The Saint (Carter Ash Book 1)

by Joshua Guess

  The old pearl of wisdom that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy will always be true. Fahey’s suggestion to gather Russey’s enemies to act as a buffer while he was disorganized was one I might not have had on my own, or at least not seriously considered, without seeing that Russey thought through my likely moves.

  I let my eyelids close, trusting the alarm to wake me up. Two hours would be long enough to at least refresh me.

  Fifteen minutes later, the phone rang. I didn’t even get to ask who it was before Fahey was speaking rapidly in my ear.

  “Listen, you need to get the hell out of there. One of the safe houses just turned into a firefight. The other two are still in a stalemate from what I can tell, but once the bullets started flying, Russey must have decided to use your own trick against you.”

  Still muzzy, I wiped my hand across my face. “What now?”

  Fahey hissed out an irritated breath. “Russey somehow found out you’re in Jen’s car and fed that to one of his pet cops. A patrol vehicle just radioed that it spotted it sitting in a parking lot and was told to wait for backup. Three more cars are headed that way. You need to go now. Get the fuck out of there.”

  I was already turning the key.

  Fahey hung up. I long suspected the guy had deeper connections than anyone knew with certainty, so it didn’t much surprise me he kept tabs on the activities of the people he worked with. If I lived through this, I’d have to ask him exactly how he knew all of this in real time, because the only person I’d seen pull that trick was Amanda.

  I crept from the lonely parking space at the back of the lot with the lights off. It wouldn’t fool the cop, who was surely watching me, but I wanted to try and slip around a corner and lose him in the dark.

  A quick scan of the lot didn’t reveal the parked cruiser until I’d moved ten feet or so. Then I caught movement out of the corner of my eye as the officer tapped his brakes. My guess? He’d moved as soon as he saw me trying to leave and began to do the same on instinct before thinking to call it in.

  I briefly wondered what charge the cop on Russey’s payroll dreamed up to require four squad cars, then decided it wasn’t important and slammed my foot on the gas. I thought it pretty unlikely they’d treat me as anything but armed and dangerous.

  I tore through the lot and onto the service road leading out of the shopping center. Lights and flashers flared to life behind me, and I felt the last cobwebs of sleep drift away. There was no time for the normal mental gymnastics where I’d use the locations of the nearest police station to figure out where the other cars might come from. This was pure flight, my entire focus on driving with every shred of skill I could muster.

  There were a lot of factors involved. Jen’s car being a mid-range sedan with equally middling power—and iffy handling—was one. Another were the powerful engines police cruisers ran with. The average cop didn’t get the sort of in-depth training I did when it came to offensive and defensive driving, though, so it was kind of a wash.

  I burst from the service road onto the state highway connected to it just in time to see the other three cruisers speeding toward me in the distance.

  Pure luck saved me from being boxed in within thirty seconds in the form of sweet, unflinching physics. I was gaining speed as I accelerated toward the approaching cars while they had to slow down and reorient. One tried to hit me, but thanks the difference in our speed I was able to slide by him. I lost the side mirror in the process, but don’t judge me. It was awesome.

  Pouring on the speed, I ran through my mental map of the area. Rather than attempt to think of every road—impossibly difficult even when you aren’t outrunning police—I tried to recall areas I knew I wanted to avoid. No neighborhoods with a single entrance, obviously no dead ends, that kind of thing. Because it was clear I had to get off this long stretch of open road as fast as possible. Once those cruisers opened their throttles, I was fucked.

  I crested a hill and briefly lost them, though it would be a few seconds at best. There were no exits or turnoffs close enough to let me get away clean.

  Then my phone rang again.

  “What?!” I shouted into it after jamming it against my head. “Kinda fucking busy right now.”

  “Wow, rude,” said Fahey. “Put me on speakerphone, then.”

  With a restrained grumble I pushed the button and threw the phone on the dash. Fahey’s voice echoed flatly against the plastic. “You’re going to want to take the exit after the next one and go left at the bottom. There’s some construction down there that’ll slow them down.”

