by Sam Sisavath
Large, meaty fingers grabbed her right wrist and someone (a man) shouted, “I got ’er! I got the crazy bitch!”
Crazy bitch? she thought, even as she struggled to turn over onto her back, the hand refusing to let go of hers. Worse, there were now two hands on her wrist and one of them was trying to pry her fingers off the gun’s grip.
A man at least a hundred pounds heavier than her was sitting on top of her chest trying to wrestle the gun away, his face contorted in intense concentration, his lips greasy with whatever he had been eating before he fled the diner. He was huge, and his weight on top of her was like a house-size boulder pinning her to the ground, and Allie had no delusions she was going to win this wrestling match.
“I got ’er!” he shouted again. “Someone give me a hand! Hey, someone give me a friggin’ hand!”
You idiot! she thought, and wanted to shout at him but simply didn’t have the strength. Getting blindsided by a man his size had knocked more than just the breath from her; it had dazed her, and being sat on by him afterward hadn’t helped. Her head was still swirling from the shock, and he had already managed to pry two fingers off the Sig Sauer’s grip and was working on the third.
The one bright spot was that absolutely no one had stopped to lend the man the assistance he was shouting for. Everyone kept running, going for their parked cars. She could smell plenty of burning rubber as vehicles continued taking off around them. It made sense, of course, why everyone was fleeing. Who was going to stick around when someone was shooting up the place? It might have just been one gunshot (hers), but she doubted if anyone realized that once the stampede began.
She didn’t care about any of them at the moment. The fact that they were fleeing was good because it meant less possible collateral damage. Right now she had to focus on the fat man on top of her trying to pry her fingers off her gun even while his weight threatened to shut off her ability to do something as simple as breathe.
“Let go!” the man shouted, spittle flying from his mouth and hitting her in the face. “Let go of the gun, you crazy bitch!”
She couldn’t lift herself off the ground far enough to hit him in his bloated face, so Allie went for the next best thing—his groin. It was squatting on her chest, within easy reach, and completely unprotected.
You’re such a cliché, she thought, and swung again with her left fist.
He gulped, cheeks ballooning as if he was going to vomit, before he leaned forward and raised himself slightly off her. Better yet, his grip on her right wrist lessened, which allowed her to jerk her arm, and the gun, away.
Of course she couldn’t just shoot him—he was, after all, just being a (vulgar and sexist pig) Good Samaritan—but that didn’t mean she couldn’t grab him by the shoulders and throw him off her. He offered little resistance and landed face-first on the concrete beside her even as she struggled to her knees.
She expected to find Dwight standing over her, having waited with a smug grin on his face all this time as she struggled with the Good Samaritan. But Dwight was gone and so was the man he had crashed into. There was just a hat where the two of them had been, and as she stared at it, red and green lights splashed across it and the parking lot floor around her.
When she looked up, Allie was surprised to see two squad cars pulling into the truck stop. She recognized their colors. State troopers. Their sirens were blaring so loudly that she couldn’t fathom how she hadn’t heard them until now. She guessed she was concentrating so hard on trying not to lose the gun to the Good Samaritan that the cops could have parked right next to them and she wouldn’t have been aware of it until their tussle was over.
The fact that they were coming in with sirens wailing surprised her, but that quickly gave way to reality—she had fired off a shot in the diner and someone had probably called 911 as a result. That, combined with what she had told Lucy to tell the troopers and someone, somewhere, had put two and two together and decided, as Lucy would say, “shit had gone down.” That meant taking the truck stop quietly and cautiously was no longer possible.
Or she hoped that was the case anyway, and that she wasn’t just dealing with a bunch of idiots who responded to her message like a bunch of Rambos. Either way, the squad cars were tearing through the parking lot only to slam on their brakes as fleeing vehicles blocked their path. Sedans, trucks, and semis were all moving at once, so many that they reminded her of fishes in a pond, each and every one of them heading for the multiple exits.
Block the exits, you idiots! she wanted to shout at the squad cars, but knew how stupid that was. There were only two so far, and it was going to take a hell of a lot more cruisers to do that. But right now, there was only one vehicle that she cared about.
She looked across the parking lot at where the black and red semitrailer and the Ford would be and immediately caught a glimpse of a running figure as it dodged a station wagon that nearly ran it over.
Dwight.
She scrambled to her feet and jumped over the Good Samaritan still rolling around on the floor, cupping his crotch. She focused on Dwight—he was moving fast, even as the red and green lights of more state troopers began filling the truck stop, flickering across the parking lot around her and turning the place into some kind of wild discotheque.
“Dwight!” she shouted.
She was hoping he would slow down at the sound of her voice and look back, and maybe lose a precious second or two (or five) and allow her to make up some ground. But he didn’t, and kept running. He might not have even heard her over the sirens and car engines and horns honking as people came dangerously close to colliding. It was a madhouse if she had ever seen one, except this one just happened to involve hundreds of tons of moving metal.
