Bad Guys (35 page)

I could hear my heart pounding in my temples. “Turn the key ahead, move the shifter back and forth a couple times, try it again.”

I heard some noise in the background. “Okay, it’s on. You’re a genius.”

I let out a breath. “Just leave it running. There should be a button somewhere that opens that middle garage door.”

“Just a minute. Okay, yeah, I think this is it. Yep, the garage door is going up.”

“I want you to back the Virtue out, get it turned around in the driveway, leave the engine running. Leave the driver’s door open, you get in the back. Have the back door open that faces the house. When I come out, I’m going to put Angie in the back with you so you can look after her. She’s a bit woozy.”

“You don’t want me to drive?”

“I’ll drive. Can you do everything I’ve asked?”

“Yeah, sure. I’ll leave my phone on but put it in my pocket for a sec. Stay on the line.”

“Okay.” To Angie, I said, “We’re leaving, honey. We’re getting out of here in just a few seconds.”

“Okay, Daddy,” she said. “Did I hear right, is Trevor out there?”

“Yeah.”

“That little weasel, putting that fucking thing in my coat.”

“Why don’t we get angry with him about it later, after he saves our lives?”

“I suppose.” She grabbed her coat, slinging it over her arm so she could still keep the gun on Bullock.

“Mr. Walker?”

I held the phone back up to my ear. “Yeah.”

“I’m all set to go here. Run out, hop in the driver’s seat, and we’re off.”

“Good man,” I said. “We’ll be right out.” I slipped the phone into my jacket. “We’re going to be on our way, guys.” I pointed to Pockmark, the dark stain on his trousers getting even larger. “I think you should see about getting this one to a doctor.”

I motioned Angie toward the door. “You go first,” I said. “Get in the car.”

She slid by me and out the door. I heard her run down the hall, through the kitchen, then a door open and close.

“Get under the desk,” I said to Bullock. He scrunched down and got under. Then I told Blondie to do the same. He had some difficulty jamming himself under there with his boss.

Then I ran.

I was out the house door in a second. The Virtue was sitting there, right where it was supposed to be, Trevor and Angie in the back, plus Morpheus, jumping around the backseat and into the front. The driver’s door was left open, and I hopped in, threw the car into drive, and pressed the accelerator, knocking Morpheus, who was without doubt one of the ugliest dogs I’d ever seen, off his feet and into the back of the front bucket. The car jerked to a start, and we were flying down the sloped driveway so quickly the car’s front underpan slammed into the street as we turned onto it.

I caught a glimpse of Trevor, the strap of his laptop case looped over his shoulder, in my mirror and saw that he was turned around, looking behind us.

“They’re coming!” he said. “Two of them! They’re running to the SUV!”

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Angie said as I swerved to avoid hitting a station wagon I’d just cut off.

“It’s okay,” Trevor said to her softly. “It’s going to be okay.” Morpheus bounded into the backseat and licked Trevor in the face.

We were nearing the end of Wyndham, and in my mirror I saw headlights sweeping down to the end of the Bullock house driveway. The Annihilator burst into view, straightened, started coming after us like the enormous beast it was.

I glanced back. Angie looked pale. “I really need some air,” she said. “I gotta put down a window or I’m gonna be sick. Oh crap, there’s no buttons or anything to put the window down.”

It was true. When they’d taken the inside door panels off to search for drugs, they’d removed the power window controls. But there was still a button on the dash for the sunroof, and I opened it. “How’s that?” I asked.

“Better,” she said.

“Trevor,” I said. “Call 911.”

“Yeah.” He had his phone out and was about to punch in the numbers when I hung a hard right at an intersection, tossing my passengers—human and canine—about. “You might try to get your seat belts on if you get a chance,” I advised.

“Here,” Trevor said to Angie, “I’ll get yours.” And he leaned across, grabbed the belt from above her shoulder, and secured it. Then he did his own. “I’m calling them now,” he said. Morpheus was in Angie’s lap now, looking like maybe he was going to have a nap.

I didn’t have a destination in mind. I just wanted to get away.

The Annihilator cut that last corner short, riding up over one curb and down another. As far back as it was, I could still hear its engine roar with the Virtue sunroof open.

