Robert pressed the accelerator and merged onto the travel lane. The service area with illuminated signs and parking lot lights receded in his rearview mirror. He faced the black night. Barely visible in the distance ahead along the straight dark highway a single red taillight glowed. Behind him no headlights were visible. It was a lonely stretch of road in the middle of the night in the middle of the country.
A jagged bolt of lightning severed the sky and illuminated the plains for an instant. A thunderous drum roll followed and a sudden spattering of heavy raindrops came and went.
He closed the distance between him and the vehicle ahead until he reached within a few car lengths. Even this close, the car ahead was tricky to see with the driver’s side taillight out and the rain starting up again.
He hadn’t been able to flag her down at the service station when he saw her pulling away from the fuel pumps, and he instinctively followed her onto the highway intending to warn her. Now that he’d gotten close, he realized he had no way to signal her. If he flashed his high beams, she wouldn’t understand his message, would probably think he was some wacko driver, and she wouldn’t know how to react. He couldn’t pull up beside her in the left lane to get her attention. Too dangerous. He’d frighten her. A situation he wanted to make safer he’d make riskier.
More lightning flashed, followed by thunder that rumbled in his chest and a wind gust that buffeted the Mercedes. The rain picked up, falling hard and fast, a relentless gunfire on the windshield. Even with the wipers on high speed, the rain was winning. A single brake light on the car ahead lit up. He backed off and decided to camp out in a position where he could track the lone taillight. If he stayed in this position, no other vehicle could get between them and she wouldn’t have to be worried about being clipped from behind, although at the moment no other vehicles were visible in his rearview mirror.
He drove through the pounding rain, a safe distance from the car in front of him, forty miles per hour where the speed limit was seventy. At the exit for Minooka, a tractor-trailer merged onto the highway in front of their two-vehicle caravan. Immediately the car in front of Robert’s shifted to the left lane to pass, without signaling. The driver-side directionals must be out as well. Robert moved over. Between the downpour and spray from the truck, forward visibility degraded to almost nothing, yet the one-taillight car moved forward fearlessly. Robert could feel his car begin hydroplaning.
He got past the truck and moved into the right lane again behind the other car. The two cars continued along this way for another ten miles until the next exit where the car in front of him signaled (the right rear light was working) and took the off ramp for Brisbin Road. This was his own signal that the other driver was fine. She was getting off the highway on a lonely county road without services or lights and the rain pounding, although she must be close to her destination. She’d told him when they were chatting by the fuel pumps and he’d cleaned the bugs off her windshield that she didn’t have far to go.
But what if the county road were flooded? Or another vehicle came up on her too quickly? That’s the way accidents happen—in an instant. No, he was overreacting, his tendency to protect interfering with reason and logic. She would be fine. She didn’t need him escorting her.
At the last second, Robert swerved right and took the exit.
