by Jason Trevor
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He could have Greenie leave the note for the contractors. That helo circling above was Joe’s telltale sign that Sims would be close behind in a car, probably with an entourage. He flipped the racing harness over the shoulders of the driver’s seat and buckled himself in by all five points, pulling each strap as tight as he could before reaching down and sliding the seat one notch forward, to get the belt as tight as possible. It was awkwardly tight, even more so than when he raced the Charger, but it was necessary. He started the mighty 426 cubic-inch Hemi engine, then carefully moved the slap-shifter into gear.
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“We just turned west onto 1960, ETA two to four minutes. Copy?” Sims radioed the helicopter pilot.
“Copy,” came the confirmation. “Suspect entered his car a minute ago. He will be rolling soon,”
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Joe rolled the rumbling car to the parking lot exit, signaling a left turn and stopping fully for the traffic that wasn’t there before he pulled out and made a slow turn into the far highway lanes. The freeway overpass was visible in the distance, but tiny, and seemed a million miles away.
As he gained speed and just barely passed the speed limit, he saw flashing lights coming toward him. There were lots of them. It looked like a parade. Leading the long line of cars was an unmarked detective’s cruiser, with a lonely red light flashing on the dashboard. It was most likely Sims, in the car that had brought him to Joe’s house on the day that Joe shot Biggie. It felt like it had been a hundred years since that afternoon. Behind the car was a familiar black civilian Tahoe. It was probably the one that had chased him from the police station to the Washington district. Good on him for fixing it so quickly! Joe thought. Behind that was another unmarked car, followed by an almost innumerable string of cruisers, all with lights and sirens running hot.
Joe sped up, kissing seventy miles per hour but not quite making a full-on run for it. He still wasn’t completely certain if he had been spotted and didn’t feel the need to draw more attention than the flashy Charger already did.
As he cruised along, the first ten or so police cars whizzed past him, going the opposite direction with nothing in between himself and them but the empty suicide lane. Joe watched his rearview mirror closely. Suddenly, the first three cars whipped rapid u-turns to come behind him, followed by the first few cruisers.
The game was afoot. He pushed the pedal to the floor.
Chapter 32
“We’ve got him! Headed west on 1960 toward the freeway,” Sims announced on the radio. “Try to block his path,” he instructed the cruisers at the end of the line. Then he spoke to the helicopter pilot. “Air support, do you have eyes-on? He’s westbound, just passing us,”
“Affirmative,” came the reply. “We won’t lose him. We’re also tracking on thermal,”
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When Joe opened up the back barrels on his two giant carburetors, the car lunged forward so hard that he could feel the chassis twist slightly and one of the skinny front tires lifted an inch or two from the ground. This happened at nearly every track launch, but this was the first time he’d done it on a public street.
The last two cruisers in the line swerved suddenly into the lanes in front of him, blocking the two left lanes and half of the right one. There was scrambling in and around the cars as the uniformed officers tried to position themselves and line up their pistols with him, but they weren’t fast enough.
Already above ninety miles per hour and gaining speed, Joe veered to the right, straddling the line between the far lane and the paved shoulder, blowing past them with inches to spare.
The overpass didn’t seem so far away anymore. At his current speed, it was, in fact, coming up very fast.
It would be very dramatic and theatrical to powerslide through the left turn at the top of the overpass, but it was a nice, wide service road that he was turning onto from a nice, wide highway. Better to find a groove from far to the right, well to the inside, and back to the far right. Incredibly, the left turn signal at the intersection was green as he broadened out the curve, managing to keep all four wheels on the ground and his speed above sixty miles an hour before powering back across the service road to the left lane and gunning for the northbound freeway entrance ramp.
The actual direction of the freeway’s travel was northeast. Because of the hour, he found bright morning sunshine coming through the passenger edge of his windshield, right into his eyes. He reached over to flip the visor down on that side, but couldn’t reach it, due to the constraints of the over-tightened safety harness. At least the windshield was clean. Better to let the horses run and get this over with than spend any extra time staring into the sun. Merging from the ramp to the deserted freeway, he pushed the pedal as hard into the floor as he could and checked his rearview mirror again.
Three cruisers had positioned themselves across the freeway by the ramp, to block northbound traffic. The rest were spreading across the freeway lanes and trying to keep up, but he was gaining ground on them. Police vehicles were equipped to be rugged and fast, but they had no chance of catching a muscle car that regularly clocked quarter-mile times far under nine seconds. His goal for the car had always been to get it below eight, but now that goal would be unrealized. It made Joe a little bit sad as he thought of this. His war on the Blood Brothers had taken his attention completely away from the challenge.
Glimpsing into his side-view mirror with one eye, he could see that the helicopter had dropped to almost a hundred feet and was following him closely. He couldn’t outrun that, but he didn’t care.
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Tyler Demato hating being a small-town cop. All he ever did was write tickets, under continually mounting pressure from city hall to write more of them and increase revenue for the semi-rural township of five hundred people.
The radio in his car crackled to life, and it surprised him. No one out here ever used the radios. People just called him on his cell phone.
