As Night Falls Read Online Free PDF

breathing hard beside him, his body giving off heat in waves now that they’d hit the high-octane warmth of the car.
    The woman fumbled with something on the seat beside her, and Nick’s heart had a second to flare. She had a CB radio, or a relative on the job; maybe she was a cop herself. But then the woman dropped her pocketbook over the seat, and a useless fluster of things came tumbling out, along with her wallet and cell phone.
    Nick emptied the wallet of cash, then examined the phone. There was a casing with a seam along it; when he picked at the opening, the plastic popped up. Inside sat the strange-looking battery that powered the device. Nick removed it. Now the phone could no longer serve to establish the woman’s whereabouts to this point. Just a few of the facts he’d learned: that everyone had one of these mechanized insects now, and they could do a lot more than dial a call.
    “What do you want?” the woman asked. But there was no heft to her question, or expectation of being answered. Her tone was whimpery and weak.
    Nick reached for the lever to roll down the window, then quickly corrected himself. He found the button that did the job now, and pushed it, but nothing happened. He jabbed at it again.
    “What the hell?” he said to Harlan, low.
    Harlan reached out a hand. It covered the whole ledge on the side of the door.
    Childproof locks, Nick realized. When he twisted around, he glimpsed special seats with straps and harnesses, in a third row that looked a whole acre away. There were humps back there, boxes maybe, a jam-up of shapes impossible to make out.
    “Roll down this window,” Nick growled.
    The woman jumped and let out a little cry. She began stabbing at buttons. Nick almost laughed at the sheer number of them.
    “Want me to come up there and help?” he said, beginning to rise from his seat.
    Harlan laid a hand on Nick’s arm, which Nick shucked off with some effort.
    “No, no—” the woman cried. She kept flailing around. Smacking sounds, whirrs, from up front until his window finally dropped down.
    Nick sent the pieces of her phone sailing out into the frigid remainder of the day.
    “Now,” he said, friendly-like again. “I want you to get off 9 and head toward Wedeskyull. You know where that is?”
    “Yes,” the woman whispered. “I live in town.”
    “Ah,” Nick said. “All the better. Except we’re not going to town. We’re going somewhere outside. Long Hill Road. You know it?”
    “Yes, I know it,” the woman said, sounding oddly pleased, as if they’d discovered common ground.
    Nick looked at the trees whipping by, their bare branches lashing.
    Long Hill Road
.
    Just the name in his head had become the purest drug during the last year he’d spent preparing. Long Hill Road was where he would find what he needed to get away, not only from prison, but from a life that had inexplicably succeeded in dragging him down. On Long Hill Road, Nick could take a brief pause, gather breath for the final push that would enable him to lose himself forever. Reach a place where he’d never be found.
    “Good,” Nick said. “Then hurry.”
    In the end, the woman turned out to be a good little getaway driver. Her foot pressed hard on the gas, and she didn’t slow down even on the twists and ells and curves.
    But a stop sign beside the broad flank of a field finally brought her to a halt.
    Nick sensed the possibility a moment before it occurred to the woman. His mother always said how smart he was, but prison had shown him that even more than brains, Nick had great instincts. He knew whenever somebody was getting ready to piss him off, buck him or thwart him. Sometimes he knew before they knew it themselves.
    Now he started to climb into the front. From this position he could see how lovely the woman was, although not young, with a silver sheen to her otherwise brown hair, and bottle-green eyes behind eyeglass frames. She had taken off her coat in deference to the cranked-up heat