Then she saw it and instantly forgot all about Dwight: The black and red semitrailer’s headlights had turned on, the stream of bright lights cutting through the shadowed edge of the lot drawing her eyes.
No. No, no, no, no.
She was forty yards away and closing fast, but it wasn’t going to be quick enough. She knew it without having to think about it. She would never reach it in time, and when the driver finally put the rig in gear it was going to leave with Sara and the other girls in the back and she would have failed both Faith and Sara—
No!
No, no, no, no!
The ceiling light inside the semi’s cab flickered on as someone opened a door. It had to be the passenger side, since the driver was already behind the steering wheel and she could make out his form struggling with his seatbelt. The new light gave her something to focus on—more importantly, it gave her a target.
She fired, again and again, using the cab’s light as a marker, even as she willed it to stay on, stay on, goddammit, stay on just a little longer. She ran and fired and could feel the gun getting lighter in her hand, but she didn’t stop.
She couldn’t. She couldn’t.
Allie mouthed a curse when the cab light finally blinked out of existence, but there was also relief because the semi had still not moved. She concentrated on the headlights, the most visible part of the vehicle, and every second that it stayed frozen—even as she got closer—was a victory for her, for Sara, for all the other girls inside that long trailer, probably terrified to death of what was happening.
She eventually stopped shooting, but she never stopped running. Her breath hammered out of her, her heartbeat racing out of control from exhaustion and adrenaline and fear the rig would start moving. She didn’t know how many bullets she had left in the P250, but the gun felt remarkably light even as she swung her arms back and forth as she sprinted faster, faster, faster.
Allie was almost there, close enough that she could see the cab’s broken driver-side window, the bullet holes in its door, when it came out of nowhere—a new pair of headlights, blinding her from the right—and caught her as she was still in mid-stride. She might have jumped at the very last second, but she couldn’t be certain, because she was overwhelmed with a feeling of weightlessness, as if
she were…flying?
She didn’t really feel the impact of slamming back down to the parking lot floor, or know which part of her hit first, never mind where the gun went. Allie was only vaguely aware of voices far and near shouting, police sirens that seemed to drown out everything, and tires screaming and screaming and screaming louder. There was also the thick smell of rubber and spilled motor oil everywhere.
Then someone was grabbing her by the arms and dragging her across the pavement before she found herself flying again, except this time it was a much shorter flight. She also landed on much, much softer material this time, almost like lying down on a cloud or something equally absurd.
After that it wasn’t very hard to close her eyes and let go, to allow herself to give in to the numbness that was flooding her senses. The alternative was to embrace the pain, and although she wasn’t a stranger to that either, she made it a general rule to opt out when presented with the option.
The blare of police sirens continued to dominate everything—at least for a while, because even that started to fade into the background until, finally, she couldn’t hear them anymore. It was instead replaced by the sting of sweat and heavy breathing, though she couldn’t be certain it was coming from her or somewhere else inside—
Where the hell was she?
She had no idea, except she could hear voices, and they sounded remarkably close.
“She dead?” someone asked.
“Yeah, I think so,” a second one said.
“You sure?”
“She’s breathing.”
“For now,” the first one said. “She’s going to wish she wasn’t when I’m through with her.”
Promises, promises, Allie thought, just before she couldn’t hear or see or feel anything anymore.
Fourteen
“What the fuck happened to you?”
“I was shot. What does it look like?”
“She shot you?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“In the diner.”
“That explains the stampede of fat asses.” Dwight chuckled. “Serves you right. I told you she was bad news. It’s just like that time in Colombia. I have a sixth sense for these things. The girl wasn’t right the first time I laid eyes on her.”
“Then you should have said something,” Reese said.
“I did. You didn’t listen.”
“You should have tried harder.”
“Whatever.” Dwight glanced over. “So, you going to bleed to death or what?”
“Hopefully not.”
“You sure?”
“Mostly.”
“Sure are bleeding a lot for someone who isn’t gonna bleed to death, though,” Dwight said, not even trying to hide that smile on his face. Apparently he found all of this very amusing.
Can’t say I blame him.
Reese sighed. He was very well aware that he was “bleeding a lot,” even when he pushed his way through the diner and out into the parking lot and saw Alice (Was that even her real name?) on the ground fighting with some fat guy. Then she was up and running, and moments later, shooting. It took him a few seconds to figure out what she was doing: she was aiming at the cab of the semi, the one hauling the girls in the back. She was trying to stop them from leaving like everyone else around them at the time.
And it worked, because the semi never moved, even though it had turned on its headlights. He assumed its engine was also on, but given the roar of noises in the parking lot at the time—police sirens, cars revving, tires squealing—it was impossible to be sure. All of that took a backseat when Dwight, in the Ford, clipped Alice in the legs, and Reese watched, his own gunshot wound momentarily forgotten, as she bounced into the air and landed back on the hard pavement like a rag doll.
