When Mike stopped abruptly, she slammed into the back of him, but he didn’t so much as waver on his feet. A narrow gate was in front of him. When Samantha, with a nervous backward glance, pulled on it, she found it latched with a lock with a big dial.
“What’s the combination?” Mike asked the man in his arms.
Doc just grinned.
“If the dogs come, I’ll throw you to them first.”
“Young man,” Doc said, sounding as though he were on a throne instead of being kidnapped, “you are the type who’d guard a man’s life with his own.”
Samantha thought that whatever else Doc was, he was an excellent judge of character, for she knew without a doubt that Mike was incapable of doing something as vile as throwing an ancient old man to a pack of dogs.
“What do we do?” Samantha whispered, scared half to death of what was coming.
For a moment, Mike looked at Doc, who was staring at them as though highly amused by all of this, then Mike turned to Sam. “Try 5–12–28,” he said. It took Samantha a moment to realize that Mike had given her the date of the massacre, the date Maxie had run away.
With shaking hands, Samantha turned the round dial on the lock. When the combination didn’t work, she looked at Mike in helpless terror.
“Try it again,” he said, sounding as though they had all the time in the world.
The second time the lock opened, and they hurried through, with Sam taking a few seconds to relock the gate, hoping to hinder dogs and men who might pursue them.
They ran to the little truck that waited under the trees for them. Nearly a week ago Raine had called his older brother, Kit, and asked his advice about a very fast car, stipulating that the car had to have room for four people, one of them not well. According to all of the Montgomerys and the Taggerts, Kit was second only to his mother in knowing more about cars than anyone else in the world.
To the astonishment of them all, Kit drove down from Maine in a little black GMC truck called a Syclone. According to Kit, there had been only a very few of the trucks made in 1990 before the government took them off the market because they were much too fast (0 to 30 in 1.4 seconds). The only road-legal vehicles in the world faster than the Syclone were a Porsche 959 and a four-hundred-thousand-dollar Ferrari, both of which Kit owned, but they were two-passenger sports cars.
Kit had been intrigued by what was going on and had stayed to help. After outfitting his truck with a camper shell, he helped Blair equip it with an oxygen tank and the accoutrements of an ambulance.
Now, Blair was waiting for them inside the camper shell, ready to take Doc and see that he lived through what might turn out to be a very rough ride. As Mike put Doc inside the shell and strapped him to the bed, Samantha slipped behind the driver’s seat. When Mike ran to the front of the vehicle, he told Sam to get over to the passenger side.
“I’m driving,” she said.
“Like hell you are,” Mike answered and started to push her into the other bucket seat, but Samantha was strapped inside her seat belt and didn’t move so easily.
“Mike, I can drive! I drove in Santa Fe for four years and never had so much as a fender bender.” She offered this explanation in the same tone that one would say, I won the Indianapolis 500 three years in a row, except that Samantha’s words made no sense.
It was at that moment that the first shot rang out and Mike, disgusted, knew that he had no time to argue with Samantha. Jumping on the side of the truck, just inside her open door, he commanded her to drive.
And drive she did. There were three cars heading straight for them, big, heavy American cars, and Samantha maneuvered around them as though she were riding the dodge ’em cars at the state fair, passing them by quarter inches, but never so much as scraping the paint on Kit’s precious, rare truck.
When she was past the three cars, she slammed on the brakes and ordered Mike to get inside. Without a word of protest, he rolled across the hood of the truck and dove into the passenger side, slamming the door after him and fastening his seat belt.
As Samantha started to drive again, he looked at her with new respect and not a little awe. For just a second, she turned her head and grinned at him. “If you think that was something, you should try a four-way stop in Sante Fe. No rules apply; it’s whoever is the most macho goes first, and I learned to never give in.”
For Mike it was a ride in hell. With the three cars pursuing them on the freeway back into the city, Samantha wove in and out of traffic as though she were an animated shuttle on a tapestry loom. The little truck was not only sickeningly fast, but it was also highly maneuverable, what’s more it was four-wheel drive, real four-wheel in which all four wheels are independently driven, which meant that the truck could probably climb greased telephone poles. When Samantha saw an opening in the fence, she made a sharp right and ran up the very steep side of the embankment and suddenly changed freeways. Unfortunately, the truck had the road clearance of a BMW, which is to say that it had none at all, so they scraped bottom all the way up the hill, but when they’d made it to the top, they had lost their pursuers.
When they reached Maxie’s nursing home, they had none of Doc’s men behind them—but they did have three police cars.
Getting out of the truck, Mike found that he was shaking. Nothing he’d ever done in his life, not kidnapping a man and being nearly attacked by killer dogs or anything else, had frightened him as much as Samantha’s driving. She, however, seemed perfectly calm as she ran up the stairs into the nursing home, leaving Blair and Mike to deal with the police, who would be shown the now-sleeping figure of Doc and told their drive through hell was a medical emergency.
As she ran into her grandmother’s room, Samantha knew Maxie would be awake and waiting for her, for she’d known what Mike and Sam had planned to do tonight.
“It’s done,” Samantha said as she climbed into bed with her grandmother.
Maxie put her arms around Samantha. “Then he’s here,” she said softly.
“Yes,” Samantha whispered, and in another minute she was asleep.
Here, Maxie thought. Doc was here under the same roof with her after all these years.