  Even in the middle of a car chase, I couldn’t help laughing. “What, am I in the goddamn Matrix right now? Are you leading me to freedom, great Morpheus?”

  “I’m watching you with CCTV, jackass,” Fahey said. “It’s spotty at best, so I’m sending you where I can access cameras. Places I watch all the time.”

  “Holy shit,” I said, genuinely impressed. Even Amanda hadn’t been able to access the traffic and county security camera network. That was next-level skill. “We’re definitely going to circle back to that, but thanks. I’ll take the exit.”

  I took the exit at speed, barely slowing as I flew down the ramp. The principle was simple and could be applied in a lot of situations; I knew what I was going to do and my opponents didn’t. Even going downhill at sixty miles an hour, I could whip to the left at the last second because I was mentally prepared to do it. My pursuers, on the other hand, were trying to manage their own hurtling vehicles while also not knowing if they’d have to go left or right.

  It was a small uncertainty, but those things add up. When a rocket has a tiny imbalance in fuel mixture it can lead to a self-sustaining problem that ends with an explosion.

  When I hit the bottom of the ramp, I went right. I did it to bleed off some of my speed, the sound of screeching rubber piercing in my ears as I whipped the car in a tight circle and turned toward my actual goal.

  The roads were fairly empty out here in the county in the middle of the night. I could see the distant, blinking orange lights of the construction area, which to my surprise was full of workmen. Must be an important project to staff it around the clock. That, or it was something much easier to work on with minimal traffic.

  I shot through the flashing lights with zero consideration for their presence. A blinking LED sign helpfully told me that I was going thirty miles over the limit for the zone, then pointed out that there were heavy fines and potential jail time for law-breakers.

  Weaving my way through the narrow lanes, the sound of shouting workers echoing as I passed them, was not how I’d planned to spend my night, though I found it strangely invigorating. My focus narrowed to the road itself. I fell into the zone fabled by athletes, my concentration absolute and fixed on a single task.

  The section of road lined with cones was long but relatively straight. It was only as I approached the end that the lane suddenly shifted, the bright orange markers directing me to a rough zig-zag where a section of asphalt was missing and had to be driven around. As I approached it, one of the workers apparently unaware of the high-speed chase began moving his truck from its parking spot on the closed-off shoulder. He was nearly in the road by the time he noticed me, but not fast enough to stop the front end of his truck from hanging over the lane by about a foot.

  I swerved, missing it by inches, but the cruiser behind me wasn’t so lucky.

  The sound of shredding steel and shattering plastic ripped through the air. I saw the cruiser continue rocketing forward in my mirror only to screech to a halt as the damaged front fender tore through the tire beneath. Watching the front end of a speeding car drop suddenly is a hell of a thing.

  Much in the same way the fall doesn’t kill you in favor of the sudden stop, it wasn’t the impact with the truck that stopped three of my four pursuers, but the hard braking on the part of the driver. The cars following him weren’t ready for it. One of them hit him in the ass, bucking the damaged cruiser forward a solid
ten feet, while the other swerved through the cones and into the lower, rougher area where the asphalt had been stripped away. As drops went it wasn’t dire, about nine inches. But the guy was driving a souped-up sedan instead of an off-road vehicle, and it was enough to steal all of his momentum and do enough damage he couldn’t regain it.

  I made it through the construction and onto the open road with only a single car following me. I whooped with excitement, the adrenaline coursing through my blood making me feel immortal as only teenagers can.

  Like a teenager, it took an actual grownup to bring me back to reality.

  “You know I’m still on the line, right?” Fahey asked from the phone on my dash.

  “Yes,” I lied. “Just having a moment.”

  “Uh huh,” Fahey said. “Sure. Look, I got an escape route planned here, and somewhere you can ditch that car and burn it—assuming you don’t want the physical evidence in there logged—but you’re gonna have to lose that last cop. There aren’t as many cameras as I’d like where you are. Can you get him off your ass?”

