They could have known what Jane was driving only if the one who remained in the Jeep had seen her arrive.
She remembered now that when she’d parked here and gotten out of the car, she had reached under her sport coat to quickly adjust the concealed-carry holster. No one could have seen the pistol, but someone familiar with such a rig—like the person in the Jeep—might have realized what she was doing.
While the three men had been considering her as a candidate for abduction, they smelled cop—or just competence and street smarts—no less keenly than she caught the scent of their criminal intent. Truck stops, museums, all the works of humankind were but fields and forests of another wilderness, where beasts on two feet stalked their own kind, each crime a symbolic act of cannibalism that spoke to a deeply entombed—but not dead—savage aspect of the human character corrupted in some time before mere history and ever since passed from generation to generation. The two women and two girls unknowingly cast behind them the spoor of prey, and the men in the Cherokee laid down the spoor of blood-seeking beasts, and though Jane knew them both by their trace, only the predators knew her.
She got out of the Escape, popped the hood. They had not taken time to sabotage the vehicle beyond her ability to put it right.
Through the restaurant window, they would have seen her slip out of the booth. If they suspected she might pause to give a word of warning to the mother of the girls, they still wouldn’t have been sure if she would step outside in two minutes or half a minute. They had needed to avoid being caught; if she had seen them disabling the Ford, her suspicions would have been confirmed.
They didn’t have a sharp knife between them. Or if they had one, they didn’t think to use it to cut the fan belts.
The ignition cables had been disconnected from the spark plugs. Four of the plugs had been removed as well and cast aside. One lay against the cap of the oil pan. Another was trapped between the power-steering belt and a flywheel. She took too long to find the third cradled in a niche between the starter motor and the oil pan. The fourth eluded her until she dropped to her knees and looked under the car; it had fallen past the engine block to the pavement.
After she installed the spark plugs and was connecting the ignition-wire boots to the plug terminals, a tall man in a cowboy hat appeared beside her. “Can I give a hand, little lady?”
He was probably a trucker, with white hair and a white mustache and a face leathered by sun and time, fifty-something, old enough to know what chivalry meant and to think that it still mattered. He wished only to help. Considering that the world needed more like him, Jane didn’t dismiss him either with a word or with a gesture.
“Thanks, but I think I’ve got it. Some damn foolish kids pulled the plugs. I guess they figured I wouldn’t know what to do, I’d have to just stand around waiting for Triple A.”
The trucker nodded solemnly. “I’d wager you did less to them than look askance. Everyone takes offense at the littlest nothin’ these days. Looks like you grown up with engines.”
“I didn’t, in fact, but I’ve learned some.”
She finished the job and stepped back, and the trucker closed the hood. “Why don’t I wait while you start her, just in case.”
“Appreciate it.”
The engine turned over on Jane’s first try.
When she lowered the glass to thank him, the trucker leaned close, one big hand on the windowsill. “Thirty years, I’ve driven dangerous loads for hazard pay, didn’t so much as rip a fingernail.”
She needed to go, get done what had to be finished, but there was a kindness about him and a melancholy that arrested her.
“My boy, a Marine, they give him an easy assignment protectin’ some State Department thing overseas. Not so easy, after all. He’s dead at twenty-four. Been six years of lies about how, what, why—the smart people coverin’ their butts.”
He opened the hand on the windowsill, producing a card between thumb and forefinger. “That’s our home address, me and my wife. The phone number, too. No one would ever find you there.”
Speechless, she took the card. His name was Foster Oswald.
“I come out the lavatory behind you, heard those ladies. Said to myself, this here is some girl. Then I saw your wedding band.”
She looked at her ring hand on the steering wheel.
“It’s a unique design, so since this mornin’ it’s in all the TV babble. But now, you want me to ride along, help with those ladies?”
“Thanks, but no. I’ve got it.”
“Damn if you don’t, girl.”
Foster Oswald stepped back, and she drove fast out of the parking lot, faster still down the exit lane, and cranked the Ford up to ninety when she reached Interstate 40.