California Schemin' - Kate George [47]
I ran out into the street and looked both ways. I couldn’t see far in either direction because of the turns and little hills that were engineered into the road. I cursed the idiot who designed it. I imagined the road crew that had to pave this shaking their heads at the stupidity. Sacramento County was flat, open land. Roadways were flat and straight too, but not this one. My natural tendency was to go to the right, so I gritted my teeth and ran to the left.
The car I’d seen parked by the side of the road from the second story window sat around the first bend. I slowed to a walk and stepped up onto a lawn. There were no sidewalks. The developer didn’t expect the residents would want to walk anywhere, or perhaps he thought they would just walk in the road. After all, there wasn’t really any traffic here.
I kept my eyes trained on the car as I approached. No one parked on the street in this community. No one. The driver was motionless. Sitting in the car, a pink sweatshirt hood covering the head propped on the steering wheel. Just what I need, another dead body. I’m not stopping, I don’t care, someone else can find her. I started to trot again. I moved past the car, and my shadow fell on the driver’s side window. The head jerked up off the steering wheel, startled blue eyes staring at me. She screamed. I screamed and jumped back so fast I tripped and landed on my ass in the grass. My heart stopped pumping, and I thought, I’m going to die right here on someone’s front lawn.
The terror on the driver’s face morphed into surprise, and she reached back and popped the back door open and started the car.
“Come on!” She hissed and she flicked the hood off her head, revealing lavender hair pulled into a ponytail. “You think they are going to wait all day before they come looking for you?”
She didn’t have to ask twice. I dived into the back seat and slammed the door. I expected her to turn the car and drive away from the Senator’s house, but she headed back toward it.
“No! No! Go the other way.”
“Can’t. There’s only one way out of this place, and it’s right past Senator Wallace. It’s the only reason I could stay parked on the street back there. Wallace has the last inhabited house. No one drives past here.”
We rounded the corner, and I flattened myself to the back seat, praying we’d get past. When the car didn’t come to a screeching halt, I sat back up. I looked at the side of the driver’s face, and it dawned on me that I’d seen her before.
“You’re the crazy shape-shifting alien woman,” I said.
“Yep, that’s me.”
“You followed me from Vermont? That’s a little strange.”
“Strange? I’m a shape-shifting alien, and you think it’s strange that I followed you?”
“I don’t actually think you shape shift, you know.”
“But it’s possible I’m an alien.”
“Doubtful.” I pulled on the seat belt.
She handed me a knit cap and an army jacket. “Put those on. We should be able to get out of the gate easily enough, but if someone approaches us, you are my teenage son.”
Great. I get to be a teenaged boy now. I pulled the cap over my head and tucked up my hair in the back. The jacket smelled of body odor and cigarette smoke, but I unbuckled and pulled it on anyway. I could shower later. If anyone took a good look in the car I was screwed, the blue dress hung out from underneath the jacket. I’d make a very strange boy.
I held my breath as she punched the code into the pad, and the gate rolled back. We had rolled through the gate and out onto the road when her cell phone began to ring.
“I’m busy, Hambecker, what do you want? Yeah, I have her. No, you can’t have her back.” The phone flipped closed.
I closed my mouth
“I’m confused,” I said. “That was Hammie?”
“You call Hambecker Hammie?” Her smile widened. “To his face?”
“So?”
“Really? To his face?” She laughed out loud. “Oh, my God, I am so doing that.”
She drove onto the freeway and headed