Dead Drop

by Marc Cameron

  The young officer continued with his description. “Two white male adults, one white female. They . . . it . . . I mean . . . the vehicle’s still going south.” His face was flushed, his voice a half an octave higher than it should have been.

  Quinn recognized the wounded officer as Greg Sizemore, a man Quinn had gone to high school with. A patch on the shoulder of his navy blue uniform identified him as an FTO or Field Training Officer, which made his partner a trainee. New or not, the rookie was doing everything right by applying pressure to an apparent gunshot wound just above Sizemore’s collarbone.

  “Are both vehicles involved?” Quinn asked, nodding toward the tiny dots that were the pickup and the Subaru as they faded into the distance around a mountain curve.

  “Only the white sedan,” Sizemore said, grimacing at the pain from his wound. “The pickup came by just before the shooting. I think the white car must have passed him. Driver and . . . front passenger are both armed. Don’t know about the girl in back.”

  Quinn felt Ronnie tap him on the shoulder. He scooted forward against the gas tank, giving her room to get off the bike. The bullet looked to have caught Sizemore just above his vest, probably destroying his collarbone. Blood seeped up through the rookie’s clenched fingers but he appeared to have it stopped until an ambulance arrived. Ronnie peeled off her helmet, shaking out long black hair, and bent to help.

  “You good for me to go get ’em, bud?” Quinn asked, looking at the downed officer.

  “Hell, yes,” Sizemore grunted, stifling a cough. “Sons of bitches shot me. Tear ’em up.”

  The rookie looked up at Quinn. “We have units responding from South Anchorage and a Trooper coming north from Summit Lake—”

  “Tell them the man on the bike is a good guy,” Quinn said, before flipping down his visor and giving the highway behind him a quick head check. A cloud of smoke rose from the BMW’s rear tire as he rolled on the gas, falling in after the white Subaru.

  The GS accelerated quickly, scooping Quinn into the seat as it ripped down the highway. He leaned hard, nearly dragging a knee as he rounded the first corner past the Girdwood cutoff. He pushed from his mind the fact that the only thing that kept him upright were the two rubber contact patches where his tires met the pavement, each about four square inches.

  Chapter 2

  Quinn’s mind raced ahead of the bike, looking for rocks, vehicles jumping out from side roads, and any other obstacles that could send him over the side of the Seward Highway in a flaming ball of twisted metal and leather.

  He toed the Beemer down a gear, feeling the aggressive pull of the engine. The speedometer on the GPS display between his handlebars climbed past ninety and then a hundred miles an hour. The Subaru moved fast, and the red pickup stayed tight on its tail, but Quinn began to gain ground the moment he left the downed officer.

  Still a mile back, Quinn watched the red pickup move up as if to pass the little Subaru on a long straightaway. Instead of passing, the larger truck jerked to the right, un-tracking the sedan and sending it spinning out of control and slamming it against the mountain on the left side of the road. The red pickup flew past, smoke pouring from its rear tires as it skidded to a stop, and them began to back down the middle of the road toward the wrecked Subaru.

  Quinn reached back with his left hand, feeling along the metal cargo box until he found a one-liter metal fuel bottle.

  He was still a little over a half mile behind the Subaru. At his present speed, the GS would close the distance in less than twenty seconds. It took Quinn a few of those precious seconds to flip the latches that held the fuel bottle in place, but he finally felt it snap and brought the bottle up by his handlebars, holding it tight in his left hand.

  Ahead on the left, people began to boil out of the wrecked Subaru, surely stunned. They’d shot a cop, so Quinn still considered them plenty dangerous.

  He eased off the throttle but kept the bike moving around forty miles an hour as he neared the man who’d climbed out the driver’s side of the Subaru—the shooter. The man from the red pickup was already engaged in a shouting match with the Subaru passenger, who’d made it out first. Quinn saw the gun in the Subaru driver’s hand when he was still fifty feet away. The sneaker-like Truants would allow him to fight and run better than his usual motocross boots, but he wanted to tenderize the men as much as possible before he even got off the bike.

  Quinn goosed the throttle, closing the distance in an instant, bringing the aluminum bottle up just in time to catch the driver in the side of his head with a resounding “tink.” Two pounds of aluminum and fuel traveling over forty miles an hour dropped the witless shooter in his tracks. Quinn let the bottle go the moment after impact, grabbing a handful of brakes and skidding the bike to a hard stop along the asphalt shoulder. He drifted the rear wheel during the slide to bring the back end of the bike around so he was facing his threat.

