The Running Man

MINUS 043 AND COUNTING

They got farther than they had any right to, Richards figured. They got all the way to a pretty town by the sea called Camden over a hundred miles from where he had hitched a ride with Amelia Williams.

“Listen,” he said as they were entering Augusta, the state capital. “There’s a good chance they’ll sniff us here. I have no interest in killing you. Dig it?”

“Yes,” she said. Then, with bright hate: “You need a hostage.”

“Right. So if a cop pulls out behind us, you pull over. Immediately. You open your door and lean out. Just lean. Your fanny is not to leave that seat. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“You holler: Benjamin Richards is holding me hostage. If you don’t give him free passage he’ll kill me.”

“And you think that will work?”

“It better,” he said with tense mockery. “It’s your ass.”

She bit her lip and said nothing.

“It’ll work. I think. There will be a dozen freelance cameramen around in no time, hoping to get some Games money or even the Zapruder Award itself. With that kind of publicity, they’ll have to play it straight. Sorry you won’t get to see us go out in a hail of bullets so they can talk about you sanctimoniously as Ben Richards’s last victim.”

“Why do you say these things?” she burst out.

He didn’t reply; only slid down in his seat until just the top of his head showed and waited for the blue lights in the rear-view mirror.

But there were no blue lights in Augusta. They continued on for another hour and a half, skirting the ocean as the sun began to wester, catching little glints and peaks of the water, across fields and beyond bridges and through heavy firs.

It was past two o’clock when they rounded a bend not far from the Camden town line and saw a roadblock; two police cars parked on either side of the road. Two cops were checking a farmer in an old pick-up and waving it through.

Go another two hundred feet and then stop,” Richards said. “Do it just the way I told you.”

She was pallid but seemingly in control. Resigned, maybe. She applied the brakes evenly and the air car came to a neat stop in the middle of the road fifty feet from the checkpoint.

The trooper holding the clipboard waved her forward imperiously. When she didn’t come, he glanced inquiringly at his companion. A third cop, who had been sitting inside one of the cruisers with his feet up, suddenly grabbed the hand mike under the dash and began to speak rapidly.

Here we go, Richards thought. Oh God, here we go.