Backwards Honeymoon

“I’ll have to issue you a ticket for driving with defective equipment, of course. I’ll be right back with the paperwork for you to sign.”

“That was lucky,” Kathryn breathed as he walked toward the cruiser.

“Don’t get your hopes up too high.”

“But if he stopped us because of the lights, then he couldn’t have been looking specifically for us.”

“Don’t bet on it. Maybe he made up the bit about the lights as an excuse to check us out.”

“How could he just make it up?”

“It’s the ‘working intermittently’ part that makes me suspicious, because that’s not easy to check. The lights could be working perfectly right now, but I can’t exactly argue about something he says happened ten minutes ago and miles down the road.”

The officer returned with a ticket pad in hand. “If you’ll sign here, sir.” He tore off the top layer and handed it to Jonah. “You realize, of course, that the law says the car cannot be driven further until the defect is fixed.”

Jonah sounded calmer than Kathryn felt. “I suppose that means we’ll have to get a tow truck out here. Since we are sitting on the edge of the highway—”

“You’re actually in luck, sir. It could take an hour to get a tow truck out here.”

“That’s lucky?” Kathryn said under her breath.

“But the rules do allow me some discretion. Since you’re only a couple of miles from a truck stop, my best judgment is that it would be better to let you drive that far than to leave you here on the side of the road for an hour or more to be a hazard to other traffic.”

“I guess it is lucky,” Kathryn muttered.

“If you’ll proceed straight ahead to the first stop sign, the truck stop will be on your left at the junction with the main highway. They have some good mechanics in the garage there, and I think they usually have someone working on Sunday to handle emergencies. I’ll follow you in, so you don’t need to worry about traffic coming up behind you.”

“That’s very kind of you, Officer.” Jonah’s voice sounded a bit hollow.

He started the engine and waited till the officer was back in his patrol car. Then he pulled onto the highway and cautiously accelerated. The patrol car fell in behind them, emergency lights still running.

“A police escort into town,” Kathryn said. “Just what we wanted. So now do you believe the lights aren’t working right?”

“It doesn’t matter much what I think, because that ticket says the wiring will have to be checked out by an approved mechanic before we can go anywhere. And that means we’re stuck till at least tomorrow morning. Just keep your fingers crossed that we’re the only emergency repair waiting when the garage opens.”

Kathryn groaned, then brightened. “There’s the stop sign. So that must be…” She looked across a complex of buildings, lit by a glare of high-powered street lamps. “The truck stop,” she said faintly. “But where’s the town?”

“Probably a few more miles down the road. Truck stops have a habit of locating where there are trucks—on the highways, outside the towns.”

“Thank you very much for that lesson in economics, Mr. Clarke. I can’t be seeing right—does that sign really say this place is called West Podunk?”

“Wouldn’t surprise me. There’s one in Iowa called Boondocks. This is actually a pretty big one. Restaurant, gas station, motel…”

“Jonah,” she said with a tinge of panic. “The restaurant is a Katie Mae’s.”

“Honey, they’re in every third town in the entire country. We were bound to run into one sooner or later. That set of doors must be the garage.” He took a parking spot outside and got out of the car, leaving the engine running.

The officer pulled alongside, called a cheerful goodbye, and was gone.

Kathryn scrambled out, as well, and joined Jonah at the back of the car. “It’s pretty dark back here,” she pointed out.

“I noticed.” Jonah jiggled the fender, and the taillights flickered on and back off as if on command. He shook his head. “He’s right, there’s a short somewhere. Dammit, I’d have sworn this thing was in first-class condition.”

“And that’s why you were under it this afternoon, I suppose. Because it’s in such good shape.”

“I was changing the oil.”

Kathryn refrained from further comment, but only by biting her tongue. “Now what do we do?”

“We pool our resources, go into the restaurant and order a meal, and hope that we can afford to check into the motel. Then we’ll work on figuring out how we’re going to pay the mechanic.” Jonah shut off the engine and locked the car. “I suppose things could be worse.”

“They certainly could. You could be in jail right now, and I could be looking for a lawyer to bail you out.”

“Taking things fifty-fifty,” Jonah said with a note of approval. “That’s my girl. And if you couldn’t find a lawyer, you could always use your nail file and break me out.”

They had enough cash to pay for their bacon and eggs, the biggest breakfast Kathryn had ever seen at any time of day. But it was apparent from a quick phone call to the motel that their resources would not stretch to cover a room.

“Then we’ll sleep in the car,” Kathryn said bravely, pushing her half-full plate away.

Jonah refilled his coffee cup. “Have you ever tried that? Not just dozing, I mean, but actually spending the night?”

“Well, no.”

“Believe me, you’ll be doing enough sleeping in the car on the way to Nevada. You don’t want to start any sooner than you have to. I told them to hold the room.”

“But if we can’t pay for it—”

“The way things stand at the moment, we can’t pay for the car repairs, either. We’ll just have to hit the money machine for a cash advance.”

“But that will leave a paper trail.”

“I’d have preferred to wait till we were out of Minnesota, but we don’t have a choice. Since I’m already in the official records as being here, we’ll use my card tonight and keep yours clear till we get to Wisconsin.”

“I thought maybe, with this happening, we’d just skip Wisconsin.”

Jonah shook his head. “With this delay, it’s even more important to lay a red herring for Jock to follow. But money isn’t the only problem we’ve got right now. There’s that ticket, too.”

“Are you still being paranoid about that poor cop? He was only doing his job, Jonah.”

“It’s in the computer now. If your father thinks to ask for a driver’s license check on me, that ticket will pop up—and he’ll know where I am.”

“Why would he do that? He probably doesn’t have any evidence that I’m with you,” Kathryn objected. “You said yourself when the cop pulled us over that you didn’t think Daddy could possibly have put the pieces together yet.”

“It doesn’t matter. Even if Jock isn’t exactly suspicious of me, he’s going to want his people to talk to everybody who was on the estate today, to find out what they might have seen. When I turn out to be hard to find, it would be only natural to ask the police to keep a lookout for my car. And if he would happen to do that before we manage to get the lights fixed—”

Kathryn winced. “We’ll be saying ‘Hello, Daddy’ when his helicopter lands in the parking lot.”