As Roger stomped his foot down on the gas, the three passengers instinctively and frantically checked their seatbelts. The van clanked and rattled in protest as Roger swerved in and out of slower moving traffic. Roger jerked the wheel to the right and the van made a sharp switch one lane to the right; Elliott began to slide towards Shavian and as appealing as that thought was, he figured that was probably one sided and he reached for the door handle to brace himself. His stomach lurched unhappily, and he suppressed a gag reflex. At least Shavian wasn’t punching him anymore, but his nose hurt like hell and his stomach wasn’t feeling awesome either.
Even Junie was holding tight to the bar above the passenger seat, but her eyes were lit up; she was just crazy enough to enjoy this. She swayed in her seat as the van jerked over the road, giggling and throwing her hands in the air like she was on a roller coaster.
Roger pushed the old van up to eighty-five, and the vibrations under their feet increased; the van was complying but was making it very clear that it was not pleased about it and there’d better be an apology and a front end alignment at the end of this.
Behind them the police cars were catching up quickly, like bullies chasing the geek, their backpack full of calculus books. The van was plucky but there was no way it was going to outrun police cruisers. Hell, they probably couldn’t outrun the S.W.A.T. van.
“We’re going to have to take this off-road, folks!” Roger shouted. “Keep your eyes peeled for somewhere we can get off the freeway.”
Elliott groaned, Junie whooped enthusiastically and Shavian rolled her eyes. “Anyone need last rites?” Roger asked.
“You have the right to remain silent!” Junie exclaimed. “Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law!”
“Those are Miranda Rights,” Shavian growled.
“Yeah, I know,” Junie said, nodding out the window. “Still applies.”
Outside, cops cars pulled up on either side of the van. Over the loud speaker they all heard, “Pull over!”
“Elliott, my boy, how close are we to the Oregon border?” Roger shouted, swerving right, trying to get as far right as he could; he was still stuck in the rightmost middle lane.
Elliott took a deep breath and pulled his phone out of his pocket, activating the GPS navigation. He knew they were close, but a glance up made the GPS pointless: the Columbia River sparkled ahead of them, the bridges spanning it and leading into Portland rising up on the horizon as they rounded a corner.
“Pretty close,” he said. “Those are Washington cops, can they follow us into Portland?”
“Afraid so,” Roger replied. “Besides, I’m sure Oregon cops would want to catch us as much as the Washingtonian ones.”
“Well, we can’t go off-road now, Rog, we’ll wind up driving straight into the river!”
“Yeah, I noticed,” Roger snapped. “We’ll have to improvise.”
Nervously Elliott looked out the window, and gasped: the police cruiser that had pulled up on their left jerked towards them. Roger hauled the wheel to the right, and the van swayed; when Elliott looked to his right, he saw Shavian closing her eyes and taking deep breaths. “We’ll be fine,” he reassured her just as the van struck a guardrail and bounced off.
“Shut up, fuckbean,” she snarled, not bothering to open her eyes. Elliott couldn’t deny that hurt but he also couldn’t deny that he just might deserve that.
“Look, I’m sorry about all this, I really am. I was just trying to protect you,” he said pleadingly, trying to make it better somehow. He couldn’t stand her hating him.
“Whatever,” she muttered. Elliott suppressed a grin; it was a start.
Elliott was snapped out of his reverie when Roger slammed on his brakes; everyone jerked forward, and the seatbelt contracted and squeezed the breath out of his diaphragm. Shavian winced as the same happened to her but Junie rolled down the window with a yelp and cried out the window, “You’ll never take us alive!”
A man in a dinged up Kia sedan frowned in bafflement as Junie waved her fist at him. The ten year old in his backseat flipped her off.
The cops, caught unawares, sped by, slowing but having no room to turn around. The cops were unwilling to take risks with the lives of unsuspecting bystanders; Roger evidently had no problem gambling with the lives in his car. The big Scot was driving like a maniac. He shoved the accelerator to the floor, swerving and changing lanes with so little room between cars that a fly on the bumper would have been brushed off in passing. His gambit worked: he wound around the cars that boxed in the cops, having brought traffic to a standstill behind him as everyone tried to avoid hitting him.
Pulling up on to very edge of the road, the large metal bridge supports whipping by the window dangerously close, they drove by the state patrol cars stuck in the scum on the bridge. Even Shavian’s head turned to watch the cops in disbelief at what Rodger had pulled off.
“No, no, no,” she mouthed as they cop cars became smaller and smaller in the distance
The Columbia River was now below them and on either side when Elliott looked out the window. They zipped across the bridge and into Portland.
“Well, we made it to Oregon,” Junie said.