Free The Lonely Mile by Allan Leverone Page B

mused about how he had spent such a long time this afternoon picking out the girl he had hoped would be the one back at the rest stop, only to have her wrenched from his grasp by that loser with the gun who didn’t have a clue how to mind his own business. Then, by doing so, the same idiot presented him with an even better replacement!
    He would have to do more digging—for example, what were the young Carli Ferguson’s living arrangements, and how much time did she spend with her father, the busybody himself?—but after just thirty minutes, Martin had decided exactly what he was going to do and how he was going to do it. He couldn’t believe his good fortune. This was perfect. It was as if the gods of karma were telling him the little chickie he had tried to snatch this afternoon was simply not good enough for him, that another girl would be a much better fit.
    And now he knew who that girl was. Her name was Carli Ferguson, and, incredibly, if she lived anywhere near her father, she was just thirty or so minutes away from this very living room. Over the course of the last three years plus, Martin had been careful to spread his kidnappings over a very wide geographical area, covering more than five hundred miles of the east-west highway. He was certain that caution—among other important factors—had resulted in the authorities not having the slightest clue as to the location of his home base. They wanted him badly, of that he had no doubt, but they would never find him.
    The drawback to being so careful was the time spent on the road, far from home, scoping out potential victims and then snatching them from the mind-numbingly similar rest stops dotting I-90. Recently, he had begun returning home via back roads rather than the Interstate, all in an effort to throw the nosy pigs off his trail—those inconvenient Amber Alerts could really throw a monkey wrench into his well-laid plans.
    So, the fact that his soon-to-be special friend Carli Ferguson happened to live in the immediate area was one more stroke of good fortune, all of it leading Martin to the conclusion that she might actually be the perfect temporary companion, the one special girl he had been searching for all these years. Time after time, he thought he had found her, only to discover upon closer inspection that the girl’s eyes were placed too closely together, or she refused to shut her mouth when ordered to, or she was too tall or too short or weighed a couple of pounds too much. It was always something.
    None of that mattered in the long run, of course, since seven days was such a short length of time—a drop in the bucket, really—but Martin considered himself extremely discriminating, and although he could still have plenty of fun with a companion who possessed a few flaws, he had lived his life waiting and hoping that the perfect one would eventually appear. The search had been exhausting, both mentally and physically, and there were times when Martin had begun to fear he would never find the girl of his dreams, that she was nothing more than the figment of an overeager and overheated imagination.
    But now, with the delectable Carli Ferguson nearly in his grasp, combined with the perfect method of lowering the boom of vengeance on her busybody father, Martin felt like climbing onto his roof and shouting out to the world, “Yes! Yes! I’ve found her! This girl is the one!”
    It was obvious to Martin that the fates had been at work. The girl he had chosen back at the rest stop was unworthy; he could see that now with the benefit of hindsight. The one he had nearly been stuck with was not quite tall enough, and her dishwater blonde hair was dull and lackluster compared to Carli Ferguson’s, whose golden locks seemed somehow to contain rays of sunshine itself. He stared at the screen, awestruck by the serendipitous way things had turned out.
    Martin would have been thankful for Bill Ferguson’s interference, but for the knowledge that the wannabe