Page 98 of Turn the Tide
“Heck of a day to be out here on foot,” Hunter said.
Charlee joined them, hitching a thumb over her shoulder. “California plates.” She leaned closer, scanned the interior. “I think we’re looking for a woman.”
“How can you tell?” Josh asked his sister, coming up behind her.
“Because I’m smart,” Charlee quipped. “And because the air freshener is pink and shaped like a flower.”
A bolt of lightning hit the ground not far from where they stood, and thunder boomed right on its heels. “We’d better find her quick, then,” Marco said.
They remounted and roared down the dirt road in the direction the car was pointed, scanning the surrounding woods all the while.
When ten minutes had passed and they still hadn’t found her, Marco’s concern ratcheted up another notch. Today was not a good day for an unsuspecting tourist to be lost out here.
***
Freddie Marshall casually slumped down in his seat as the sheriff’s work-farm van made its way out of the Marion County jail compound. He shook his head at the idiots surrounding him. They followed the rules like a bunch of pansies, didn’t even try to escape, the wusses. He kept his head down to hide the grin that stretched across his almost toothless mouth and kept his hand over the snake tattoo on his neck. He didn’t want someone remembering it later, when they were asked about a prisoner nicknamed Fang. A few more minutes, and he’d be home free.
Who would have guessed that Derek, a kid he’d gone to middle school with, was now a guard at the jail? He snorted. It had been incredibly easy to demand his help. Derek had defied him once in seventh grade, and Freddie had taken a knife to Derek’s old hound dog as punishment. Threatening Derek’s family now was child’s play. Derek didn’t doubt his resolve.
Freddie wanted his freedom, and Derek had made all the arrangements. The time had come to make that slut, Patty, pay for getting him locked up like some animal. Maybe he’d teach her meddling mama a lesson, too. Mama T had gotten between him and his boy one too many times. Donny should be with him. A boy needed his father to teach him to be a man.
Once he took care of Patty—and he grinned thinking about his plans for her—he and Donny would finally be together all the time. He had a lot to teach the boy, had to make sure his good-for-nothing-but-sex mother didn’t turn the kid into a total wuss.
He glanced down at his hands, saw the dried blood from when he’d knifed the guy whose green-and-white “nonviolent” prison uniform he was now wearing. If Derek did his job, nobody would realize for several hours that the guy wearing Freddie’s red “violent offender” uniform, bleeding in the cell, wasn’t actually Freddie. He didn’t know if the shank had killed the man, but he didn’t care. Trading places was the only way out. He wasn’t letting anything stand in his way.
Anticipation built as the van turned onto Twenty-Seventh Avenue. Freddie had made sure he was the last one in, so he sat by the door. The van slowed for a traffic light, and he grabbed the back of the seat.
Time to make his move.
He reached over the front seat and grabbed the driver’s gun, yanked the van door open, and leaped out. Trusting idiots didn’t even keep it locked. He raced across the street and disappeared into the nearby subdivision in a matter of seconds.
By the time the guard appeared on the street behind him, spare gun drawn and shouting into his radio, Freddie was already in the passenger seat of a small sedan, gun pointed at the terrified businessman behind the wheel.
“Drive,” Freddie growled. “And don’t be stupid unless you have a death wish.”
The man swallowed hard and hit the gas.
