Free The Trial of Dr. Kate by Michael E. Glasscock III

behind her as she passed.
    She wouldn’t have thought anything about the truck if it hadn’t been for the incident with the tires. But it followed her for about a mile, staying roughly twenty yards behind her car. She felt a lump in her throat and noticed her pulse quicken. Slowly, she pressed the accelerator toward the floorboard, speeding up to fifty miles an hour. The truck did the same. Her mouth felt dry, and she pulled her purse next to her leg. It contained a snub-nosed Colt .38.
    She kept accelerating, as did the truck. She hit a straight stretch and glanced at her speedometer. The needle was pinned at eighty miles an hour. The truck pulled alongside her car. The passenger window was opaque with dust as well.
    Suddenly, the truck swung into her lane, forcing her to hit the shoulder of the road. She fought to keep the car from sliding into a ditch, but was able to pull the left front wheel back onto the asphalt and once again gain control. The whole time, the truck stayed right beside her.
    Ahead, a tractor pulled onto the road in her lane. She stepped on the brakes and slowed the car just as the truck swung into her lane again. This time she lost control. Her car went off the road, jumped the ditch, and plowed through a dry field. She fought the wheel, trying to keep the car from flipping over.
    Finally, the car came to a stop in an explosion of dry Parsons County dirt. Her chin hit the steering wheel, and for a split second, she lost consciousness.
    Quickly, she shook herself awake and looked out of her window. The truck sat in the middle of the highway. As soon as she moved her head, the truck began to move, and within seconds it was barreling down the blacktop, moving out of sight.
    Shenandoah crawled out of the car and saw the tractor moving across the field toward her, brown dust flying off its big rear wheels. She reached into the car and removed her purse. She slipped the Colt out and held it in her right hand behind her back.
    As the tractor approached, Shenandoah saw that it was driven by an old woman with a tattered straw hat pulled down over her furrowed face. The tractor made an abrupt stop, and the woman crawled down and wandered over to Shenandoah. She spit a trail of tobacco juice from the side of her mouth.
    “You okay, honey? Why’d that truck run you off the road?”
    Relaxing, Shenandoah slipped the pistol back into her shoulder bag. “I have no idea. Did you recognize the truck?”
    “Ain’t never seen it before in these parts. You sure you ain’t hurt none?”
    “I’m fine. Could you pull my car back up onto the highway?”
    The woman spit another stream of tobacco juice through her parched lips and laughed. “I ain’t got nothing else to do. Ain’t nothing to plant in this dried out Parsons County dirt. This damned drought’s sending me to the poor house.”
    With that, the old woman walked back to the tractor and removed a long chain from a metal box behind the driver’s seat. She wrapped it around the brace of the car’s front bumper and laid it out on the ground. Then she climbed into the driver’s seat and fired up the diesel engine. She turned the tractor around, backed up to Shenandoah’s car, and attached the chain to the tractor’s trailer hitch.
    “Sit in the car, honey, and steer the thing back up to the blacktop while I pull it.”
    Shenandoah scrambled back into her Chevy as a bloom of black diesel smoke bellowed out of the tractor’s exhaust. The tractor’s big rear wheels dug into the parched earth, and the right one began to spin before it finally gripped the surface and began to move forward. The car’s steering wheel spun quickly as the wheels lined up with the path of the tractor.
    Once the car rolled onto the highway, the tractor stopped and the old woman released the chain. Shenandoah crawled out of her car and walked to where the woman stood gathering up the links.
    “How much do I owe you?” Shenandoah asked.
    The woman frowned. “Nothing. It were