“You know he’s running the plate,” Stick said as Gannon got back behind the wheel.
“I know, I know. Just take it easy.”
“You keep saying that, but it’s getting harder and harder,” Stick said as they pulled out.
Gannon watched the trooper in the rearview as he slowly accelerated. He was on his radio. Then Gannon saw him move the cruiser just as they hit the bend in the descending road ahead.
“He’s following us,” Stick said, glancing back, “and he’s on his radio now. They’ve got a BOLO on the truck. Has to be. What do we do?”
“Nothing,” Gannon said. “Just hold on. Let’s not get too hasty, okay?”
“But you know he’s calling for backup.”
Gannon looked ahead. Far below down the slope of the road they were descending, there was a car. It was coming up, heading toward them at some speed.
“Dammit! It’s another cruiser!” Stick called, pointing the field glasses over Gannon’s shoulder. “I knew it.”
Gannon looked ahead where some high voltage lines bisected the road at a high-to-low diagonal. He looked at the rusted red transmission towers over the trees on his right where the lines went down. They were a hundred yards from the utility cutout.
“Put on your seat belts! Now!” he called out.
“You have got to be shitting me,” Stick said as Gannon wheeled to the right off the road.
There was the snap of fallen tree limbs then a crunch of flying gravel as they swooped down an embankment onto a tire-track dirt path. Thirty feet from where they caught the path, there was a fenced-in stand of electrical equipment at the base of one of the transmission pylons, and the back end of the Subaru clipped one of its corner poles smartly as they skimmed headlong past it.
Coming down the cutout was like riding a bucking bronco down a ski slope. Dirt showered off the hood as they seesawed into the hill face and crunched over tree stumps and slid over gravel.
After a few hundred terrifying more feet, they suddenly hit a flat of concrete that supported another of the electrical pylons. Then they were off-roading again, zigzagging left and right as they bounced up and down hard over the rough descending terrain.
Gannon managed to halt the truck with a high screech at the cement base of the next pylon, and he rolled down his window and looked back up the slope.
Not surprisingly, the cruiser hadn’t followed them.
Of course not, Gannon thought. The guy was young, took care of himself. He didn’t want to die just yet.
“Mike, there’s an access road. See it?” Stick said, pointing another thirty feet below.
“Hallelujah,” Ruby said when they were finally on asphalt again.
The access road ran alongside a river onto an actual road.
“We need to ditch the car,” Gannon said as he gunned it past an old farmhouse. “Get a new one. They’re going to have every cop in the state looking for us now.”
They came to an intersection and hooked a right. They’d just crossed a bridge over the river when Ruby grabbed his arm.
“Wait, wait. Slow down.”
“What’s up?” Gannon said, easing off the accelerator.
“Turn left here. See?” she said, pointing at the road they were coming up on.
On the corner, there was a little green sign with an arrow on it.
Hollytree Airport, it said.
“Yeah?” Gannon said.
“Trust me,” Ruby said.