Jane’s fingers hit the button to unlock the doors without a second thought. The police turned one of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims back to him; people turn away all the time because they don’t want to get into the middle of a domestic spat; a day later their shocked, guilty faces are all over the TV. Jane would unhesitatingly risk quite a lot not to be one of those faces – "and he passed by on the other side," is a pretty damning indictment.

The man fumbled at the door, scrambled up into the shotgun seat, breathing in great, uneven, whooping breaths. "Go!" he moaned. "Just go!"

Jane asked no questions, just stepped on her gas and shifted up through the gears. In her mirror, she saw a disturbance in the brush beside the road; beside her, her passenger drew in a long, hissing breath. Jane spared him a brief look, took in the ashen face and pressed harder, eyes to the twisting road. She asked, "Where to?"

The man never took his eyes from her side view mirror. "The police! Do you have a cell phone?"

She nodded at her glove compartment. "I’m not asking what happened, understand. But am I going to be chased by a bunch of hairy bikers, or just a lone madman who will blow my head off, given the chance?"

The man looked up from the phone. "How can you be so calm?"

"I have a gift for trouble," Jane shrugged. "You either learn to deal with what it brings you, or you spend your life huddled under the covers making little whimpering noises."

He choked, "I hadn’t thought of it that way." The phone beeped cheerfully, and connected him to a dispatcher.

Jane listened as her passenger identified himself as Albert Farnham, grabbed this morning while on a hiking vacation. Two men had been doing nasty things to him all day. She happened to catch a glimpse of his hand, the fingers swollen and raw – no fingernails – and winced. Albert was a bloody mess, and she didn’t want to think about what she couldn’t see.

Lights showed in her rearview mirror, coming fast. She gave an anxious little whuff. "Let ‘em know we’ve got company," she said. This was not going to be fun; her suspicion was that it was the torturers, and they weren’t thinking in terms of cell phones, if they were thinking at all. They must be in a state of near panic. Their victim had escaped. The victim and the witness had to be silenced.

"Shit." Jane extended her right hand, beckoned for the phone. Albert clutched it like his hope of heaven, reluctant to abandon this small security. She sympathized, but she needed to give the cops some information or there would be more danger than just the nuts. "Hi," she said to the dispatcher. "My name’s Jane Osborne, and I’m driving a blue Tahoe. I have a gun in the car, and if these idiots try something, I’m going to shoot. Please let anyone coming know, so they don’t shoot me, all right? Thank you." She handed the phone back to Albert with her best friendly, sane smile.

He didn’t look like he regarded her sanity as proven.

Five years ago, Jane had taken a hiking vacation of her own, and stumbled into a murder. Very seldom is real life like the movies; in this case, it turned out that the murderee was a land developer laundering money for biker gangs. The gangs were upset with the small, unassuming blonde woman whose testimony acted on their enterprises like a dropped stitch in knitting. Astonishing amounts of money wash about in the sub-economy, and a lot sticks to the fingers of people who live on the fringes of towns and drive powerful motorcycles.

Next time you’re wandering by a Harley dealer, ask yourself how people apparently living on beer and waitresses’ tips afford a machine whose base model is $18,000 American.

The number of people wanting to put large, bloody holes in her astonished her. So did the venues in which they were willing to try. Jane learned fast to shoot back, and not miss. Everywhere she went, she thought in terms of sight-lines, background picture, and cover. It turned her from a nice high school teacher into…whatever the hell she was these days. Not exactly unemployed, nor precisely homeless, she didn’t stay any one place long. In the course of her drifting, she’d found she had a nose for trouble, and (to her own everlasting surprise) the ability to survive it while extricating the innocent.

She took her gun out of the special pocket on the left side of her seat, snicked the safety off without looking, and laid it carefully in her lap. "Down, Glory," she ordered the dog. He worked his way to the floorboards behind the front seat. "Albert, you might want to slide down as far as you can go, too. The floor is actually the best place for you, if you can make it."

"What are you going to be doing?" Albert sounded just a little faint.

There was a small silence as Jane debated her reply. Saving the taxpayers the expense of a trial might be true, but hardly what you wanted the man repeating to the police in an hour or so, and never mind what the dispatcher on the other end of the cellular might think. "Driving like hell."

Her mouth was desperately dry, the water bottle not six inches from her hand, but she wasn’t taking her hand off either the .44 or the wheel for anything now. She lowered her window with an elbow, and in the battering rush of air began slow, controlled breathing, and watched the road rushing by at 80, and the mirror filling with a pickup truck doing at least 90. She preferred to shoot two-handed. Though her hands were big and long-fingered for a woman her size and light build, a .44 is an awfully big gun, and the recoil is harder to control than it looks when it’s a six-foot tall man doing the shooting. Shooting from a moving car at another moving car is a gamble, and doing it while driving…Jane suppressed a giggle. It wouldn’t help Albert’s morale.

The truck moved into her blind spot; she scooted down as far as she dared at this speed, and waited the extra two seconds for the truck to pull even. From the corner of her eye, she saw the double barrel of a shotgun stick out the window and promptly blow off target. Good choice on their part, Jane acknowledged, emptily, before laying her gun on the door sill, taking the quickest look to establish her sight picture, and pulling the trigger.

At that speed, in a high-centered vehicle, a startled swerve isn’t advisable. Jane stamped her accelerator flat to the floor, leaving the pickup to careen into one crimping turn, another in the opposite direction, then roll and keep rolling. Jane didn’t slow down or look back, though she safed the gun and put it away. Her voice sounded artificial and stiff in her own ears. "I don’t believe they were wearing their seatbelts."

The cops were not happy with her when she finally delivered Albert to them. Albert, who had been tortured, nearly killed, and had a harrowing escape, got almost no attention. The focus was on Jane. The police do not like competent civilians. For one thing, they don’t believe there is such an animal. For another, they can’t lose the conviction that the civilian really is up to no good. Jane’s nice, middle-class appearance stood her in good stead; her increasingly weird history did not. Eventually, though, they had to let her go.

She paid Albert a brief visit in the hospital. He watched from his high window as she loaded Glory’s tail-waving form into the big blue Tahoe, and climbed in after him.

Copyright ©2001 Dianna Deeley.  All Rights Reserved