  I considered my options. “How far away is wherever you’re sending me?”

  “Little less than four miles,” Fahey replied. “But you’ll want to be free of him way before then.”

  The cop still chasing me had quick reactions and wasn’t an idiot. I didn’t think it very likely I’d be able to shake him in a neighborhood or with the usual tactics.

  “Call me back in five minutes,” I said.

  “What the hell are you going to do?” Fahey rumbled.

  I grinned, though no one could see it. “I’m going to let him catch me.”

  25

  Until that point, my experience with police chases was entirely theoretical. At least, if you don’t count watching them on television, and I’m assuming most people don’t. My education on the subject was thorough, however. The primary thing to keep in mind is that if you’re being chased by one cop, keeping backup from finding you relies mostly on preventing them from radioing your precise location. Sure, GPS does a lot of the work, but with fast-moving vehicles, the lag time between gathering that information and transmitting it through all the various systems and servers is enough to give a determined driver the advantage.

  Which was why I tore down a county road away from the city and into an enormous development as fast as I could get to it. The neighborhood-to-be would hold hundreds of homes eventually, and had things not gone to shit, Russey’s construction company would have made a small fortune building them. At that moment it was a series of roughed-in roads waiting for crews to break ground on homes, a grid of asphalt broken by stands of trees and brush yet to be brought down.

  Whipping around corners lit only by the moon made it hard to be seen, but the cruiser didn’t do a bad job. My own lights were off, and after a handful of hard turns and double-backs, I got enough space for what I planned.

  I wasn’t going to be able to lose him, not even on terrain as favorable as this. The best I could do was give myself five or ten seconds out of his line of sight.

  Once I had it, I slammed the brakes and let the car drift to a stop sideways. The driver’s side faced the direction the cruiser would come from in almost no time at all. I threw the car in park, pushed open the driver’s side door, then crawled over the seat to the passenger’s side as fast as I could. I had just shut it behind me and positioned myself in a crouch behind the rear wheel when the lights and flashers shined around the corner.

  I watched the shadows cast by the cop as he got out of his vehicle and walked between his headlights and my car. I was in a great position not to be seen—made clear by the officer’s shadow when he crouched down and looked for my feet under the car—but if he walked around and spotted me, I was screwed. The weird hovering position I was in was badly unbalanced, so there was no way I could just spring up and take him down if he had a weapon drawn.

  The rasp of shoes on the coarse road grew louder, the odd acoustics making it impossible to determine the direction. I craned my head as close to the bottom of the window as I could, tilting sideways to maximize my peripheral vision.

  I was looking left, and that was the wrong direction. The officer walked past the end of the car on my right side, but apparently thought he saw me in the scrub brush next to the road. I looked over in time to see him sweeping his light and weapon toward them. I waited as long as I could, hoping he’d walk forward a bit more to give me more room to maneuver. He hadn’t walked around the car, just past its end as he approached the side of the road, and the space between us was mostly blocked by the trunk.

  I lowered my hand to the ground, gently brushing my fingers across it, and mentally praised every god I could think of when I came up with a piece of loose gravel. The reason the oldest tricks in the book get that reputation is because they usually work. I tossed the small rock over my head in an arc. It landed well past the officer, and when his light swept toward it he gave me another gift: cover.

  “Police! Come out of there with—”

  I was pretty sure he’d been about to say with my hands up, but with the sound of his voice masking my already quiet footfalls, I snuck up on him. Fortunately I was armed, and that made the whole thing a lot easier. Not wanting the death of a police officer on my conscience, I pistol-whipped him in the back of the head. It wasn’t hard enough to knock him out, but definitely sufficient to knock him stupid.