Trevor, craning his head around every few seconds, said, “They’re gaining.”

I leaned on the gas, but the hybrid didn’t take off the way I might have hoped. The SUV was closing the distance.

“Is this the police?” Trevor said into his phone. “We’re being chased by some people who want to kill us! Uh, we’re in a silver Virtue, going north on—” He looked around. “Where are we?” he shouted.

I wasn’t sure. I knew about as much as Trevor did, that we were heading north.

“I’m not sure. But look for a silver car being chased by a black SUV. There’s two men in it and they’re—”

We were hit from behind. The Annihilator, its shoulder-high headlamps filling the Virtue with light, had nudged the back bumper. Morpheus sprung up from his short nap, put his paws on the back window ledge, and began barking and slobbering. I swung the wheel to the right, then the left, crossing the middle lane and then back again. At least this time they weren’t shooting at us. I’d taken guns off both of Bullock’s men and—

And then they were shooting at us.

“He’s got a gun!” Trevor shouted. “Like a machine gun or something!”

“Get down!” I shouted, and Trevor threw his arm around Angie and forced her head below the bottom of the rear window.

“It’s going to be okay,” he told her again. “I’m going to take care of you. I’ll always take care of you.”

There were more shots, a
pop-pop-pop-pop
. All our windows were still intact, but I thought I’d heard at least one bullet strike the trunk or back bumper.

I rounded a corner, the tires shifting and slipping on some streetcar tracks. Up ahead, a late-night streetcar taking people home after the bars had closed was rolling along. I swung out to the left, passing it in the opposite lane. I glanced in my mirror and the Annhilator was gone, but once I’d passed the streetcar, it appeared on my right side. It had passed the streetcar on the inside and was now getting ready to ram us from the side.

I hit the brakes. The Annihilator, as big and as heavy as it was, couldn’t stop in as short a distance. I turned left down a narrow residential street. In seconds, I saw the headlights behind me again. I zigzagged my way through the neighborhood’s streets, a right, another right, a left, a right. I’d completely lost my bearings, but I hadn’t lost the Annihilator.

The thing was, my car was no match for it, not unless Bullock and Blondie ran out of gas. Driving the vehicle that got better mileage didn’t count for much at the moment. It wasn’t like I could take this chase off the streets. Off-road I’d have even less chance of getting away from that four-wheel-drive monster.

Ahead, I saw some familiar buildings. I was starting to get my bearings. We were coming up on Mackenzie University and its historic, grand structures.

I blasted past the gate, where you picked up your parking ticket when entering the grounds. The university streets were nearly deserted, hardly any cars parked along the lanes, no students walking around.

The Annihilator came in after me, barreling like a locomotive.

Angie raised her head enough to see where we were.

“Get back down,” Trevor said.

“Wait,” Angie said, looking around. “Dad, I’ve got an idea.”

“Me too,” I said, my hands wet with sweat as I gripped the wheel.

It was going to be tricky, that was for sure. But for all the car’s faults, its steering was tight and precise.

I slowed a bit, let the Annihilator gain on us. It only took a second. The SUV’s massive grill loomed over our trunk, its lights like fire, its engine roaring as if it were about to devour us.

Morpheus barked incessantly.

I sped through the grounds, looking for Galloway Hall. There it was, up ahead. And there, around the building’s far side, Angie’s shortcut. The pedestrian pathway.

I waited until the last possible second, then cranked the wheel hard to the right, gripping it with both hands, and aimed the car for the center of the opening, this low-ceilinged pathway that Angie used to sneak out of Mackenzie without paying for her parking.

The Annihilator was no more than a couple of feet behind us.

We’d only been in the tunnel a thousandth of a second when we heard it. An ear-splitting noise. Metal meeting brick. Glass shattering. Sheet metal tearing.

I’d have looked back, but I had to keep my eyes straight ahead to make sure neither fender caught the brick walls. But I was able to catch a glimpse of the fireball in the rearview mirror. I didn’t slow down. I didn’t know how much of the Annihilator might be left to follow us in.

As it turned out, what was left of the truck only went about thirty or forty feet, but I couldn’t bring myself to let up on the gas until we were out the other end. Only then did I stop the car, a couple of feet shy of the chain that kept us from driving out onto Edwards Street.

