Wicked Fix by Sarah Graves

Author:Sarah Graves
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: mystery, cozy, women sleuths
ISBN: 9780307570840
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 2009-09-09T00:00:00+00:00

Walking back along the rutted dirt track, I found the farm ruins still mouldering in the slanted sunlight, gnarled branches of old apple trees casting crooked shadows. Thick clumps of pale, blue-green iris foliage marked the old perennial garden, ancient roots pushing out of the earth like massive knucklebones.

A scallop dragger puttered in the channel at the end of the old Toll Road as I crossed the causeway back onto the island. In my rearview a line of cars had begun forming; off-islanders, most likely, impatient to reach their destination after a long drive.

There was nowhere for them to pass and I’d been just loafing along. I hit the gas hard and sailed into a long uphill curve, my thoughts still on Heywood’s last comment. He’d been lying.

The engine coughed. I glanced at the dash. The gas gauge’s needle sat on E. Impossible—but there was no time to worry about the implications of it; I was already into the curve.

The engine died, slowing me suddenly. The power steering went too, and to make matters worse, a car behind me was speeding up, pulling out, trying to pass.

Disastrously worse, actually: An air horn shot my attention forward again. An eighteen-wheeler, coming the other way around the curve …

I hauled the steering wheel, struggling to get off the road. The right front tire bit into the soft, sandy shoulder, slowing me further but not, I felt suddenly, slowing me enough. Ahead was a metal guardrail, beyond it thin air followed by a three-hundred-foot drop to the water, and of course I had no power brakes at that point, either.

The truck got bigger, its air horn blasting again. The car that had been trying to pass was now right beside me, aimed head-on at the truck. He couldn’t back off; the other cars had pulled up, closing the gap. But the big vehicle didn’t have anywhere to go either, because to its right was a vertical granite cliff, the continuation of the ledge that the road had been built into. The only area of shoulder was occupied by the massive, disabled crane-hauling rig I’d seen earlier, on my way out.

Oh, it was fascinating, and happening so fast, yet slowly, too. Gracefully, inevitably. In the next few instants, several of us were going to die, not a thing I could do about it.

Suddenly the car beside me slammed mine, with a thud that snapped my head sideways. It jolted me toward the rail, which was a puny thing, toylike, and then I couldn’t see the rail at all because it was underneath my front bumper. Thin air yawned ahead of me and he jolted me again, trying to get by; a metallic groan said the rail was giving under the pressure.

Then with a shriek of metal on metal the other car scraped past, skinning the eighteen-wheeler and my front fender by a matter of inches. My front bumper bent the guardrail out another fraction, trying to uproot the rail’s support posts, stopped.

And then it was over, the big rig’s air horn howling one way, the car speeding away in the other.

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