Dwight hadn’t wanted to bring Alice along, but Reese didn’t wait for his partner’s permission to pick her up and throw her into the backseat. Not an easy feat, given that the only thing keeping him from bleeding out was his own hands and he had to use them to grab Alice. Thank God he had insisted on outfitting all their vehicles with first-aid kits for just such occasions, otherwise he would have bled to death by the time Dwight, somehow, managed to weave his way through the maze of moving vehicles and get them back out onto the interstate even as more state troopers poured into the truck stop behind them.
“You need a doctor or something?” Dwight was asking him. He didn’t sound amused anymore. In fact, he might have even been actually concerned, though Reese wasn’t willing to commit to that assumption just yet.
“No, I’ll be fine,” Reese said. “She just grazed me.”
“Looked a hell of a lot more than a graze, dude.”
“It looks worse than it is.”
“Really? ’Cause it looks really worse.”
“I’ll live.”
“We’ll see about that,” Dwight said.
A jolt of misery shot through Reese and he grimaced through it, letting it wash over him. Both his hands were slick with blood, and he wiped them on his pant legs, then brushed at the sweat dripping from his forehead. He checked, then double checked to make sure the bandages wrapped around his stomach under his jacket weren’t soaked with blood. It was a slightly half-assed job, but the best he could do while trying not to bleed to death in the front passenger seat of an erratically moving vehicle. Dwight was a hell of a tactical driver, but he hadn’t been shy about swinging the Ford around as if it were a toy as they fled the truck stop.
Reese hadn’t completely lied to Dwight, though; his wound wasn’t life-threatening, though it hurt a hell of a lot more than just a graze, so maybe he was lying just a little bit. Still, he counted his lucky stars. Another inch or two to the wrong side and it would have put a permanent hole in his stomach. He was bleeding, but as long as he stopped it—which he had, despite working in the semidarkness—he wasn’t in any danger of bleeding out in the foreseeable future.
Is that a professional diagnosis or unwarranted optimism, old sport?
He grimaced again and said, “I won’t lie; I could use some painkillers.”
“Why not some morphine while you’re at it?” Dwight said, focusing on the road outside the car’s spiderwebbed front windshield.
The damage to the Ford was limited to the windshield where Alice had struck it when she rolled across the hood before bouncing into the air. The sight of her flying had been something else, and Reese was surprised she was still alive when he turned the corner and saw her lying there.
“That’ll work,” Reese said.
“I’ll see what I can do. Until then, what’s our next move?”
“We’ve lost Nest. Best-case scenario, the drivers are dead. Worst case, they’re wounded and the cops have them.”
“She pumped a lot of rounds into the cab back there.”
“You didn’t see what happened to the boys?”
“Are you kidding me? Cops were coming out of the woodworks. You’re lucky I spotted your dumb ass, or I would have left you back there with your girlfriend. That would have been some sight, the two of you…”
Reese grunted. Girlfriend? Who, Alice?
“Assuming worst case,” Dwight continued, “what are the chances the drivers will talk?”
“They’re freelancers,” Reese said. “They have no reason to take it all on themselves. They’ll talk about what they know.”
“And what do they know?”
“The gigs and the people that hired them. Specifically, us.”
“That’s bad news.”
“Indeed.”
“So what about them?”
“I’ll deal with that when they call.”
“You think they will?”
“Oh, I know they’ll call.”
Dwight didn’t say anything for a moment, and Reese watched his partner staring out the cracked windshield, lost in thought. Alice was right about one thing—he was, in many ways, the “brains” of the operation, but that didn’t mean Dwight was an idiot. If anything, Reese
thought Dwight deferred to him simply because it was less work.
“They were there awfully fast,” Dwight finally said.
“The cops?”
“Yeah. Couldn’t have been more than a few minutes after she shot you in the diner before they showed up. I barely heard the gunshot outside, mostly saw the herd running out of the joint. And there were way too many cops responding. There shouldn’t have been that many in the area.”
“What are you saying?” Reese asked.
“I think they were already on their way,” Dwight said. “They knew about us, just like they knew to stop and search the semis at the roadblocks. Question is: How did they know?”
I have a pretty good idea, Reese thought, remembering the woman telling Cheyenne, the waitress in the diner, about a stranger who had asked to borrow her phone when she came out of the bathroom. Then later, Alice spending an awful lot of time inside the ladies’ room.
Two and two gets you four, old chum.
“Well?” Dwight said.
“I don’t know,” Reese lied.
He turned in his seat and looked into the back. She was still alive, because he could see the rise and fall of her chest (slightly labored, but nevertheless clearly rising and falling). She had landed with one leg dangling carelessly off the seat, and her head was lolled to one side—facing him, which offered a nice view of her serene expression.
Reese couldn’t deny that Alice was pretty. Then again, so was Juliet, and he’d never had any interest in her. But there was something different about Alice. Maybe it was the confidence. He liked that in a woman. Even when he put her through the test back at the roadside diner, she hadn’t been flustered. Even when Vanguard wasted the troopers, she had sat there and kept quiet and didn’t panic once. Compared to Dwight, she was a model of calm. Hell, she had given him a run for his money in the stoic department all day.