I unbuckled and, along with Angie and Trevor and Morpheus, got out of the Virtue and looked back.

The brick archway had caught the Annihilator at the base of the windshield. Bullock and Blondie would have been thrown forward from the force of the collision, but only in the instant before the brick archway sliced the entire top of the vehicle, and in all likelihood their heads, clean off.

THERE WAS A LOT of explaining to be done.

Before the cops began with their onslaught of questions, I told them, standing by the Virtue and holding a shaken Angie in my arms, that there were a few things they needed to know about immediately. There was the matter of a tied-up woman in a house out in the suburbs. And the fact that her husband had taken a header off a balcony at the airport Ramada, and that the odds were she didn’t know a thing about it yet.

Also, there was a guy with a bullet in his leg in a house on Wyndham Lane. Assuming he was still there, and hadn’t already hobbled his way down to the closest emergency room.

It was pretty likely they were going to find, in the back of that disintegrated Annihilator, a dead police detective. And further investigation by their forensic folks would show that he hadn’t died in the accident.

And last, but far from least, there was my daughter Angie. She seemed okay, but as I explained to one of the officers, she’d been drugged with something earlier in the evening and should be checked out at a hospital immediately. There were already ambulances at the scene, waiting for the folks from the fire department to see who or what they could recover from the wreckage of the SUV, so a couple of paramedics rushed over to see how she was.

“I’m going to have to answer a whole lot of questions,” I said as they loaded her into the back of the ambulance, an anxious Trevor moving from one foot to another as he cautioned the paramedics to be careful with her. “I’ll give your mother a call, send her to the hospital to wait with you. After they’ve checked you out, made sure you’re okay, the cops are going to have a lot of questions for you, too.”

Angie nodded tiredly and slipped her arms around my neck. “You look nice in your new clothes, Daddy,” she said.

“Thanks, honey.”

“Promise me you’ll have them check that bump on the side of your head?”

I smiled. “I think it’s fine. It might even have knocked some sense into me.”

She was puzzled by that, but let it go. “You were something,” she said. “You were really something.” And then her mouth dropped open, as though she’d suddenly remembered something.

“What?” I said.

“Shit,” she said. “I’ve got an essay due in the morning.”

I smiled. “I think being kidnapped and narrowly escaping death is an even better excuse than having your dog eat your homework. I’m sure the paramedics will write you a note. Which course is it?”

“My psych course. I had all the research done. All I had to do was write it up, which I was gonna do last night.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Your professor will understand. What was it about, anyway?”

She smiled. “Man and masochism,” she said. “Trying to figure out why some guys get turned on by pain.”

My eyebrows went up. “This is what they’re teaching you in school?”

“College, Dad.”

Tumblers started falling into place. “So, what kind of research did you have to do for a paper like that?”

“I read all kinds of stuff, and I even talked to Trixie.”

“Oh yeah,” I said, like I was trying to remember. “Our old neighbor.”

“She’s hardly old. She’s pretty dynamite looking, actually.”

“You know what I meant.”

“Yeah. Like, it’s no secret anymore what she does for a living, so I gave her a call, she gave me all kinds of great quotes. I made her promise not to tell you, ’cause I knew you and Mom would freak if you knew I was going out to see her.”

“No,” I said defensively, “we’d have understood.”

“She’s actually a very nice person,” Angie said.

“Yeah, for sure. She is.”

“It’s not the sort of thing I’d like to do for a living, though, you know?”

I nodded. “Well, I don’t like to judge.”

Angie smiled. “I hope you’re not pissed.”

It was my turn to smile. “I’ll get over it. Listen, you really should get checked out.”

She turned and there was Trevor, trying hard to look nonchalant in his long black coat, but you could see it in his eyes, that he was rattled, that he’d been through a night like no other. Morpheus seemed a bit drained, too, standing at Trevor’s side, leaning into him, his long tongue hanging in front of him.

Angie approached Trevor, smiled. “Thank you,” she said. She leaned in and gave him a light kiss on the cheek. “Thanks for being there. I guess I’ll give you shit later about how you happened to know where we were.”