Accompanying Alice Read Free Page B

Alice snapped. She rounded on him ferociously. “I’m tired of people telling me there’s no choice. There’s always a choice whether you want to make one or not.” Her voice faded abruptly. What was she doing yelling at a man with a gun in his lap—even if she did believe him?
    She believed him.
    With only part of herself she watched him reach across the car to turn the key in the ignition, heard the car jump to life. She looked at his hand. Beneath the mud and grease it was a neat hand, long fingered and strong, nails and cuti cles trimmed, nothing ragged about it. The hand of a gentleman. Or a well-paid crook.
    “Come on,” he urged, voice gentle despite the tightness in it, bass-rich beneath a veneer of gravel. “However many choices we’ve got, we can’t sit here talkin’ about ‘em. They’re out there looking for me. We have to go.”
    Facing him, she squeezed her hands around the steering wheel until her nails cut into her palms and her knuckles ached from the strain. Oh, God, she believed him. She hadn’t intended to, but she did. And that meant she’d let him stay with her. Willingly. Just another man she’d say
yes to when what she really ought to do was give him a punch in the gut and a firm no. Why was it that, when she was so strong in other ways, she’d let herself get into that yes-no-maybe so habit with men? First there’d been her father and the dare-to-challenge-yourself camp she hadn’t wanted to attend at fourteen that had cost her a broken ankle and torn ligaments in her knee. Then there’d been Matthew in the back seat of his car when she was sixteen and fertile.
    She mentally ticked off the rest of them. The real estate agent who’d sold her the house for more than it was worth. The man at the dealership who used to work—and work and work —on her car until it really should have been better than factory fresh ever thought of being. Five years ago when her former boss insisted she become manager of the bookstore when she wasn’t sure she wanted the extra responsibility even though she had already shouldered most of it…
    Well, maybe she shouldn’t include him. He’d only wanted to promote her to the position she’d taken on by default, pay her what she deserved for it and…
    Off topic, Alice , she admonished herself, and came back to the point. Anyway, that brought her up to this guy with the gun, sitting in the car beside her now ...
    In resignation she faced forward, shifted the car into drive and pulled away from the side of the road. “Where...” She paused, suddenly knowing that, in spite of anything else, she had to help him because instinct told her it was the right thing to do. Period, exclamation point, and damn her mother, anyway. “Where to first?”
    *
    They drove in near silence, attention focused deliberately away from one another on things that were less unnerving.
    The air between them was stifled, tense, unsure. Gabriel gave directions circumspectly. Alice followed them nervously. Further talk seemed inappropriate—they weren’t here to get to know one another—and the rarely tongue-tied Alice couldn’t seem to find anything to say, anyway. Gabriel sank inside himself, as though wrestling with the demons of his own disbelief, offering and inviting nothing.
    Rain fell in sheets, cut a blinding path across the empty pawnshop parking lot as she pulled in and, at Gabriel’s direction, angled the car sideways as close as she could to the front door. Across the street near the intersection of M-59 and Voorheis Road that officially divided the in-decline City of Pontiac from more rural Waterford Township, yellow buses stood in line at the corner waiting for traffic to clear. Around the corner stood the steepled church and once-Catholic grade school Alice had attended. When the time had come for the girls to go to school, Alice had scraped together the tuition to send them there, too. Cattycorner from the pawnshop was the independent family-owned grocery