Jane had lost twelve minutes with the spark plugs at the truck stop. The motor home had probably gotten twelve miles in that time. She covered that much ground in eight minutes—during which Sandra might have put another eight miles between them.
The bastards in the flat-black Cherokee wouldn’t have rushed into a setup. They would have driven fast ahead of the motor home until they found the right place to jack the women. Maybe they even knew from the start where they would do it, which meant it would happen sooner than otherwise.
Flagstaff and its Ponderosa pines had been put so far behind her so fast that it might have been a clairvoyant vision of a place rather than a place she had actually been. Jane pushed the car even harder, until the speedometer showed 100, and then 110, and the radar detector gave her no reason to relent. She whipped from lane to lane when slower traffic appeared before her so abruptly that it seemed to be reversing at her from the east. A careless motorist changing lanes without signaling, a blown tire, a highway patrol siren signaling a chase that she couldn’t win—anything could go wrong. Mile after mile, however, nothing happened except that a couple truckers air-horned her to express their disapproval.
Medium-light traffic. But the highway was far from lonely. The day waned quickly, though twilight remained at least half an hour away. Hijacking a motor home on an interstate in daylight would be a bold act, the work of guys who had chemicals other than just alcohol in their blood. They couldn’t block multiple lanes or risk staging a bump with a vehicle much larger than theirs and maybe lose control.
She could see only one way they might do it. Fake a breakdown, flag the motor home, hope Sandra would be civic-minded enough to pull off the road behind them. They knew her nature. They had not only been watching her but also listening to her in the restaurant.
But would two women with two children in their charge dare stop when those pretending to need help were three fit young men? The only sane answer was no. Even if Sandra had a heart bigger than her brain, she would not put her daughters in jeopardy, especially not now that she had been warned that those same three men had been watching her in the restaurant.
And then Jane knew how it would surely happen. Neither Sandra nor her mother would see the three men until it was too late. The fourth person in the Cherokee, the one who hadn’t come into the restaurant, must be a woman.
The Jeep would be off the pavement where the shoulder opened into a wider lay-by. The woman, the shill, would be standing beside it, apparently alone and vulnerable, desperately waving for help only when the motor home rolled into view. She might be faking an injury, too. Beyond the shoulder of the road, the land would drop away. The men would be hiding on that slope behind rock formations, among whatever clumps of brush there might be. The woman, their accomplice, would come around to the starboard side of the motor home when it stopped behind the Jeep, rather than to the port side, past which traffic streamed at high speed. The RV would screen her from the view of passing motorists. If the grandmother was still up front in the cockpit, when she put down the window, the apparently injured girl would have a gun.
From there it could go several ways, depending on whether the door was locked or not, depending on whether the shill shot the grandmother dead at that point or only threatened her. But of the various ways it might play out, whether deadly force was used in the first instant or not, the men would surge up the slope and be inside the vehicle in half a minute. Less. Kill the grandmother if she wasn’t already dead. Drag Sandra out of the driver’s seat, pistol-whip her into submission, take control of the two girls. They would drive the motor home to some prearranged hiding place—a barn, any abandoned structure—and use the girls and the mother until they tired of them, strip everything of value from the vehicle, leave the murdered family behind to rot until someone stumbled on the bodies.
The speedometer at 115, tires thrumming. The fierce velocity turned the dead air ahead into a buffeting wind through which the Ford cleaved, its body shimmying on its frame with a sound like an out-of-tune violin issuing a two-note oscillation under a long-enduring bow stroke.
Cresting a hill, she saw a straightaway sweeping toward the east, where the far horizon darkled, and not a mile ahead, the motor home stood roadside. She more than halved her speed, squinting at land rutilant with the light of the low sun, as if some nuclear catastrophe had rendered it radioactive and unfit to sustain life. Straining forth from every rock and signpost, elongated shadows like the spirits of those things yearned toward the coming night.
Having entered the straightaway in the center lane, she could see past the motor home to the shoulder of the highway ahead of it, where stood a dark, familiar vehicle. A man and woman were walking away from the motor home, toward the Jeep, their backs to Jane. The man might have been one of the three in the restaurant. The woman was surely the shill. From a distance, she appeared slender, perhaps five-feet-two, a girlish figure who would inspire sympathy if you came upon her stranded at the roadside.
If those two were returning to the Jeep with such nonchalance, then the hijack must be complete, two men now aboard with the women and girls. The shill and her companion would drive ahead to prepare whatever makeshift garage for the arrival of the big RV.
As though casting a spell of misdirection on the pair afoot, Jane murmured, “Don’t look back, don’t look back, don’t look back,” as she slowed and pulled into the right-hand lane, one tire on the shoulder, getting out of their line of sight behind the hijacked vehicle. Other traffic noise might have masked the sound of the Ford, but taking no chance, she killed the engine and coasted the last hundred yards. Gravel crunched under two tires, until she stopped six feet from the motor home.
Drapery lay in soft wide folds across the back window of the RV. But other windows might not be covered.
When she got out of the Escape, she didn’t fully close the driver’s door.
The motor home’s engine was idling, condensed exhaust vapor dripping from twin tailpipes.
Passing vehicles lashed her with their tails of wind as she went to the starboard side of the RV. If those drivers were curious about this roadside tableau, they restrained their curiosity with thoughts of the high price often paid these days by good Samaritans.
One door on the port side, but two doors here, one near the back, the other at the front. She resisted the temptation of the rear door, drew her pistol, and moved forward, staying close to the RV and below the glass line.
She came to the door beside which the grandmother had been sitting when they left the truck stop. Eased up to the window. No one in the cockpit, two empty seats.
If the hijackers were in the living area or the kitchenette, which would both be open to the cockpit, they would hear the door. The sudden increase in traffic noise would alone alert them.
For one faint-hearted moment, she told herself that this was not her war, that these evil men were not the organized sociopaths that posed the great danger to her future and to Travis, that they were mere amateurs at wreaking horror, not havoc mongers of epic intentions like D. J. Michael and his kind. But in truth this wasn’t one war and hers another. They were the same war, universal across all space and time, each a battle essential to sustaining the hope of an ultimate triumph, and to walk away from one skirmish was to surrender everything, everywhere, and there would be nothing then but to lay down arms and die.
Past the front of the RV, she saw the Jeep Cherokee enter traffic, racing east toward whatever exit would take them to the place where they would celebrate and their captives would suffer.
Screened from traffic, Jane took the sound suppressor from the sleeve in her shoulder rig and screwed it on the .45.
She tried the vehicle door. It was unlocked. She opened it.