They never got there. As they passed the town limits sign, and the road rose up a little in a mini-hill, Claire caught sight of flashing red and blue lights up ahead. “Uh oh,” she said. Eve hit the brakes, and she and Shane exchanged a look. “That’s the motel, right? They’re at the motel.”
“Looks that way,” Shane said. “This is not good.”
“Ya think?” Eve chewed her lip. “Call Michael.”
“Maybe they’re—”
“What, hanging out there looking for somebody else? Call him, Shane!”
Shane dialed the number of Michael’s cell phone, listened for a second, then closed his phone. “Busy,” he said. “We need to get in there.”
“And do what,exactly?”
“I don’t know! You want your boyfriend dragged out to french fry in the sun?”
Eve didn’t answer that. She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel, looking agonized, and then said, “I’ll apologize later, then.”
She hit the gas, and the hearse picked up momentum coming down the hill. It zipped past the motel, doing way past the speed limit.
One of the police cars—there were two in the parking lot—backed out and raced after them. Eve didn’t slow down. She hit the gas.
“Eve, what the hell are you doing? We can’t outrun them in a hearse,in the middle of the desert!”
“I’m not trying to,” she shot back. “Claire, look out the back. Tell me if the other car joins in.”
It took a few seconds, but then Claire saw another flare of red and blue flashers behind them. “They’re both following,” she called back. “And how is this good, exactly?”
“Text Michael,” Eve told Shane. “Tell him the coast is clear and to get his butt out of there.”
“What about Oliver?”
“Michael’s too much of a Boy Scout not to tell him, too. Don’t worry about that.”
Shane texted fast. “It’s still kind of sunny out, you know.”
“Oliver’s older,” Claire said. “He can stay out in the sun a lot longer than Michael. Maybe he can lead the police away, or something.”
“That’s up to them,” Eve said. “I just need to keep driving as long as I can before we give up. The more we piss these guys off, the more chance Michael and Oliver have of getting away.”
It turned out, as the police cars cranked it up, that Eve’s hearse really wasn’t made for car-chase speeds. They were overtaken in about another mile, and boxed up in another two.
Eve, surrendering, eased off the gas and hit the brakes to slow down and pull over.
“Okay, here’s the deal,” Shane said. “Keep your hands up, and play nice. You panicked, that’s all. We were telling you to pull over, but you locked up. Got it?”
“It’s not going to help.”
“It will if you play the ditz. Better sell it, Eve. We’re in enough trouble already.”
The rest of it went straight out of the reality-TV-show playbook. The police ordered them out of the car, and before she knew it, Claire was being thrown up against the back of the hearse and searched. It felt humiliating, and she heard Eve crying-whether that was acting or not remained to be seen; Eve cried over smaller things. Shane was answering questions in a quiet, calm voice, but then, he’d spent a lot of time getting hassled by the Morganville police. For Claire, it was kind of a new experience, and not at all a good one. She had the deputy, she supposed; he was a tall, skinny guy whose uniform didn’t fit very well, and he seemed nervous, especially when he put handcuffs on her.
“Hey,” Shane called as his own hands were secured behind his back. “Hey, please don’t hurt her. It wasn’t her fault!”
“Nobody’s hurting anybody,” said the sheriff from the night before. “Okay, let’s just calm down. Now, let’s have some names. You?” He pointed at Claire.
“Claire Danvers,” she said. Oh man,there went any chance at all of ever getting into MIT. She was going to have a mug shot that got pasted all over Facebook. People were going to mock her. It would be high school all over again, times a million.
“Address?”
She gave him the address in Morganville, on Lot Street. She didn’t know what the others would have done; maybe she ought to have lied, made something up. But she didn’t dare. Like Shane had said—they were in enough trouble already.
Eve gave her name in a trembling, small voice, and then Shane finished things up. They both gave the Glass House address.
“So, you’re all, what, sharing a house?” the sheriff asked. “Where’s the blond kid from last night?”
“I—” Eve bit her lip and closed her eyes. “We had a fight. A big one. He—he left.”
“Left how? Seeing as the car you came in is still smoking in the parking lot back there, and it ain’t going anywhere. There’s no bus coming through here, young lady.”
“He hitched a ride,” Eve said. “With a truck. I don’t know which one. I just heard it on the road.”
“A truck,” the sheriff repeated. “Uh huh. And he wouldn’t be back there in Linda’s place with the door all locked up, then.”
“No sir.”
That, Claire reflected, might be almost true, because if Eve’s gamble had paid off, Michael and Oliver weren’t there any longer. Where they werewas another story.
“Well, we’re waiting for Linda to get back; then we’ll open up those doors and see what’s going on. Sound okay to you?”
“Yes sir,” Eve said. “Why the handcuffs?”
“You three are a bunch of desperate characters, way I see it,” the sheriff said. “I find you causing trouble last night, get a report your car’s been trashed by the very same boys who say you threatened them, and next thing you know, I’ve got one man dead and two men missing this morning. The dead one got found in his pickup truck just about a mile up the road from your motel.”
“I—” Eve stopped, frozen. “Sorry, what?”
“Murder,” the sheriff repeated, slowly and precisely. “And you were the last ones to see them alive.”
7
For a long, long moment, nobody moved, and then Shane said, “You don’t think we killed—”
“Let’s just stop right there, son. I don’t want to be making any mistakes about how we do this.” The sheriff cleared his throat and recited something about rights and remaining silent. Claire couldn’t make sense out of it. She felt sick and horribly faint.
She was being arrested.
She was being arrested for murder.
Eve’s crying was uncontrollable now, but Claire couldn’t help her. She couldn’t help herself.
Shane stayed uncharacteristically silent as they loaded him into the back of the squad car, then put Claire and Eve in with him. The sheriff leaned in before he closed the door to look at them. He almost looked kind now. That didn’t make Claire feel any less sick.
“I’m going to have the deputy drive your, ah, vehicle back into town,” he said. “Can’t leave it out here. Might get stolen, and you folks already lost one car in Durram. Don’t want it happening again.”
He slammed the door on them. Claire felt Eve flinch all over at the boom of solid metal.
“Deep breaths,” Shane said softly. “Eve. Sack up. You can’t go to pieces like this. Not now.”
The sheriff got in the front, on the other side of a wire mesh screen. He put on his seat belt, looked in the rearview mirror, and said, “No talking.”
Then they drove back to the motel, where Linda’s truck had just pulled in. She looked pale and worried, but she didn’t betray much of anything at the sight of her three former guests in the back of a squad car. She listened to the sheriff, nodded, and went into the office to get master keys.
She opened up all three rooms they’d rented. Shane let out a sigh of relief even before the sheriff went in to look around. “They’re gone,” he said. “They got out. Somehow.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because Michael’s smarter than me, and he’d have found a way. Ow, Eve, stop squirming. Not like there’s a lot of room in here!”