looked odd—suspended in space.
Aly was already out of the cab. Jason peered past the sheriff and spotted his honey’s feet first, then her legs, and a strange-looking dress that he knew she hadn’t been wearing before. No, it was a blanket. Looked like an Army surplus thing. He looked up and saw her face. Kind of banged up—and not the kind of banging they’d been working on.
He kept staring at Aly, who didn’t seem pleased to see him, and wondering how the hell they went from having such a good time to this mess. Nothing made sense. Least of all Sheriff Walker: Under arrest? For what?
It slowly came to Jason that most likely it was against the law to drive with a naked girl going down on you. Not just any naked girl, either, but a naked underage girl. The next instant, the word “sodomy” came a’calling, chilling him to his … bone.
He gradually became alert enough to spot Aly’s thong, skirt, and bra on the ceiling, which made no sense whatsoever till he finally realized that he’d flipped his pride and joy upside down. The sheriff’s head was starting to make sense, too. It was still hanging there, studying Jason like he was some kind of strange barnyard animal, a five-legged lamb or a two-headed chicken. Something nature spit out and wouldn’t take back.
“Anything broke, near as you can tell?” Sheriff Walker asked it like he had to.
Jason grabbed his crotch in raw panic, remembering a fine old movie in which a guy was getting a really cool BJ when his car was rear-ended—and the woman bit off his dick so fast that she might have been a snapping turtle foraging in his lap. But Barnacle Boy was starting to get hard as hickory again. Go figure. Down, boy, down, he commanded, to no avail. His dick always did have a mind of his own.
Not only that, Jason’s balls ached. How the hell do you still have blue balls after being knocked out? But then he glanced at Aly and recalled her efforts seconds before the crash.
“Why’d I close my eyes?” he mumbled to himself.
“Because you’re a murdering sex maniac,” Sheriff Walker answered. “Now get out. Unhook that safety belt carefully so you don’t die on us before we can fry you. And make yourself decent.”
Jason bent Barnacle Boy back into his pants, zipped up, and unsnapped the seat belt, lowering himself to the ceiling of the truck’s cab. A few seconds later he crawled out the window.
Walker cuffed him. Then the big dawg read him his rights. But Jason didn’t hear much beyond the “Anything you say can and will be used against you” because the words “murdering sex maniac” kept bouncing around his rattled brain.
Much as he could see, Aly was alive and so was everyone else standing around—all the damn cops, EMTs, and firemen with their big red extinguishers just in case his truck burst into flames. So where were all the dead people? Where was even one dead person?
The answer came to him with the greatest reluctance, as cold and clear and deadly as black ice. That’s when he knew that driving naked, even with an underage honey, would likely prove the least of his worries—and the last sex he’d ever have outside a prison cell.
* * *
Forensia eased off the gas when she spotted the highway patrol officer directing traffic into a single lane. Two ambulances and five patrol cars, including Sheriff Walker’s old Bronco, lined the side of the road, lights flashing in the setting sun. A pickup truck lay upside down about fifty feet from the shoulder. It had driven through a farm fence; broken slats littered the ground and a post had been sheared off to a ten-inch stub.
“I wonder if anybody’s hurt?” Richtor said from the backseat.
Slowing down forced the small green SUV—a RAV4, as it turned out—to within spitting distance of Forensia’s car. Akina’s shiny red Prius was two cars ahead.
Sang-mi pretended to fix her unflappably straight hair in the sun visor mirror—with her gaze firmly on the vehicle behind them.
“I can see them now. They are definitely Korean.” She shrunk into the seat, as if she expected bullets to come flying through the car at any second.
“There are cops here, let’s just pull over.” Forensia slowed her Subaru.
“No!” Sang-mi shouted. “Don’t stop. They don’t care about police. Keep moving. I’m not kidding. They will kill us.”
Shaken, Forensia kept driving.
“There are thousands, probably tens of thousands of Koreans in