Only a few steps from Aunt Flo herself.
He was desperate to check on her, see if she was really dead, and get help for her if she wasn’t — maybe the bad guys weren’t monitoring calls for ambulances — but he’d be out in the open if he approached her. He couldn’t risk it.
He crouched behind the passenger side of the truck where he could not be seen from the house, and peered in through the window. The keys were still in the ignition.
But hold on.
The black SUV nosed up behind it was making a lot of noise. Daggert had left it with the engine running.
Jeff quietly opened the passenger door on the pickup, leaned across the seat to the steering wheel, and took the key from the ignition. Then he moved back to the SUV, opened its passenger door, and got inside.
The windows were heavily tinted, so there was little risk that anyone would see him. There was a huge console between the two front seats that he had to climb over to get behind the wheel.
Jeff had only driven two motorized vehicles in his life: Aunt Flo’s truck and her lawn tractor. No, wait. One time, his father had taken him to a go-kart track. But those experiences did not prepare him for this.
The seats were plush leather, there was a huge screen in the dashboard and there had to be like a million buttons all over the place. Now that Jeff had decided to use this as his getaway car, he wasn’t sure how to make it go.
But how complicated could it be?
He got himself settled behind the wheel but found that his feet could not quite reach the pedals. That Daggert guy was a lot taller than Jeff. He reached under the front seat, looking for a lever to pull the seat forward, but there was nothing there. Then he ran his hand down the side of the seat and found a whole bunch more buttons. He pressed one and the back of the seat began to vibrate.
“What the—”
He tried another button and the seat began to lower. He did not want that! He could barely see over the dash as it was. He slid the button the other way and the seat went higher. He kept it going until he had a good view of the hood. Finally, he found the button that moved the seat forward and gave the gas pedal a nudge.
The car was so well sound-insulated that Jeff barely heard the engine respond. But respond it did. He was good to go.
The gearshift was in the console. Jeff pressed on the brake, moved the shift lever into reverse so he could back far enough away from Flo’s pickup to turn around, and even though he felt he’d barely nudged the gas pedal, the SUV shot back like a rocket, pitching his head towards the steering wheel.
His foot found the brake and hit it hard. The SUV stopped abruptly, this time throwing Jeff’s head into the headrest.
Jeff saw Daggert charge out the front door of the house and lock eyes on the SUV.
Jeff tromped on the gas and turned the wheel as sharply as it would go, clipping the corner of the pickup with a huge crashing noise. The car lurched hard to one side but Jeff kept pushing down on the accelerator. The back end fishtailed and it took him a second to get the SUV going in a straight line, but before he knew it, he was tearing back down the driveway and headed for the highway.
All Jeff had to do now was figure out what to do next.
Twenty-Nine
Daggert’s fists clenched at his side as he watched his SUV disappear beyond a ridge of trees. Bailey and Crawford burst out the door of the house several seconds later.
“Where’s the car?” Bailey asked.
Daggert said nothing.
Crawford said, in a voice that sounded like he was trying to be helpful, “I think, when you got out, you might have left the key in it.”
Daggert, turning slowly and giving the two of them a murderous look, said, “Get the pickup.”
Bailey and Crawford glanced at each other, unsure which of them had been given the order, then both ran towards the truck.
“Just Bailey!” Daggert said.
Crawford stopped.
“How did you let him get out of the house?” Daggert asked.
“Huh?”
“He must have been in the house, snuck out, and now he’s taken our ride,” Daggert said, shaking his head. “I don’t know who’s more incompetent. You, or Bailey.”
“At least neither of us left the key in the car,” he said.
Daggert went to reach for the weapon he’d used on Flo, debating whether to use it on Crawford, but he was distracted by a shout from Bailey.
“There’s no key!” she said, holding open the door of the pickup.
Daggert scanned the cabins that dotted the lakeside. “There must be another car around somewhere. See what you can find,” he told Bailey and Crawford.
Crawford said, “Even if we get a car, we don’t know which way the kid went.”
Daggert again resisted the impulse to shoot him, deciding a phone call he had to make was more pressing. While he was speaking to someone back at The Institute, a rusted old van pulled up alongside him with Bailey behind the wheel.
“Some idiot left the keys in it,” she said through the rolled-down window.
Daggert, phone to ear, raised a finger in the air to silence her.
“I need you to lock in on our car,” Daggert said to someone at the other end. “No, I do not wish to explain why I don’t know where it is.”
Crawford opened the side door of the van, waiting for Daggert to finish.
“You have it?” he said. “Fine, now send me the coordinates. And if you breathe a word of this to Madam Director, I shall personally pull your heart out of your chest. Also, there’s a possibility we may need backup transportation out of this area if the police get wind of what’s been going on. There could be roadblocks. Maybe a chopper or — what? Yes, a boat would work. So long as it’s fast.”
Daggert listened for a few more seconds. “Yes, an hour would be about right. That’s good. And have you sent the coordinates? Fine.”
He took the phone away from his ear but did not return it to his jacket. He was waiting for something to show up on his screen, and when it did, he smiled.
“Interesting,” Daggert said, opening the van’s passenger door and getting inside. “The SUV is stopped. The boy hasn’t gone far at all.”
He pointed. “That way,” he told Bailey.
Thirty
When Jeff had left the train station to drop off the garbage at the dump and had got to where the driveway met the main road, he’d made a point of closing the metal and wire gate behind him.
But this time, in the stolen black SUV, he didn’t feel he had the time to get out, swing back the gate, drive in, get out again and close the gate behind himself. He had to get off the main road as quickly as possible before Daggert and his pals found a way to come after him. They wouldn’t be able to use his aunt’s truck, but they struck Jeff as a resourceful bunch who wouldn’t be delayed long.
So when he swung the big, lumbering SUV off the road, he drove his foot to the floor and smashed his way through the gate. It made such a huge crashing noise he worried they’d hear it back at the camp. The gate crumpled as it was torn off its hinges, slid across the hood and bounced off the windshield. The glass suffered some cracks, but did not shatter.
Jeff wondered if the glass might be bulletproof.
He barreled down the narrow, bumpy lane and hit the brakes when the trees opened and the old train station came into view. He turned off the engine, snatched the key, jumped out of the SUV and ran for the building, shouting, “They’ve found us! We have to get out of here!” as he raced up the stairs.
Chipper whipped his head around and Emily was wide-eyed as Jeff’s head appeared behind the banister.