The Great Escape Read Online Free PDF Page B

August?” Lucy had made it sound like a question, not a declaration, and the waitress looked confused.
    “Or September.” Panda leaned back in the booth, eyelids at half-mast. “Depends on who’s the daddy.”
    The woman advised Panda to get himself a good lawyer and walked off.
    He pushed away his empty plate. “We can be at the Austin airport in a couple hours.”
    No plane. No airport. “I can’t fly,” she said. “I don’t have an ID.”
    “Call your old lady and let her take care of it. This jaunt has cost me enough.”
    “I told you. Keep track of your expenses. I’d pay you back. Plus a thousand dollars.”
    “Where are you getting the cash?”
    She had no idea. “I’ll figure it out.”
    L UCY HAD GONE TO THE party knowing there’d be drinking. She was almost seventeen, none of the kids was going to narc, and Mat and Nealy would never find out. What was the big deal?
    Then Courtney Barnes passed out behind the couch, and they couldn’t wake her up. Somebody called 911. The cops showed up and took IDs. When they found out who Lucy was, one of them drove her home while the rest of the kids got hauled into the police station.
    She’d never forgotten what the officer had said to her. “Everybody knows what Senator Jorik and Mr. Jorik did for you. Is this how you pay them back?”
    Mat and Nealy refused preferential treatment for her and hauled her back to the police station to sit with the others. The press covered the whole thing, complete with op-ed pieces about the wild children of Washingon’s pols, but her parents never threw that in her face. Instead they talked to her about alcohol poisoning and drunk driving, about how much they loved her and wanted her to make smart choices. Their love shamed her and changed her in a way their anger never could have. She’d promised herself never again to let them down, and until yesterday, she hadn’t.
    Now she stood in a small-town discount store that smelled of rubber and popcorn. She’d adjusted the plastic bag under her shirt so it didn’t rustle, but she looked so mangy after hours on the road that no one was giving her a second glance, although Panda was attracting the same wary attention he’d garnered in the restaurant. A young mother even pulled her toddler into the next aisle to avoid him.
    Lucy glanced at him from under the brim of her ball cap. “I’ll meet you at the register.”
    He held up a cheap pink training bra. “This looks about your size.”
    She gave him a tight smile. “Really. I don’t need any help. You can do your own shopping now. It’s on me.”
    He tossed down the bra. “Damn right it’s on you. I’m keeping the receipts.”
    But he still didn’t move. She added some ugly white granny panties to her shopping basket because she wasn’t going to let him watch her choose anything else.
    He pulled out the granny panties and tossed in some neon-colored nothings. “I like these better.”
    Of course you do. But since you’ll never see them, you don’t get a vote.
    He slipped his hand under his T-shirt and scratched his stomach. “Hurry up. I’m hungry.”
    She needed him, so she left the trashy nothings in the shopping basket and let him steer her to the single aisle that served as the store’s men’s department.
    “I like to get input from the ladies when I shop.” He grabbed a navy T-shirt and studied the illustration, a cartoon drawing of a woman with enormous breasts and a rocket launcher between her legs.
    “That would be a definite no,” she said.
    “I like it.” He tossed it over his shoulder and began thumbing through a stack of jeans.
    “I thought you wanted my input.”
    He stared at her blankly. “Why’d you think that?”
    She gave up.
    A few minutes later as she set her meager purchases by the register, she experienced a stab of yearning for her pearls and headbands, her slim summer dresses and neat little sandals. They were the objects that anchored her. In her ballet flats and cashmere