Survival Clause, стр. 44

I hadn’t. Or rather, I hadn’t looked. I’d been focused on making out the numbers. So had Vasim, I assumed. Neither one of us had commented on whether the plate was from Maury County or elsewhere. I’m not sure we would have been able to tell. “Maybe Vasim noticed.”

“Do you want to go ask him?”

“He worked second shift yesterday,” I said. “Three to eleven. I’m sure he isn’t back yet.”

Charlotte shrugged. “Well, I don’t see anything moving around.”

I didn’t, either. The small, pale car was nowhere in sight. “I guess we go home.”

Charlotte put the hybrid in gear and we rolled backwards out of the parking space. “Maybe she has something else to do on Saturday mornings.”

Maybe so. Or maybe she just wasn’t out of bed yet. But I had better things to do than to stalk my own husband in the event that she’d show up. “Just take me home. Maybe the photographs have arrived, and I can get the listing up and promote the open house for tomorrow.”

“Works for me,” Charlotte said happily and headed up the hill toward the courthouse to circle around and go back home.

We were halfway around when I looked out the window and squealed. “Stop! There! You see that?”

It was a small, tan car with a Smoky Mountains license plate—the purple mountains, orange sky, and black bear I had seen in black and white in the video yesterday—and it was parked on the opposite side of the courthouse from the police station. “That’s it. I’m sure it is. Yes… I can see the Mardi Gras beads around the mirror!”

The hybrid kept going, though, and Charlotte said tensely, “I can’t stop. There’s a car behind us. And he’s in a hurry.”

I glanced in the mirror. There was a car behind us, or more accurately a truck. And it was so close to the hybrid’s bumper that all I could see of it was the grill and the top of the hood. If the guy behind the wheel was impatient—and it had to be a guy; the truck had testosterone written all over it—I had to take Charlotte’s word for it.

“We’ll go around,” she said, without slowing down. “It’ll only take a minute to circle the courthouse. Just keep your hair on.”

My hair was in no danger of going anywhere. My butt was, though, or would have been, if she’d slowed down long enough to allow me to jump out. She didn’t, so I kept an eye on the quarry in the side mirror until we’d circled too far for me to be able to see the tan car anymore. And then I turned to Charlotte. “Hurry up. By the time we get around to the other side, she might be gone.”

“The square isn’t that big,” Charlotte said, her hands tight on the wheel. “And this guy behind me is making me nervous. I keep expecting him to beep at me so I’ll go faster. Look, there’s an empty parking spot. Want me to pull in?”

“Yes,” I said.

Charlotte turned the wheel, and the truck behind us hit the back corner of the hybrid and knocked us a good ten feet sideways. It would have been farther if Mrs. Albertson’s car hadn’t hit the car parked next to the empty spot and been forced to a stop. Charlotte and I both squealed, with the first impact and the second, and once we came to a quivering stop, Carrie let out the scream that had been building in her little lungs.

“Oh, God.” I fumbled for my seatbelt, only faintly aware that my hands were shaking and my neck hurt.

The truck stopped behind us, and a large and angry man jumped down from the cab. “What the bleep bleep bleep…!”

I left Charlotte to deal with him, and tuned out as I pushed my own door open, and then took the couple of wobbly steps to the back door—it was crunched in; Mrs. Albertson wasn’t going to be happy about that—and wrenched at the handle.

At first it wouldn’t open, and I felt panic rising in my chest. I knew nothing was likely to be wrong with Carrie. Nobody who could scream like that could have anything seriously wrong with them. But we’d been in a (minor) accident, and she was back there, and the door wouldn’t open, and I couldn’t get to her… and then I realized that the reason the door hadn’t opened under all my frantic yanking was because the mechanism for the lock must have been impacted by the… well, the impact of the truck, and when I snaked my arm through the front opening and pulled the button up manually, the door opened, and I was able to grab to Carrie and lift her out of the seat and cradle her against my chest and see for myself that she was all right.

My pulse quieted after that, and so did her screams. My heart slowed to a rate that wasn’t likely to throw me into cardiac arrest, and I was able to look across the roof of the hybrid and figure out what was going on with Charlotte.

The driver of the truck had stopped berating her while I’d worked on getting Carrie out of the back seat, and now he was standing, hands on hips, scowling down at her. At Charlotte. “Now listen here, young lady—!”

“I am not,” Charlotte informed him, through gritted teeth, “a young lady, and if you don’t stop talking to me like that, I will prove it.”

I smirked, and then did my best to hide it. She wouldn’t appreciate me laughing at her attempt to sound fierce.

By now, people—the few who were abroad at this time of the morning—had started coming out of the various shops and offices around Main Street. Several of them had paper cups of coffee in their hands from the coffee shop on the corner. And I recognized a woman I’d spoken to briefly last spring, a friendly lady named Becky who worked at the tourist office