He was used to a life of looking over his shoulder and so he didn’t panic, aside from his worry for Loretta he was disconcertingly calm.
Their house was cleverly concealed but it wasn’t invisible and Steven, high on adrenaline, made easy work of finding it. “Come out Rick,” Steven yelled, as he and his three colleagues drew their guns.
Loretta was best described as striking. An angular face atop a delicately boned body.
But her most striking features, had to be her arms, not just for their toned shapely form, but for the tattoos adorning them. Flowers, vines, butterflies and tiny, tribal markings dotted in perfect patterns. She was used to people staring at them, in that way for the most part, they avoided staring at her face every time she would foray into a little town nestled amongst countless towering hills covered in thick forest.
She’d buy fresh meats, soft breads and other essential groceries before having a quick coffee and disappearing again. She kept to herself and the townspeople, unlike nosier city folk, paid her no mind. But today, as she’d sat enjoying a cup of rich strong coffee, a plain, nondescript man paying her tattoos too much attention had turned her day upside down.
Now, Loretta sat hunched over the wheel of her car, swerving dangerously on a narrow cliff road, two cars in pursuit, with men hanging out the windows firing an endless volley of bullets at her. They were from the Criminal Department, at least that’s what Steven, the man in the café, had said before she’d punched him in the jaw and fled.
She knew she was leading them straight to Rick, her husband, who they’d been searching for since he’d disappeared one stormy night eight years before, but she had no other choice, she wasn’t going anywhere without him.
Fifty miles down the winding twisting cliff road that hugged the steep hills, Rick froze as he heard the unmistakable sound of gunfire. He stiffened, his stocky frame tensing as his fear gave way to rage. Were they shooting at Loretta? He clenched his fists, his nails digging into his flesh as he moved quickly about their cabin, a low structure hidden behind a dense clump of trees, built solid with thick planks of wood a foot wide and half a foot thick. His face grim, he begun loading a cache of guns, flinching at the ricochet of each bullet.
“Dead or alive!” Special Investigator Steven from the Criminal Department roared to no one in particular as he fired his gun. His colleague in the driver’s seat glanced for just a second at Steven, half hanging out the window, his face contorted with anger and pain from the dark bruise Loretta had left on him. He’d never seen Steven out of control.
He remembered the light in Steven’s eyes when he’d announced to the department that he’d found Rick, brandishing an old photograph of two teenagers holding hands in a field. The boy was clearly a younger Rick, and Loretta, well she wasn’t hard to find, not with art like that marking her.
“Faster!” Steven ducked back into the car to re-load his weapon. His face shiny with sweat. He wasn’t letting Rick slip through his fingers again, “Faster! He knows we’re coming!”
It had been an afternoon filled with a soft sun that filtered weakly through shape shifting clouds. Those clouds had gathered slowly, unnoticeably, as the day darkened into evening, covering the sky in a thick ominous blanket that rumbled and flashed with lightening.
Rick piled the loaded guns into a large duffel bag, then pulled a second duffel bag out of a wooden chest that stood prominently in one corner of the living room. This one was already packed with everything they’d need if they were ever on the run again. He was used to a life of looking over his shoulder and so he didn’t panic, aside from his worry for Loretta he was disconcertingly calm. As if summoned by his thoughts of her, he heard tires screech to a stop outside.
Loretta leapt out of her car which she’d cunningly parked away from their concealed cabin and run panicked, straight into the solid figure of her husband.
“You okay?” he enveloped her in a crushing hug, lifting her off the ground and running to their cabin just as the authorities pulled up.
Their house was cleverly concealed but it wasn’t invisible and Steven, high on adrenaline, made easy work of finding it. “Come out Rick,” Steven yelled, as he and his three colleagues drew their guns.
“Never!” Rick yelled, pulling open a cleverly concealed trapdoor in their kitchen that hid a roughly hewn dark passageway that led to a spacious underground cave, miles off, in a hill hollowed out by a river.
“I’m counting to three,” Steven nodded at two men who moved stealthily to cover the back of the cabin, “One, Two…”
A burst of gunfire cut him off and he fell flat onto the ground as Rick fired. Loretta was already in the damp passageway, dragging a duffel bag behind her. Steven was lucky Rick wasn’t aiming at him, he was just angling for them to fire back. And fire back they did, just as Rick climbed through the trapdoor and fired at their large kitchen gas tank. The fireball was massive. It took weeks for them to comb through the ruins before Steven was informed that they’d found no bodies; and plead though he did, his superiors had had enough.
The case was closed. The townspeople heard the explosion and saw the dark clouds of smoke rising, darker against the dark sky, and the woman with the striking tattoos was never seen around again.
