Wanted! Read Free Page B

ballerina.
    And the traffic! Trucks towered on one side, vans crunched on the other. Each red light meant gauging when to slow down, and Alice failed, braking as violently as if small children were darting in front of her.
    They were not kidding about zero to sixty in five seconds. Compared to her mother’s tinny little Sentra, Alice was in charge of a rocket launcher. Or it was in charge of her.
    At last she was out of the city, beyond the developments, free of red lights, hurtling down the long country road toward Salmon River. No matter how slowly she drove, it felt fast. The curves tested her control. The Corvette possessed goals of its own, and if she accelerated a tiny bit, it accelerated a whole lot, and the tires screamed and left patches.
    Alice was exhausted.
    She was holding the steering wheel way too tightly, but it was all that balanced her, scootched up too far on the leather seat, legs extended, ankles flexed. The fake fingernails gouged her palms, as if somebody else were holding the wheel.
    She could grip, steer, look, stare, tense, turn, and brake.
    She could not think.
    Power vibrated up through her thighs and pressed her spine back into the padded leather, but she did not take her father’s joy in this. She did not have his faint smile, the one that told her he was pretending to be on a racetrack, or have the FBI on his heels.
    There was the turnoff, by a low-lying meadow with a narrow glimpse of the beautiful Salmon River. The turn came quicker than Alice expected, and she took her foot off the gas late, braked late, and knew immediately that the best decision was to quit making the turn. Skip the whole thing, keep going straight, turn around later and come back. Too late for that. Alice found herself in the turn with way too much velocity. The tires screamed as if she had run over squirrels and Alice screamed, too, imagining their flat, bloody bodies, but she hung onto the wheel and missed the picket fence of somebody’s yard and even got back onto her side of the road.
    Thinking of squirrels had distracted her from thinking of cars. A silver Crown Victoria coming in the opposite direction had to yank into somebody’s hedge to escape collision. Wonderful. The state police drove Crown Vics.
    But it was no state trooper. The driver rolled his window down and leaned out to yell at her. Alice was scarlet with shame, and weak with escape. What if she had totaled Dad’s Corvette?
    Her mouth tasted awful, as if she’d thrown up and forgotten it.
    She waved at the Crown Vic to apologize, but her fingers didn’t let go of the steering wheel after all and there was no wave. She crept forward, unable to solve this, leaving the driver’s furious voice behind.
    There was the ice cream shack, centered on a parking lot of broken asphalt and the kind of pebbles that lodge in shoes and tires. The place seemed to have no name, just a big brightly painted wooden cone and scoop nailed to the gable. She wondered how they had a telephone listing without a name.
    She circled around the back of the shack, riding the brake. Edging up the far side meant she faced frontward and wouldn’t have to back the car again.
    Alice stopped.
    Branches from pine trees relaxed onto the long scarlet hood. The engine would be hot, and the sap from the trees would make sticky spots hard to get off. Dad would be crazed.
    But Alice could not drive another inch.
    She turned the engine off and sat trembling. Waves of panic at all those near misses washed over her like ocean tides, as if now, now when she had gotten here, now she was going to drown.
    It was several minutes before she was breathing like a person. She could see the road down which she’d come, and there were no dead squirrels on the pavement. That was good.
    When would Dad get here? What were they going to do with two cars? She absolutely could not drive this Corvette again. She would have to drive the Blazer. No, they would have to abandon the Blazer, and somebody would have