  He got the Beemer stopped in time to watch the driver of the red pickup, an older man with a tweed driving cap, slap the Subaru passenger in the ear with an open palm, driving him to his knees. The female passenger from the Subaru threw her hands in the air, wailing and cursing as if she was being beaten herself, but giving up immediately. Quinn drew his Kimber 10mm from the holster tucked inside the waistband of his riding pants and scanned the area.

  The man in the driving cap had drawn a gun of his own and now trained it on the downed Subaru passenger.

  “Jim Hoyt, DEA,” he shouted to Quinn. “Retired.”

  * * *

  The driver of the Subaru, a skinny twentysomething covered with meth sores, looked up at Quinn from where he sat against a slab of rock, a bloody hand pressed to the side of his head. “You could have killed me,” he said. “I don’t know who you are, but I’m gonna sue the shit out of you, mister.”

  “Hell of a thing,” Hoyt said. “You’d think a little shitass cop shooter who got smacked from the back of a moving motorcycle would be a little more sedate.”

  Quinn raised an eyebrow, wondering how Hoyt knew a cop had been shot.

  “Got a scanner in the truck,” Hoyt said. “Heard the description go out about the same time this rocket scientist flew past me.”

  There was a no-nonsense air about Jim Hoyt that made Quinn wonder just what he’d done for the DEA—and how long he’d been retired. A tall woman with long, silver hair and a silver gleam in her blue eyes introduced herself as Mrs. Hoyt. She’d moved their pickup out of the roadway and now stood beside the open door, arms across the large bosom of her fleece vest. She looked at her husband and shook her head, giving a resigned sigh—certainly a policeman’s wife, accustomed to his behavior.

  Quinn and Hoyt worked together to pat down the occupants of the Subaru, lining them up face down in the grass along the shoulder of the road. Bad guys secured, Hoyt stepped up to Quinn, keeping an injured elbow tucked in tight against his body. His cheeks were flushed, and he was obviously in pain judging by the way he treated the elbow. Pain or not, his green eyes sparkled with a mischievous grin. His jacket fell open when he extended a large hand toward Quinn, revealing a sweatshirt bearing a blue Air Force Academy Falcon logo.

  “That was some good work back there pitting these guys, Mr. Hoyt,” Quinn said, nodding to the man’s shirt and giving him a knowing wink as they shook hands. “Fast, neat, average . . .”

  “Ah.” Hoyt returned the wink with one of his own. “Friendly, good, good,” he said, providing Quinn with the second half of the phrase used by one Air Force Academy graduate to identify another. Taken straight from the Mitchel Dining Hall comment card, Fast, Neat, Average, Friendly, Good, Good were the only acceptable critique freshman cadets were allowed to give on the mandatory Form 0-96.

  Hoyt stepped back to give Quinn a more thorough up-and-down look. “Class of seventy-five.”

  “Two thousand and two,” Quinn said.

  “Oh.” Hoyt rubbed his elbow. “That class.”

  “Yeah,” Quinn said, “that class.” He decided to steer t
he subject away from the fact that he’d graduated from the Air Force Academy the same academic year Al-Qaeda brought down the Twin Towers and crashed a plane into the Pentagon. “You sir, are a good guy to have around.”

  “That was hellacious!” Hoyt grinned, shooting a glance at his wife. “Work as long as you can, son. Retirement’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”

  Quinn chuckled, rolling his shoulders to relieve the pain in his ribs as he nodded to Hoyt’s elbow. “You should probably have that looked at.”

  “Don’t worry about him.” Mrs. Hoyt gave a little good-natured scoff. “He’ll be glowing about this for days,” she said. “Best thing in the world for him, getting to mix it up with some bad guys. Makes him realize he’s still relevant.”

  A white Alaska State Trooper SUV approached from the north carrying Ronnie Garcia in the passenger seat. Quinn could tell immediately from the frown on her face that something was terribly wrong.

  “What is it?” Quinn said when she opened her door. “What’s the—”

  Half in, half out of the car, Ronnie waved Quinn over. “Jericho,” she said. “You need to come hear this.”

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  Photo by V. Otte

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  A native of Texas, MARC CAMERON has spent over twenty-nine years in law enforcement. His assignments have taken him from rural Alaska to Manhattan, from Canada to Mexico and points in between. A second-degree black belt in jujitsu, he often teaches defensive tactics to law-enforcement agencies and civilian groups. Cameron presently lives in Alaska with his wife and his BMW motorcycle.