Choke by Kaye George Page B

ineffectual disguise thing, she decided to jettison it, too. Unfortunately, the wig was tangled in the handle of the plastic bag that held her newly purchased treasures, so they went out the window with it.
    Slamming on the brakes, she pulled to the roadside shoulder, intending to retrieve her pencils and pins. She needed the pencils to color-code her list. A dark SUV that seemed to have been traveling at a high rate of speed squealed its tires as it swerved around her. A loud report sounded.
    At first Immy thought a gun had been fired, and she ducked low behind the steering wheel. Then she saw the car, now in front of her, sag to the right. Was that her letter opener sticking out of the flattened tire?
    Sirens wailed behind her, coming closer.
    Had the rude clerk fingered her? Was she made? Were the cops onto her? She pulled out onto the road and sped away. The sirens continued screaming, wailing, up and down, drilling into her brain.
    She kept her grip on the steering wheel, but sweat oozed from her palms, sprang to her forehead, and dripped beneath her arms. She had never been in a high-speed chase before.
    As she reached the edge of Wymee Falls, the sirens came to an abrupt stop. She chanced a glance in the rearview mirror. They were stopping at the SUV with the flat tire.
    Close call. They weren’t going to nab her, at least not today.
    But her hands didn’t stop shaking until she had been back in the motel room for at least an hour.

Eleven
    Detective Immy needed more information. She needed to inspect the scene of the crime further. If Clem could go inside the diner when it was roped off with police tape, so could she. Maybe the tape was gone by now anyway. How long did they leave that stuff up?
    She didn’t expect the diner to be open for business, but it was. What was Clem thinking of? It had to be him that opened it up. That just didn’t seem decent to Immy.
    Five white pickups were nosed into the curb in front of Huey’s Hash, and as she walked past, again in disguise, two leather-skinned ranchers came out the front door rubbing their bellies and smiling. They looked vaguely familiar, and one nodded to her. They were probably semi-regular customers. They wouldn’t know her in disguise, so they were no doubt just being polite. Clem might see through it, though. She had better not go in.
    Immy returned to the alley where she had stealthily parked the van and decided she would have to come back when the restaurant was closed. She picked up a bucket of chicken for her mother and her for lunch at the drive-through chicken place in Cowtail, then hunkered down at the hideout until nighttime when she could use the cover of darkness.
    A good operative knew when to carry out covert missions, or was she straying from private eye into thriller territory with that thought?
    You never knew how spooky a place was until you tried to sneak around in it at night. She waited until midnight, a time when most Saltlickians were in bed. The van sounded like a motorcycle roaring through the quiet, deserted streets. She passed close enough to the police station to see that both official cars were parked there. As far as she could tell, she wasn’t detected hiding the van in the back of the diner again, where Clem usually parked.
    She still hadn’t figured out how to turn off the dome light, and she let out a squeak when it lit up the alley as she opened the van door. Then she let out a louder squeak when the sound of the door slamming reverberated off the solid back wall of the eatery like a rifle shot. This definitely felt much more like a thriller than a detective story lately. She hadn’t read many thrillers, but she hoped they had happy endings.
    It was hard to tell if anyone had heard her. She doubted she could have heard a siren over the pounding she felt in her ears. Was her heart going to explode? After five full minutes of standing stock still and no one appearing, she approached the back door, her heart pounding slightly