  I hooked my foot in front of his ankle when he staggered forward and gave him a push. Cops are trained to expect you to take their firearms, and even in his dazed state, this guy acted like it. Luckily I didn’t give a shit about his gun, so there wasn’t much of a struggle on my part. I went for the handcuffs instead.

  I snagged them, then struck him in the same spot with my gun. The second time was a bit harder. It gave me a few seconds to slap a cuff on one of his wrists. He fought, trying to buck me off, but I was in the far superior position.

  His right hand, stretched out in front of him and now pinned at the shoulder by one of my knees, tightened on his weapon. Five rapid thunders belched from it, and I found myself impressed. Most people don’t keep their head in a terrifying situation, and I’m sure this poor guy thought he was going to die. Yet his head was together enough to try to startle me into a mistake by firing his weapon.

  I pushed harder with the knee. “Let go of your gun.”

  “Fuck you,” the cop said.

  I sighed. “Look, I’m not gonna kill you. Drop the gun, let me cuff you, and I’ll be on my way.”

  “Yeah, right,” the guy said. He didn’t sound scared, but furious.

  “Think about it,” I said, trying to make my tone as reasonable as possible. “I could kill you right now.” I tapped him on the back of the head with the pistol. “I don’t want to. I have you pinned at the shoulder, and I have a cuff cutting into your wrist. You have no way to get leverage. I know because I’ve been held down this way a couple times. So drop the gun, give me your hand, and you can spend the next half hour in your car waiting for someone to come unlock them.”

  I put the barrel of the gun against his shoulder, right next to my knee. “Or I put a bullet there and make you drop it that way. Probably end your career, might cripple you for life, but it won’t kill you.”

  In the faint illumination from the dropped flashlight, I could see his face boiling red with anger. “I didn’t serve two fucking tours in Iraq to put up with this bullshit from someone like you.”

  “You’re a veteran? Thank you for your service.” I pushed the barrel deeper into the meat of his shoulder. “Now, which way is this gonna go?”

  “Well, that sounded exciting,” Fahey said after I was back in the car and moving. “I’m assuming you didn’t have to do anything dire to that cop?”

  “No, he’s fine. Actually—wait, why are you still on the line?” I asked, glancing at the phone miraculously still sitting on the dash.

  “Because I’m bored and have a limited attention span,” Fahey said flatly. Then,
in a more exasperated tone, “Did you miss the part where I’m trying to save your ass? Why the fuck would I hang up on you at this particular moment?”

  “Yeah, okay,” I grumbled. “Before you tell me where I’m going, mind filling me in on why I should trust you to send me there? It’s not that I don’t appreciate the warning a few minutes ago, but I’m a bit worried you’re sending me in to a trap where Russey can capture me.”

  There was a pause so long I thought Fahey ended the call.

  “I’ve been helping Russey run some of his communications tonight,” he finally said.

  “That’s not reassuring,” I told him.

  “That’s because I wasn’t done, jackass,” Fahey said. “Look…oh, fuck it. The reason I’m so damn good at what I do is because I’m an IT contractor for the city, okay? I gave myself backdoor access to virtually everything. So I’m watching cameras, listening to police scanners, and all the while helping Russey coordinate with the few members of his crew not holed up in those safe houses. Here’s the thing, though: Russey isn’t just mad as fuck, he’s crazy, Carter. Actually off his rocker.”

  I blinked. One thing Fahey never did was use names on a phone call. I realized belatedly he’d been using Russey’s as well. That he had spoke volumes about how put off he was. “How bad?”

  “Worse than you’d imagine,” Fahey said, a note of exhaustion in his voice. “He’s telling his guys to go full-out if cops show up. Shoot their way out if they have to, any amount of collateral damage is acceptable. He’s fine with them being hemmed in, but as soon as it looks like they might be taken off the board, Russey has given them orders to go wild. He wants you that much. I mean, yeah, it’s bad for business, but I’m not a fucking monster. I don’t want a bunch of cops dead because this guy has a hard-on for you he can’t control.”