The Siege Read Free Page A

because she was so damned sick of beans and soup heated in their cans over a campfire.
    Hocker made a deep rumbling in his chest, worked a wad of spit back and forth in his mouth, and then sent it sailing into the air. It arched gracefully, two globs joined by a silver filament twisting end over end, and then landed— splat —on a dew-slick stop sign.
    “Hot damn!” Hocker said, pausing to watch with child-like intensity as his saliva slowly slid down to the edge of metal, hung suspended for a moment, and then dropped to the pavement. The sound it made when it hit reminded Tasha of her mother’s parrot, when his turds hit the newspaper lining his cage.
    “This is bullshit, and you know it,” Tasha said sourly as they resumed walking. “I’m cold and wet, and my friggin’ legs are so tired I can barely feel them.”
    “It’s refreshing to take the scenic roads now and then,” Hocker said. “Gives us a chance to really see where we’re goin’.”
    “You’ve gotta remember, I was born in New Jersey,” Tasha said. “The turnpike is the scenic road, as far as I’m concerned.”
    Hocker shook his head vigorously. “The turnpike isn’t really travelling—it’s just getting there,” he said. He glanced back at her over his shoulder and frowned deeply. Whenever he did that, it made Tasha want to laugh aloud because he looked so damned dim-witted, but beneath the surface smoldered a crazed intensity, like the fire hidden inside an ash-gray coal. It was what kept her on her guard around him.
    “You’re still dressed like a damned teeny-bop hooker from Miami, that’s why you’re so damned cold,” Hocker said. He twanged his words with an exaggerated Southern drawl. “So you can quit your complainin’, all right? I mean—” Again he rumbled in his chest and spat. “What do you expect, a chauffeur-driven Cadillac or somethin’?”
    Tasha smiled wanly. “That’d be nice,” she said, more to herself than to Hocker.
    The mere mention of a Cadillac made her think of her parents, back in Port Charlotte, Florida. If she was still back with them, or at least with her father on every other weekend, she would have had the Cadillac, if not quite the chauffeur. But that and a whole pile of other reasons was why she had left Port Charlotte five weeks ago. She was tired of feeling like a wishbone in her divorced parents’ emotional tug-of-war, and her goal in leaving home was to make it to the tip of northern Maine—to be as far away from her parents as she possibly could be without having to leave the country.
    With Hocker leading the way, they walked down the road toward town, taking only a passing notice of their surroundings. Lights glowed in a couple of houses and three or four cars whispered by in the early morning stillness. The cows were heading in the opposite direction from the way they were walking, so they couldn’t stick out their thumbs. Tasha couldn’t help but wonder what kind of impression they made.
    As they rounded a corner into town, they saw up ahead a rusted pickup truck pulled over on the side of the road. A grizzled old man, easily old enough to be her grandfather, Tasha thought, was leaning over the rear wheel well on the passenger’s side. He had a star wrench in his hand and was busily spinning the lug nuts off the back tire.
    Hocker jolted to a stop, holding his arm out to stop Tasha. Before she could complain, he held his fingers to his lips, silencing her.
    “Not exactly a Cadillac,” he said. He spoke so softly Tasha wasn’t exactly sure what he had said.
    In silence, they watched as the old man worked the last lug nut loose and dropped it into an upturned hubcap. The clanging sound it made was like a shot in the early morning stillness. The old man put down the star wrench and picked up a car jack, as rusted and dented as his truck, and inspected it to see if it was still functional. Leaning over to concentrate on his work, he didn’t hear Hocker and Tasha when, on