Chapter 1 - As far away as possible
Actually she had intended to drive to the north and then to the west, but then still in Florida she decided to get rid of the rental car first thing and let it fall down a slope into the sea with the driver's door open, leaving her real papers in the glove compartement.
That would at least be enough to report her missing and it might also be enough to fake her death. Either way, it could only be to her advantage.
Wearing oversized sunglasses and hiding her long hair under a baseball cap pulled low on her forehead, she boarded a Greyhound long-distance bus at the next available opportunity. If you didn't look closely, you could mistake her with her backpack for a half-wit on a field trip.
After a few hours of driving, she had enough of this kinda unpleasant to travel like that, and as soon as they crossed the state line, she got off in the next town and bought an older and wornout-looking GMC pickup from a used car dealer who wasn't really interested at all about her fake ID.
As she drove on, she had to shake her head again because of her new name: Roxanne Boone.
Sounded like a porn star but the weirder and more unusual the better.
Sometime the next day, she stopped at a well-stocked drugstore in Dallas and stocked up on drinks, some groceries, black hair dye, colored disposable contact lenses and a hair clipper. As usual she paid cash.
In the evening, she checked into a motel and finally began to radically change her look:
She shortened her white-blond hair to shoulder height, gave herself a beveled sidecut and then dyed it jet black. She briefly considered dyeing her eyebrows as well, but then decided against it, preferring to make up for it with an appropriate makeup pencil. After the color was rinsed out and she had inserted the new disposable contact lenses, this contrast effect amazed her. Wearing black clothes and appropriate makeup, she was almost unrecognizable afterwards.
"Hi, I'm Roxanne. Roxanne Boone," she introduced herself to her reflection with a wry smile and had to practice a few more times until it sounded convincing.
Finally arriving in California, she asked for work in every more or less remote small town she passed or drove through, but had no luck and so it took her further and further north. Should it take her all the way across the border into Canada, she basically wouldn't mind either.
In a supermarket parking lot just outside of Sakramento, she struggled to fold the road map back up and swept down one of the cans of Coke she had just bought, which she had unceremoniously placed on the dashboard, and bent down cursing for it.
Because of this, and also because of the loud rock music blaring from the car radio, she neither saw nor heard the motorcycle pulling into the empty parking space across the street.
She turned down the radio, threw the Coke cans on the passenger seat, tossed the only half-folded road map onto the backseat, before she started the engine and backed out of the parking space way too fast. Too late she realized she hadn't looked in the rearview mirror, and shortly thereafter she already noticed and heard the impact and subsequent unmistakable crash and crunch of metal.
"Shit!" She jumped out of the pickup and moments later clasped her hands over her head in horror. Although no one had come to harm, but the black Harley and shortly after a guy in appropriate black biker gear already rushed out the door of the supermarket.