Last Resort
Rome had to keep his head down, even though he wanted to peek out the window and see where the cars that had been following them were. “What’s going on?” he whispered to Ella as she approached the toll booth. He could see her behind the wheel without lifting his head far enough to be noticed by anyone in other vehicles.
“They’re two back from us,” she said, rolling down her window and crushing a twenty dollar bill into the person’s hands. “Keep the change,” she said.
The bar raised, and Ella shot out of the parking lot, going right because she could merge into traffic that way, even though Rome was pretty certain they needed to go to the left.
“How the hell did this happen?” he muttered. What were the chances that his dad would be monitoring every damn airport in the nation?
“Maybe he just has someone at every big airport. I mean, DFW is pretty big. A lot of international flights arrive there each day.”
“True, but I don’t even look like myself, do I?”
She didn’t answer for a second, and when he looked back at her, she was doing her best to get as many cars between them and the vehicle following them. Or were there two of them on their tail now?
They came to a stop, and Rome looked up to see they were sitting at a red light.
“Shit,” Ella muttered. “I don’t see them anymore, but I also don’t know where we are.”
“That’s okay. That’s what phones are for.” Rome climbed up out of the back of the car, figuring if she didn’t see the other cars anymore, there wasn’t much chance of them being spotted at the moment, and if they already knew he was with her, what was the point in hiding?
From the driver’s seat, he took a look around and saw the sedan about three cars back in the lane on their left. “Okay, they’re back there, but my dad’s not going to authorize them to shoot at us, especially not in a crowd. We just need to get on the highway and then maybe we can lose them.”
“But what if we drive out of the city, and they’re still on our tail?” she asked, looking in the rearview mirror. She pulled the ball cap she was wearing down a little lower.
“We’ll figure that out when it happens. We lost them before, remember? Did you learn anything from Gus’s crazy driving?” He laughed, trying to get her to laugh, too.
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Just remember this highway cuts through the middle of the airport, so we don’t want to turn around and get stuck back in there because it’ll give them more of an opportunity to get us while we’re stopped.” He was a little surprised no one had jumped out of the sedan and tried to force their way into the SUV at the long light. Rome made sure the doors were all locked, just in case. “I’d stay out of the middle lane,” he murmured.
“Right.”
The light changed, and Ella waited for the car in front of them to go, then she switched lanes as soon as he could, to get into the left lane and took the on ramp to the highway, the one that led back to the airport--if she were to go the other direction.
Ella flew around another car, her foot mashed to the gas pedal as she swerved around a passenger van and got back on the highway, headed out of Dallas-Fort Worth--to where she wasn’t sure, but they could straighten that out later, after they lost the sedan.
“Do you see the other car?” Ella asked.
“No, just the sedan. It’s pretty far back there, but they could just be waiting for traffic to thin out.”
“What do you think I should do?”
“Uh… let’s see what happens,” Rome said. He pulled up an app called Waze that would tell him not only what direction they needed to go to head to California but also if there were any cops spotted on the road by other drivers. The last thing they needed at the moment was to get pulled over. Actually, that might help--if he could tell the police he was being followed by some henchmen sent by his father to track him down and kidnap him…. That probably wasn’t the best idea either.
A couple of eighteen wheelers slowed in front of them. Ella tried to go around them but was blocked in by a minivan. Rome glanced out the back window to see the sedan getting closer to them. “Damn it!” she shouted.
He drew in a deep breath, trying to decide what to do. The sedan went around another car, and now they were right behind the minivan. In another few seconds they’d be even with them, on Ella’s side. What if they didn’t have any qualms about shooting after all?
“What do I do?” Ella asked. They were hemmed in by other cars with no place to go.
“I don’t know,” Rome replied. There had to be a way to put some distance between them on the crowded highway….
Before he realized what she was doing, Ella had her window rolled down and was gesturing for the large man in the passenger seat to roll down his window, too.
“What the hell are you doing?” Rome asked her.
“Last resort,” she said over her shoulder as the man next to her rolled his window down.
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