or not? Sure feels like one to me. They’re taking our money.”
“We have to get out of here.”
“We are. First car that comes.”
“After we take the bike back to the barn.”
“We don’t owe them that,” Shorty said. “We don’t owe them diddly. Not anymore. Not if they’re pulling weird shit on us now, with the motel signs. We should dump the bike here and let them come get it themselves.”
“They get up with the sun,” Patty said. “If there’s a bike missing they’ll know right away. But if it’s back in its proper place, they might not think about us for hours. They’ll assume we’re eating breakfast on our own, in our room. They’ll have no reason to come by until later in the morning.”
“It’s a gamble.”
“It could buy us a lot of time later. They’ll come looking for us as soon as they find us gone. We need to delay that moment as long as possible. We need to be miles away by then. We definitely can’t afford to be still stuck down here with our thumbs out. I think we should buy ourselves as much time as we can get.”
Shorty said nothing. He looked along the dark and silent road, first one way, and then the other.
“I know it feels weird to go back,” Patty said. “Now that we just got here. But there are no cars coming anyway. Not yet. We’ll do better closer to dawn.”
Shorty was quiet another long moment.
Then he said, “OK, we’ll take the bike back to the barn.”
“As fast as we can,” Patty said. “Now it’s all about speed.”
They unstrapped their overnight bags from the rack and stashed them close to the suitcase, and then they eased the bike around a wide circle on the blacktop. The air smelled sweeter in the open. They got the bike pointed back down the track. They took up their positions. They set off. The same two-plus miles all over again, in the reverse direction. But Patty had been right. Pushing was much easier without the weight of the suitcase. The bike felt buoyant. Like it was floating. They did the hippy dance under the wire again, and then they got it going and kept it up at a fast walk with what felt like barely any effort at all. They didn’t stop and they didn’t rest.
Chapter 14
It took them a fraction more than thirty minutes to push the two-plus miles. They rolled to a stop where the track came out of the trees. It ran on ahead of them, gray and ghostly in the moonlight, through the flat two acres, to the curve of buildings in the distance. The motel, dark and quiet. The barn, dark and quiet. The house, dark and quiet. Five-thirty in the morning, by Patty’s watch. Easily an hour before the first hint of daylight.
All good.
They pushed on, as quiet as they could, nothing but the hiss of the tires and the slap of their soles on the last of the blacktop. Then they bumped down into the motel lot, and their progress got louder, with crunching steps and squelching stones, past the office, past room one, and two, all the way to the dead Honda, and onward, past room twelve’s corner, straight toward the barn. They could see eight ghostly shapes, neatly parked, and the ninth slot empty, like a punched-out tooth in a smile. Shorty pointed and gave Patty a thumbs-up. She was right. The first daylight glance out the window would have raised the alarm.
They cut the last corner across the grass, and rolled real slow on the parking area’s gravel. Putting the bike back in place was easy. Just a question of lining it up and pushing it in, nose first, and then nudging it dead level with the others, and stepping away. Job done. Perfect. Undetectable. They tiptoed across the gravel, and they walked away on the grass, back to the track, where they stood for a second and took a breath. Ahead of them were the same two-plus miles. All over again. But this time they had nothing to push. This time they would be walking, plain and simple. Walking away, forever.
Behind them a door opened. Over at the house. Relatively distant. A faraway voice called out, “Hey guys, is that you?”
Mark.
They stood still.
“Guys?”
A flashlight beam lanced beyond them, with their shadows cut out, which meant light was playing on their backs.