“Demato! Tyler! Do you copy?” came the police chief’s voice. What was he doing at the police station on a Sunday morning? Tyler grabbed the mic and smoothed his dark mustache before running his fingers through his inky black hair that complimented dark olive-skin well enough to get him noticed by far too many of the romance-starved and meth-addicted single ladies who populated this useless town.
“Yeah, I’m here. Why aren’t you in church?” he asked his boss.
“There’s a pursuit that started down on 1960 coming our way. An HPD detective called and asked us to spike the ramp in case he exits here. I think it’s the Gang-Buster from the news! How fast can you get there?”
“Two minutes,” Finally, some action!
“Then get over there and spike it!”
“On my way,” Demato started the car, hit his lights, and performed a rushed three-point turn on someone’s culvert, shifting to reverse so fast that he missed it and threw it into park while still rolling forward. The transmission park pawl clicked repeatedly and complained loudly as he cursed.
Bouncing down the broken asphalt of the one-lane road at a speed more than three times the speed limit that he wrote people tickets daily for exceeding, Tyler barely maintained control of the car. He almost dove into a ditch before he turned the wrong direction on the service road and rushed up to the freeway exit ramp, parking alongside it and mashing the button on the dashboard for his trunk release.
As he ran alongside the car and dove into the trunk to dig out the accordion-style Stinger spike strip, he could hear a helicopter approaching from the southwest, the crashing of its rotors echoing down the freeway.
Quickly deploying the spike strip across the ramp, he drew his revolver and held it at the ready, trying not to fantasize about catching the infamous Gang-Buster and using the bust as his ticket into a real police department.
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Running at faster than one hundred fifty miles per hour for this long was taking its toll on Joe and his Charger. The eng
ine temperature gauge had passed two hundred and forty degrees, touching the red zone. He seldom drove it this fast for more than a few seconds, and Joe had designed the cooling system with as much in mind.
The brutal and difficult job of handling the car at such a speed for an extended period was also wearing Joe down. His arms were tired, his ankle was sore, and the target focus of the open freeway combined with the morning sun was making his eyes bloodshot. The pressure of the over-tightened harness was also making it hard to breathe as adrenaline increased his heart rate and respiration.
The helo was keeping up with him, but the red and blue lights were only a distant blink in his mirror. He could give his ankle and eyes a break for a minute and drop below one hundred.
He lifted the pedal, shrugged his shoulders, and rolled his head around on his neck. He heard the helicopter draw closer, the pilot not expecting the sudden drop in speed.
The break couldn’t last too long. There was a landmark coming up. He had planned for it. There was a dumpy little town up ahead that was famous, nationwide, for its speed traps and corrupt police department. There had even been a book written about it back in the eighties, named something about terrorizing the highway. Just beyond the town was where the eastern fork of the San Jacinto River crossed under the freeway and the final destination for his beautiful charger.
As he approached the town, Joe sped up again, not wanting to get too complacent about the time he had bought himself. He widened his target focus from the freeway to the shoulders and beyond. He didn’t want something unexpected to disrupt his plans. He was surprised to see the town’s only police car sitting at the exit with one of their few cops manning a spike strip on the ramp. Sims had managed to call ahead. That was unexpected, but shouldn’t have been.
As he thundered past, Joe thought he saw the small-town cop raise his pistol on Joe. Surely, he would know better than to shoot at a moving car. Then again, this dude was probably not much more proficient than Barney Fife at anything but writing citations.
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It was a blue Charger. An awesome blue Charger. Tyler stared in awe as the car blasted down the freeway at breakneck speed and made no move to take the exit or hit his spike strip. He saw his short-lived dreams of actually working a real beat in a real city slip through his fingers faster than the speed of the Charger racing by. No. He couldn’t let it go that easily.
Demato raised his pistol and moved it in a sweeping motion across in front of him, keeping the car in his iron sights. That would be stupid. He couldn’t shoot a moving car.
Finding new resolve, Tyler yanked the spike strip back, threw it in his passenger seat, and raced up the ramp to the freeway with his open trunk lid flopping up and down comically. He spun a wild and violent u-turn as soon as he cleared the barricade, nearly spun the car completely out, and began to chase down the Gang-Buster, his ticket to fame and a better job.
Chapter 33
“We’ve got a new dog in the hunt,” came the helicopter pilot over the radio in Sims’ car.
“Come again?” Le responded before Cody could.
“A local yokel from the town ahead just entered the freeway using the exit ramp and is in pursuit,”
“More the better,” Sims replied.
“I’m not so sure,” said the pilot. “This guy drives like a teenager. I hope he doesn’t get himself hurt,”
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Joe lifted the accelerator again. The moment of truth was approaching. He carefully slid the Charger to the right lane, then pushed further over to the roughly paved shoulder. The concrete was ragged, poorly paved, littered with small debris and years of dust. He was forced to drop his speed dramatically to maintain control.
He glimpsed in his rearview mirror, then gaped. The small-town cop was right on his tail, driving on the shoulder too.
