Shadow Woman A Novel Page 0,92
a stolen car or hitchhiking and being picked up by a nutcase. And who would think to look for her on a bicycle? She’d surprised even him. That was part of the fluidity of her thinking, because absolutely no one would expect her to escape on a bicycle. With a helmet and sunglasses on, she’d also have a damn good disguise. No one would look twice at her.
The road she was on would eventually lead to Charlottesville. He checked a couple of things with his phone and discovered there was a bus terminal there. She could dump her bike and buy a ticket to anywhere. That terminal was far enough away from D.C. that it probably wasn’t being watched, close enough that she might remember the location from her training. She’d had multiple escape routes memorized, and one of them might have included the Charlottesville terminal.
He definitely didn’t have to worry about catching up with her, not as long as she stayed on the bicycle. He’d been worrying about when and where to confront her, her reaction to seeing him again, the difficulty of any witnesses being present. If he let her wear herself out, the coming confrontation would be much easier … for him, that was. It wasn’t a small consideration. When he’d been training her, she’d occasionally cleaned his clock. Not on a regular basis, but often enough to make her cocky. Not many people could take him down, but she was just sneaky enough to surprise him a couple of times, and she didn’t mind playing dirty. In his mind, he could still see the glee in her smile the first time she’d managed to put him on his back.
Another cup of coffee was called for, after all. Xavier lifted his empty coffee cup in a silent request for a refill. There was no reason he couldn’t sit here for a while and let Lizzy get a bit farther down the road. He could even think of it as payback for what she’d done to his motorcycle.
She had her bike, and he had his. The coming chase would be no contest.
Oh good lord, yes, she had let herself get into terrible shape. Lizzy simultaneously pedaled and cursed every cookie she’d eaten in the past year, every extra pound. There weren’t many of them, thank goodness, but oh, if only she’d started running a couple of months ago instead of just this week. If only she were in the same shape she’d been in back in the day.
She paused in her thoughts. What day was that, exactly? She didn’t know, but she did know she once would have been able to handle this trip without feeling as if she were being tortured.
The straps of the cheap backpack, being thin on the padding, cut into her shoulders. Her legs ached. Her butt was numb. Sometimes she’d stand up to pedal and give her butt some relief, but that was harder on her legs.
She’d been on the bike about an hour. There was currently little traffic on the two-lane road, so she chanced a glance at her wristwatch. Assuming it was keeping correct time … make that forty-five minutes. Evidently being tortured made time pass more slowly. By her calculations she had another four hours and fifteen minutes of cycling time, and that didn’t take into account the breaks she’d have to take along the way.
She ached everywhere, and she needed a bathroom already. Maybe she should have said no to that third cup of coffee at breakfast. If necessary, she could make a trip into the bushes on the side of the road, but that would be a last resort. Not only were there homes behind the trees that lined the road, there could be poison ivy, ticks, mosquitos.
She would laugh, if she weren’t afraid the laughter would turn to tears. Someone was trying to kill her, and in the past twenty-four hours she’d resorted to car theft—twice—stolen drunk Sean’s cash, lied to an impressionable young woman to get a motel room, and possibly led stone-cold killers to an innocent late-night shopper’s door. She no longer knew who she was, and she didn’t even have time to think about that, not until she was safe, but here she was, worried about modesty and the dangers of Virginia roadside wildlife.
She couldn’t let herself dwell on that. She had to concentrate on moving, on surviving. When she was safe, then she’d think about stuff.
One step at a time.
Every hard uphill battle