“Obviously, you gave better than you got,” Louisa said.
Peter grinned at the pride in her voice. There was hope for her. “I don’t see any pigs.”
“Not the four-legged kind,” she said. She stepped back from the window and accidentally kicked a beer can. It skittered over packed dirt onto the gravel drive. Bucky lunged out of the easy chair, and a big black German shepherd materialized from somewhere in the house and flung himself, snarling and snapping, against the dining room window.
Pete grabbed Louisa’s hand and took off across the neighboring lawn. They were running flat out when they heard two blasts from a shotgun. Rear lights went on in the colonial. The shepherd was baying behind them, and Pete glanced over his shoulder to see the dog closing in. Two more shotgun blasts peppered the ground to their right. They hit the birch stand just as the back door to the colonial was flung open and a rottweiler bounded out. There was a yelp followed by an awful racket that spun Pete around in his tracks.
Louisa held tight to Pete, gasping for breath. “What is it?”
“Looks to me like both houses let their dogs loose at the same time, and they’ve attacked each other.”
Louisa peered out from the patch of trees. Two men had waded, kicking and swearing, into the melee. The dogs were untangled, and swearing gave way to accusations and to hand gestures. Suddenly, the rottweiler’s owner stopped arguing and pointed toward the thicket where Pete and Louisa stood obscured in the shadows. Bucky shouldered his shotgun.
“Uh-oh,” Pete said. He grabbed Louisa by the wrist and dragged her, full sprint, through the woods to the car. He shoved her inside, scrambled behind the wheel, and took off, spraying gravel behind him and laying a sixteenth of an inch of rubber on the blacktop.
They were past Frederick, Maryland, before Louisa was able to speak. Her heart was still pounding in her chest and perspiration trickled down her breastbone. She lay back in her seat, eyes closed, hand to her forehead. “Holy cow,” she said.
Pete’s mental exclamation was much stronger. If it hadn’t been for the rottweiler, they’d be dog food right now. He was going to have to be more careful. He’d almost gotten Louisa killed. He needed to go home, pour himself a drink, and review the game plan.
Five more minutes of silence passed. They were on Route 280, heading south. Louisa finally opened her eyes. “I’m not cut out for this. I’m a failure as a peeper.”
“You just haven’t had enough practice. You were doing great until you punted the beer can.”
She studied him for a moment and realized he wasn’t rattled by the chase. His voice was steady with a hint of humor. His hand was relaxed on the wheel. His cavalier attitude piqued her interest. “How come I’m the only one sweating? Why aren’t your hands shaking like mine?”
“I’m big and brave.”
“This isn’t the first time you’ve been shot at, is it?”
“Hell no,” he said. “I used to drive the freeway to work.”
“I’m serious.”
He glanced over at her. “I wrote my first screenplay six years ago while I was recovering from a gunshot wound.”
“Angry husband?”
“Angry drug runner. I was a South American correspondent for Reuters, and I was tagging along with some Special Forces guys who were supposed to blow up an airstrip in Colombia. I caught a bullet in the leg. It shattered the bone and pretty much ended my ability to tramp through the jungle.”
Her eyebrows raised a half inch. “How long were you in South America working for Reuters?”
“Almost four years.”
“Covering drug runners, riots, and minor wars?”
He nodded.
“And you were shot at a lot?”
“Not a lot.”
Looking at it in retrospect, he thought his chances of dying from a firefight back then had been considerably less than his chances of dying from alcohol poisoning.
It was hard to believe he’d achieved such success writing screenplays. His personal history wasn’t exactly impressive. He’d been a lousy student with a rotten attitude. He’d been caught stealing cars when he was eighteen and joined the army to avoid jail. He’d been the world’s worst soldier, getting busted down for everything from insubordination to impersonating an officer. He’d started his newspaper career on the loading dock, sweated his way into the mail room, and farther up.
He’d made progress as a correspondent, because he was good, but he never followed the rules and was a thorn in everyone’s side. People were willing to give him glowing recommendations with the hope that he’d move on to another job. He suspected his boss at Reuters had sent him to South America to get him out of the office.
Somewhere along the line, looking at life from the bottom of a bottle, he’d managed to grow up. And he’d discovered a code of ethics and a level of responsibility he could live with.
Louisa considered this latest piece of information. Reuters was a very respectable news service. She hadn’t thought much about Pete’s background up until now. Certainly, she hadn’t envisioned him as a hard-edge journalist tagging after a bunch of mercenaries. Still, it seemed in keeping with his character, and she could easily imagine him with a three-day-old beard and filthy, sweaty clothes, tramping through the jungle, rooting out crime and corruption.
She was sure when he was a kid he’d never backed down from a dare, and as a journalist she thought he must have been as single-minded as a mongrel with a soup bone once he’d latched on to a story. That was why he was picking away at this pig thing, she thought. He had the instincts of a journalist. He knew when something was rotten. And he knew when there was a story out there, waiting to be told to the world.
The more she thought about it, the more exotic and heroic it seemed, and her life sounded dull in comparison. She’d lived all her life within the beltway. She’d barely traveled because she’d never had time for a vacation. She’d never seen a jungle or a desert or even the Pacific Ocean. In the past, she’d never much cared about seeing Kuala Lumpur or San Salvador or Shagai Fort, but suddenly she felt rabid with wanderlust. She should broaden her horizons, she thought. She should see more of the world. Maybe she should get a job with the CIA or Cunard or join the Peace Corps.
She was on adrenaline overload, she acknowledged. She was romanticizing Pete Streeter, and she was grossly exaggerating her desire to trade modern plumbing for a glimpse of the Khyber Pass. Still, she felt exhilarated over the idea that, suddenly, there were all sorts of new options and exciting experiences available to her.
Pete went east on the beltway to Connecticut Avenue and then cut south. He wasn’t sure if it was the best route, but it seemed the most straightforward. Louisa probably knew of a better road, but he didn’t want to disturb her. She was lost in thought, chewing his last piece of gum for all she was worth.
Her cheeks were flushed, and her hair was wild and tangled. She was steamy from passion and their run through the woods. She smelled like sex and Juicy Fruit, and just sitting next to her made his heart race. She was primordial woman in a Porsche. She was beautiful and erotic and naively blind to the power she held over him.
He couldn’t imagine what she was thinking, but the next morning she was going to wake up with her blood pressure back to normal and the passion of the night hours behind her. She was going to be furious that she’d almost made it in a car, on the side of a road, with a man she’d only known for three days and thought was a notch below slug spit. He was going to keep his door locked and his sound system cranked up until she was done breaking things.
He left Connecticut Avenue with its neon-lit restaurants and twenty-four-hour traffic. A block off Connecticut on 27th Street, urban Washington was dark and quiet, settled in for the night behind locked doors. Globed streetlights dropped dim light over gray sidewalk and made the porch and shrub shadows seem black and deep.