Choke by Kaye George Read Free Book Online

Hortense just as the smoke alarms started shrieking.
    Imogene held her breath. Now was when her plan would either work or not.
    Ralph threw open the interrogation room door where Hortense was and ran toward the front. “Fire!” he yelled. “Follow me!” He ran fast for such a big guy.
    Instead of obeying and following Ralph, Immy ran into the room and straight to her mother. Her plan was working. At first, Hortense wouldn’t, or couldn’t, get up. She must have been sitting there for hours in that hard chair.
    She grabbed her mother’s hand. Stupid Ralph. If the station were really burning out of control, he would have let her mother fry in here.
    “Is that the fire alarm? Is there a fire?” Hortense gave her daughter a dazed look.
    Immy had never seen her mother look so demoralized and bedraggled. “It’s part of my plan to get you out of here, Mother, my plan to spring you.”
    “Darling,” she whispered back, “they think I killed Hugh. I really think that they really think that.” There was fear in her wide eyes.
    Immy paused just a second to figure out her mother’s syntax, then resumed her urging. “Quick, before they come back.” Immy tugged Hortense to her feet and dragged her into the hallway. It was empty, but she could see people milling about in the front vestibule through the open door.
    “This way,” Immy urged.
    Hortense shook her head to clear it, stood tall, and was suddenly energized. The three pushed through the side door, clambered into the van, and Immy sped away, avoiding the front of the building.
    “Ah. It worked! The old fire-in-the-wastebasket trick.”
    “You set the fire?” Her mother looked at her in amazement.
    See, I’m not so helpless. Not so stupid, either. Immy nodded and a big grin split her face. “Jailbreak! How cool is that?”
    “Mommy.” Drew’s tiny voice piped from the back seat.
    Immy turned to see her daughter’s puckered brow and worried eyes. “It’s all right, sweetie. Fasten your seat belt. Mommy and Geemaw are all right. Aren’t we, Mother?” The last question was more for Drew’s sake than her own.
    “Where we going, Mommy?” piped Drew.
    Immy felt her mother and her daughter looking at her.
    “Well, what’s the next part of your plan?” asked Hortense.

Seven
    Immy drove straight out of Saltlick and came to the next small town, Cowtail. Her plan had only extended through the jailbreak, so now she was improvising.
    “I think we’d better lay low somewhere until the heat blows over, Mother.”
    “Imogene, why are you talking like that? You sound like a character in an old movie. An old, terrible movie.”
    More like the old detective novels she had read, Immy thought. She loved the way those characters talked.
    “Still,” Immy said, “don’t you think we ought to hide out? Where would they not think to look for us?”
    Hortense stared out the van window. They wended down Cowtail’s main street, Second Avenue, as opposed to Saltlick’s main drag, Second Street. Hortense had often voiced to Immy her opinion of the unoriginality of the city founders of both towns who had used exactly two brain cells to name the streets.
    At the far edge of town squatted a squalid little strip motel, fronted by a trash-filled, dry swimming pool and advertising itself as Cowtail’s Finest. “That’s a falsehood,” said Hortense. “There’s a nicer one at the other end of town. We just passed it.”
    “Then let’s stay here.” Immy turned the van onto the asphalt in front of the door marked Office at the end of the building and jumped out. “They won’t look here, will they? I’ll see if I can park around back.”
    Half the long, rectangular building’s rooms faced the road, but the ones on the back side, away from the highway, faced a cow pasture and couldn’t be seen from the main road. Immy booked one in the rear and hurried to move the van out of sight.
    It didn’t take long to move in, since they lacked luggage. Drew tested the bed by