Page 27 of Twisted Lies
“Be careful,” I beg when JR climbs out the passenger window.
With my eyes bouncing between the rugged landscape and his ruggedly handsome face, I watch him toss a machete at a massive tree trunk coming up on our left.
His aim is perfect, and within a second of the machete slicing through a section of vine curled around the truck, it slithers through the snowy field, its snake-like maneuver only ending when a net made from liana cuts snavels up the first dog in the vicious pack of three.
Although the remaining two are still capable of chasing us down, like all imprudent foot soldiers, they lose steam when their leader is taken out.
When they circle the opening in the snow where the net flung out, I grin with excitement. JR could have fought back with violence. He could have instilled the same level of fear onto the dogs as they’re bombarding me with. The fact he didn’t has me gobbling up his features even more than I was in the bathroom both this morning and this afternoon.
My stare is so consuming, it takes JR yanking on the steering wheel to avoid us colliding with the trunk of an old pine tree.
When a lack of clearance knocks off the side mirror, I shoot my eyes to JR. “Maybe you should drive now.”
Before he can answer me, we break through a gathering of shrubs, straight onto a busy road. Motorists honk and brakes are compressed, but before we come close to veering into oncoming traffic, I yank on the steering wheel with so much force, I get us back on the straight and narrow in an impressive period of time.
“Why the hell are there so many idiots on the road?” I grumble under my breath. “Don’t they know we’re in the middle of a blizzard!”
An icy road is a thing of the past when JR tugs on the steering wheel for the second time. Instead of veering us away from a tree trunk, he directs us straight toward one.
“Holy shit,” I mutter when a second yank careens us down a windy dirt road I’m sure hasn’t been used for years.
The wheels of the truck bump across the landscape more than they roll, and their bounce routine has me fearful JR’s life is still in danger when he removes a large pair of tin snips from the duffle bag he packed in a hurry and raises them to his face.
I grimace more than I cheer when he commences hacking off his beard. He doesn’t bring the blade of the snips close to his jugular, but within seconds, his beard goes from bushy to cropped in less than five minutes.
“No,” I push out on a sob when his hair is the next thing to face the chop.
He doesn’t trim it as short as his beard, but the inches he loses break my heart. His hair is a part of who he is. I am as fond of it as I am of the hairs on his chest.
Once the hair from his beard and face is tossed out the window, JR signals for me to turn down a bush track coming up on our right.
It’s as rough and bouncy as the last road, but within five miles, it pops us out onto a state freeway half a mile up from a state trooper barricade.
I stray my eyes from the flashing lights disappearing on the horizon to JR. “You knew they were there.” Although I’m not technically asking a question, he nods as if I am. “How?”
My nose crinkles when his face becomes washed with remorse. He has a lot of bad memories, which makes me even more concerned that pushing him out of his comfort zone will increase his pain. I was able to pack up my life and relocate years ago because I’ve never really seen one place as my home. We moved a lot when I was a kid, so none of my roots are firmly planted in one spot.
After a couple of seconds of painful silence, he flips down the visor above my head, exposing a faded polaroid. While doing my best not to get us in a wreck, I take in the faces of the two people in the image. I know both of them even with them technically being strangers. The woman was referenced in the newspaper article JR showed me two days ago, and the man, although a lot younger in this photograph than he was when I met him, was once a patient of mine.
He came in with a nasty head knock a little over seven years ago. I was working in a rural hospital as part of my penance for keeping my career when a hearing deficit almost pulled it out from under my feet. I had just gotten him stabilized when his care was overtaken by local law enforcement authorities.
Supposedly, he was wanted for murder. I couldn’t believe it. His eyes were far too kind and honest to ever warrant such suspicion. I tried to stop them from taking him. I rattled off statistics about men his age with head wounds suffering long-term side effects if not death.
Nothing I said made any difference.
They marched him out like he was already convicted by a group of his peers, and the next day, I walked out right alongside him.
It was that weekend I accepted an offer from Isaac to work with him on building the most advanced hospital in the world. He had the money and the vision, and I had the ability to sniff out the doctors who weren’t about the money.
Cedric was the only one who blindsided me. If I were honest, I’d admit his attention caught me off guard, but it was nowhere near as perverse as the swiftness of JR’s moves. I’m driving us away from an entity sworn to protect and serve only days after he tied me to a bed.
I’d call myself insane if this didn’t feel as right as the first time I drove to Ravenshoe with nothing but a suitcase in my trunk and my old ID card stuffed in my wallet instead of the one that was thrust in my chest when I stumbled onto an accident scene I was never meant to witness.
The young woman who died in the wreckage was a well-known figure in the underworld. Her family doesn’t bury their dead because they don’t leave any bodies.
They have the same beliefs for witnesses, hence my appointment at a hospital forty miles from the area we’re fleeing. The blast almost cost me my hearing, but the consequences that followed it were almost just as career-ending. If I hadn’t met Isaac when I did, who knows where I’d be right now.
Everything in life happens for a reason, and now I’m beginning to wonder if Cecil’s inclusion was for more than encouraging me to take back the life I threw away because I was too scared to fight for what was right. Perhaps if I had fought harder back then, Cecil’s death wouldn’t have been the first autopsy rostered at Saint Francis Hospital the morning after he was taken into custody.
