Five minutes later, they screeched into the parking lot of Cheap-Rentals-R-US and she said a small prayer of gratitude for one more day of life.
They’d barely stopped when she tossed a five at him and launched from the seat to safety, resisting the urge to drop to her knees and kiss the blacktop.
The pizza guy took off again, to be replaced by an oily looking character in a brown tweed suit who hurried from a small and uninteresting gray building. He tugged at his thick sideburn and gave her a once over.
“You must be Harper Evans? I’m Benny.”
Dear lord. Neither the driver nor this guy had updated their look in forty years. Were they related?
She nodded and clutched her pitching stomach. She couldn’t run away even if she wanted to. Her legs wouldn’t hold up. She just wanted a car.
“Yes. Can we do this quickly?” she asked, impatient. “I have an appointment.” At this rate, she’d need pizza guy to drive her if she wanted to get to Noah on time.
The guy grinned. His pointed canine teeth were yellow. “We have the car all ready. We’ll just need you to fill out some paperwork.” He lifted the clipboard. “Okay. Do you have a credit card for the down payment?”
The card was almost maxed out but had a few bucks left to charge. “Yes.” She gave him the number. He wrote it down.
“Do you want insurance?”
“My policy should cover the rental.” That was one thing her aunt stressed when she’d bought her first car. Good car insurance in case of “idiot drivers.”
“Then sign here.” He gave her the pen and the clipboard. On it was her name and a checkbox for “yes” for charging her card.
“That’s it?” She signed on the X. “Usually you have to sign away your first born child to rent a car.” She looked at a row of shiny new vehicles parked in front of the office. The blue one had her name on it. She liked blue.
Handing back the board and pen, she lifted a finger toward the blue sedan. A sharp whistle pierced her left eardrum. Startled, she dropped her hand and stumbled back.
“What the heck, dude?” Harper blanched and spun when a second piercing sound, a whine this time, followed by a knock-knock tore up behind her. The sales guy stepped a few paces sideways as a battered old gold Yugo came to a hard brake between them. Harper expelled a terrified squeak as it stalled just an arm’s length from taking her out.
A kid of about sixteen climbed out and tossed Benny the keys. Sales guy spread out a hand toward the car. “Your chariot awaits, milady.”
It took a minute to realize he wasn’t kidding. “I am not driving that.” The back bumper was held on by wire and the entire bottom half of the car was rusty to the point that it was one large pothole away from the entire frame being left somewhere on the highway. “What about all those pretty ones?”
“I’m afraid that’s all we have for you, Ms. Evans.” He managed to look sympathetic, probably from years of shafting the public with bait and switch policies. “With your history, the boss can’t trust you not to flee the state with one of those.”
“What do you mean ‘my history’?”
He pulled out his phone, typed, and walked around the car. Holding up the screen for her viewing enjoyment, Harper saw a headline on a gossip site that read, Cheerleader kills boss in a fit of rage!
“Oh my God.” She snatched the phone out of his hand.
Beneath the caption was an old picture of her in Daytona during spring break two thousand and twelve. Her bikini top was halfway off and she was doing a bad twerk challenge with her friends at a crappy beach bar. That wasn’t her finest moment.
How had they gotten the picture? When had the news gotten out about the murder? Why didn’t she pay attention to the news? Oh, right. She’d been a little distracted of late.
Shaking off the thought, she had more pressing matters. She handed back the phone. “I did not kill Gerald.”
The guy shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. The boss is giving you his son’s car, hoping that you’ll head for Mexico and he can get a big payout. He upped the insurance on it right after you called. Twenty grand if you run.”
Lightning strike me now, Harper silently begged the heavens. Unfortunately, there was only one pitifully small white cloud in an otherwise beautiful blue sky. The chance of a fatal electrical strike was nil.
“That car isn’t worth twenty bucks.”
Benny shrugged. “You know it. I know it….”
“This is BS.” She pulled out her phone. There had to be a hundred car rental places in South East Michigan. She didn’t have to take this from Benny and his boss.
“Before you think about calling anyone else,” he said, smug now. “Every rental company in town will check your history. You’re a celebrity, and not the good kind.” He tugged at the corner of his mustache. “Do you want the car or not?”
She wanted to rip the mustache off his face like a strip of duct tape just to hear him howl. Instead, she scraped the keys out of his outstretched hand. “Give me those.”
After leveling a death-glare at the salesman, she climbed into the beater and cranked the key. The engine whined piteously to life and she ground the stick shift into first gear.
It had been a decade since she drove a stick; the car stalled out three times before she managed to jerk her way out of the lot and onto the street.
From somewhere behind her she heard cheers from onlookers. Of its own volition, her hand went up and she gave the group a one finger wave as she sputtered out of sight.
Chapter 7
“There’s no way in hell I’m riding in that thing,” Noah said as he ran his disbelieving eyes over what was once called a car. It looked like it had been rescued from a car crusher too late. He kicked a half-flat tire and the hubcap fell off, rolled down the garage driveway, and disappeared into a sewer grate.
“Thanks for that,” Harper sniped as she walked toward the grate and bent to look inside the damp darkness.
Without a flashlight and a heck of a lot of motivation to spend all day digging through sludge with a long stick, she wasn’t getting the missing car part back.
She grumbled, “Excellent. Benny will probably charge me two hundred bucks for a replacement.” She stalked back over to Noah.
“The whole car isn’t worth that much.”
“Try to tell that to the thieves at Cheap Rentals.”
“This is a rental? Whatever you paid was too much.” He raked a disapproving eye over the vehicle. “Why are you driving this piece of shit anyway? Don’t you have a car?”
She closed her eyes for a second, then looked up at him. From the look in her blood-shot eyes, she was on the edge of a meltdown. But she wouldn’t express those feelings to him.
“Yes, I have a car.” She told him what happened to her classic car. “Since I’m a murderer, no one will rent to me. It’s this or nothing.”
Fists closed, he wanted to snap the vandal in half. He also wanted to pull her into his arms and tell her everything would be all right.
However, that was a lie. Last night he’d done some initial investigation and discovered the detectives had focused on her as their suspect: something about drunken threats at a bar. With a dozen or so witnesses, she’d all but confessed to wanting Covington dead and had been found with the body.
At this point, there were no other suspects.
“The Mustang is a 1970 Boss 302,” she added, not realizing