Proven Guilty (Treadmill III)

IX

You know what movie scenes have always been my favorite?

            Car chases.

            They're always so intense. There's always great music playing in the background, and people are yelling and driving on the wrong side of the road and almost killing, but never actually killing, innocent pedestrians. The bad guys are right on the good guys' tail, but the good guys' car is always smaller and fits in a little alleyway to get out. And you think they're safe; you think that they got away. But once they emerge from the alley, there's the bad guys again, right behind them, and the whole thing starts over. The music rises and falls with the action on the screen, and your heart is pounding despite the fact that the outcome of this scene does nothing to your own personal life.

            When I watched car chases in the movies, I had never thought that I would ever be involved in one. I had especially never thought I would be involved in one where I wasn't sure whether I would be considered the good guy or the bad guy to an objective observer.

            It was probably the latter.

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            Kennedy had managed to sit up straight and turn her body around to see the cars with their flashing lights and wailing sirens following Rebecca's tiny little car. She counted three cop cars in total, but she could have been wrong; the adrenaline and the lights did nothing to help her vision.

            "Can this thing go any faster?" Kennedy spat over her shoulder, "They're going to catch us."

            "The pedal is quite literally touching the floor." Rebecca snapped.

            Kennedy turned around to look in front of them and wasn't sure if this vantage point was more or less terrifying than the back window.

            They were flying down a road that Kennedy couldn't remember the name of, but knew the speed limit couldn't have been more than 45 mph. One glance at the speedometer on Rebecca's dash told Kennedy that they were travelling at well over double that speed. Rebecca was honking her horn incessantly in an effort to warn cars that she was coming up behind them. When they didn't move, she wove around them with a deft accuracy that Kennedy hadn't realized she was capable of.

            Rebecca took a sharp right turn onto a street that had hardly any lighting besides the headlights of whatever car moseyed down it. Their little blue car raced along, and Kennedy looked behind them again to see that they had lost one of the cop cars in that turn, but the other two were still determined in their pursuit.

            "Where are we going?" Rebecca asked, and Kennedy heard the first inkling of fear in her voice, "I don't know if there's a specific direction I should be heading in."

            "Florida." Kennedy said the first state that came to her mind, "Go south."

            "How specific of you."

            Rebecca swerved around and headed to the left, where the highway would eventually appear. The sirens from the police cars grew louder, and Kennedy grew desperate.

            "Do you have anything in here that we could throw at them?"

            Rebecca's eyebrows shot into her hairline and she met Kennedy's gaze through the rearview mirror.

            "You want to not only be a fugitive, an accused murderer, and a permanent flight risk for the rest of your life, but you also want to add assaulting the police to that list?"