“What the heck do you think you’re doing?” Joe scowled to the empty car.
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“Suspect has moved to the freeway shoulder and dropped his speed,” the air support reported back to the pursuing entourage, now more than two miles back. “He’s up to something, but there’s bad news,”
“Now’s our chance to catch up!” yelped Sims. “What’s the bad news?”
“The village deputy is right on his tail and he’s also driving on the shoulder!”
“Somebody, tell him to get that car safely back onto the main lane!” came Le over the radio.
“You got a way to reach him?” asked the pilot.
“No,” relented Sims. “I hope he doesn’t get himself killed,”
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As Joe raced down the shoulder, struggling with the wheel to keep his skinny front tires on a steady path, an expected guardrail sprung up between him and the freeway lanes. This was it. He braced himself.
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Demato focused hard on the Charger. He had the guy. This was a famous, high-profile criminal, and he, the unknown small-town cop, was going to make a huge bust. This was his moment to shine, a career-maker. He didn’t care if the fame only lasted fifteen minutes. He would get out of this shithole town and his dead-end job to be a real cop with a real career and real prospects. He was going to do it! He didn’t even notice the freeway lanes on his left changing to the bridge that passed over the San Jacinto River, or that the shoulder he was driving on was going to suddenly end.
He did notice when the charger unexpectedly deployed its chute to rapidly drop its speed. All Tyler could see was the billowing fabric suddenly inflate in front of him, undulate for a few seconds in the wind, and then both the car and the chute dropped from view, leaving an empty void in front of him as he shot into the clear space over the top of the Charger. He felt a jolt from the rear of his car, saw his hood hit the water, and then he blacked out.
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“Sims! Le! Wakefield! Franks! EVERYBODY!” sputtered the pilot. “This is insane! Your suspect just deployed his racing chute and dove into the river! I’ve lost visual contact. Repeat, I have lost visual contact. The pursuing village cop is going in behind him!”
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“I hope you can swim, dumbass,” Joe once again said to nobody as he yanked the lever for his drogue chute.
The Charger dropped speed, the safety harness pushed the wind out of Joe, and then he dove awkwardly off of the embankment, landing so hard on the riverbank below that the frame bent and the car buckled, digging into the sandy mud.
Only seconds later, the police car sailed over the top of him, nosing down. The rear tires and then bumper glanced off of Joe’s hood as the car charged into the murky water. Joe saw airbags deploy throughout the car from his vantage point, but saw no signs of motion after that.
“Shit!” Joe tried to open his door but found it jammed. He had expected the possibility and grabbed an escape hammer from his glove box that he kept there, against the possibility of a bad enough crash at the track requiring a broken window for a safe escape.
“Joe! Get out of here!”
He whirled in staggering surprise to see Rebecca sitting in the back seat, her chest heaving as she struggled to catch her breath from the impact. “What are you doing here, baby? This is dangerous!”
“Joe, you have to help that man. Go. Save a life, but then you have to leave. It’s time. I’ll be fine. You go. Be the hero that I’ve always known you are,”
Joe stared, slack-jawed and completely at a loss for words. “But Baby!” he finally protested.
“GO!” she ordered firmly.
He turned back around, smashed the driver’s window, reached across and broke the passenger window, cut the passenger seatbelt securing his backpack with a blade built into the hammer, and set about releasing his safety harness. It was too tight. He slid the seat back and tried again. This time, the latch at his solar plexus relented and he tossed the straps aside before climbing out the window and diving into the mud below.
Struggling to his feet, Joe reached in through the broken window to fold the seat f
orward for Becky, but she wasn’t there. Heeding her instructions, he slogged into the river and made his way to the door of the flooding cruiser. Still clutching the escape hammer, he smashed the window and was faced with an inflated curtain airbag. Throwing the hammer into the water, he dug out his pocketknife and pierced the airbag, quickly deflating it. It only took seconds to cut it away and find a partially conscious young police officer in the seat, bleeding from his forehead where he hit the steering wheel. The seatbelt wouldn’t be a problem. He hadn’t been wearing it.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he shouted.
The officer halfway opened his eyes at the exclamation from Joe, groaned and lifted a hand, then dropped it.
“Come on, let’s go,” Joe heaved him out of the car through the window and dropped him into the thigh-deep water. “Stand up! Can’t you use your legs?”
Another groan.
“Well, shit. I don’t have much time, you know. You’re screwing up a well-laid plan, here,” Joe bent down and heaved the man onto his shoulders. Struggling to lift his feet through the silty bottom of the river, he fussed at the stranger as he plodded back toward his car on the bank. “Why am I asking what the fuck is wrong with you? What I need to know is what the fuck is wrong with me! Stupid know-nothing deputy nearly gets himself killed while I am fighting for my freedom, and I have to be the good guy. I always have to be the good guy. Here I am, saving your dumb ass when I’m supposed to be saving my own ass. The clock is ticking and you won’t even walk!” He slung the man onto his back in the damp sand, like a sack of potatoes, alongside the passenger side of his wrecked Charger. “You owe me!” he yelled at the youngish cop.