I can do this. For a moment, I faltered, but my confidence is returning. Darko might be looking for me, but I am a very small needle in a very large haystack, and no matter how many resources he has, there are still ways around them.
“You can go fuck yourself, Darko,” I shout to the wind. “You and your friends can go to fucking hell! Oh… shit!”
Screeeeeeech! The brakes complain as I stamp my foot on the pedal. The traffic ahead of me is crawling to a halt. An accident, maybe. I almost slammed into the back of a Volkswagen with a pink fuzzy toy suspended in the rear window and had an accident of my own.
After a few minutes of crawling along I see that there’s no accident. There’s a road block slowing traffic. The highway has been filled with cops, checking vehicles. It looks like they’ve set up a border patrol in the middle of the road. That can’t be safe, and it can’t be standard procedure, but they’re doing it anyway.
Could this be on my account?
Of course it’s on my account.
It’s too damn coincidental not to be.
My heart slams in my chest as I struggle to maintain composure. There’s no way off this highway. Concrete barriers on both sides mean driving off it isn’t going to happen, and there’s no way I can pull over and leap out without drawing attention to myself. I’m going to have to go through this fucking road block.
Hand shaking, I put sunglasses on and slowly start to brake. There’s a line of cars ahead of me being looked at, so I have a couple of minutes to compose myself.
“It’s okay. I’m going to be okay,” I breathe.
They’re looking for Chloe Parker-Baskerville, stuck-up heiress to the Parker-Baskerville empire. They’re not looking for Tina Parker, bombshell redhead with the gaudiest red lip color to ever be painted on a human being.
“Well, hello, officer,” I beam. “How can I help you?”
“License and registration, please, ma’am.”
“Of course! Of course!” I pull out my fake ID and thrust it into his hand. “Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t have registration in my name, I’m borrowing a friend’s car, will this do?” I grab a sheaf of papers from the glovebox and thrust them at him.
“Who are you looking for? Has someone escaped from prison? Oh, my god. Has a murderer escaped? Oh, my god! Has a mass murderer escaped? Oh. My. God. Why isn’t it on the news that there’s a murderer going around chopping people’s heads off?”
“It’s not like that,” he says as I let hysteria flow. I took a few acting classes in college. Now I get to try them out in a real-world, high-stakes situation.
“I’m going to tweet this out! I’m going to let people know that there’s some kind of murderer out here on the highway, you all got road blocks like Bundy went for a run out here. Oh, my god! Is it Bundy?”
“Bundy is dead, ma’am, and you can go.”
“Well, that’s good,” I say. “You can’t have people like that just running around the place…”
“Move along, ma’am.”
“Oh, yes, right, of course. Thank you, officer! Thank you for your service!”
He waves me on impatiently. It’s a hot day and I’m sure he’d rather be anywhere other than the highway looking for some girl. I wave to him and I accelerate to freedom, trying not to grin too wide just in case any of the other law enforcement people see and somehow recognize my smile or something.
It’s a full six-hour drive to San Francisco. I have to keep filling the car up, it’s like the thing has a gas leak. Four hours in, I decide to pull off the highway and into a rest stop, grab some food at a diner. I’ve seen places like these on television shows, but never stopped in at one myself. Before now, I would have considered a place like this beneath me. I’m too good for eateries where the floor has mystery sticky spots and shrieking kids run around either playing or threatening each other’s lives.
I grab a booth and a portly waitress comes over and pours me coffee. I don’t even ask for it, but she gives it to me anyway. Yeah, why not.
“You look like you need some fortification,” she says. “What’ll it be?”
“You got any waffles?”
“Yep.”
She doesn’t ask me how I want them, she just trundles back to the kitchen and yells the word waffles, almost like she’s a witch who can conjure food just by shouting it into existence.
I sip the coffee and find that it’s not bad. Not that I’ve ever been able to tell the difference between good and bad. Coffee is like wine. It’s all fine. You’d just destroy industries if you ever let on.
There’s a game on television. Baseball. The announcer is talking in soothing sporting terms and I feel myself settling into the background of this tableau. The other people in here are tourists and truckers, vagrants seeking refuge from the road. None of us have ever seen each other before, and we never will again. It’s funny how this place feels so transitory. There’s no sense of community, unless you count the skeleton crew behind the counter, the waitress and the cook, yelling at each other, their grumping barely audible over the television and the various offspring sharing their opinions with the world.