colorado border, she'd be able to tell the authorities where he was going and exactly what kind of car he was driving as well. By now, his face was already plastered all over every television screen in the country, so he couldn't possibly

hope to rent or buy another car without being recognized. Furthermore, he wanted the police to believe

he'd managed to fly to Detroit and cross into Canada.

Julie Mathison seemed to be both a godsend and a disastrous kink in his plans. Rather than curse fate for saddling him with her and the deadly threat to his freedom that she represented, he decided to give fate an opportunity to work out this problem and to try to help them both relax. Reaching behind him for the thermos of coffee, he thought back to her last remarks and came up with what seemed like a good conversational opening. In a carefully offhand, nonthreatening tone, he inquired sociably, "What's wrong

with my jeans?"

She gaped at him in blank confusion. "What?"

"You said something about my 'damned jeans' being the only reason you offered me a ride," he explained, filling the top of the thermos with coffee.

"What's wrong with my jeans?"

Julie swallowed an hysterical surge of angry laughter. She was concerned about her life, and he was