Pit Stop (5 page)

“GREAT PLAN!” GARBER SHOUTED. “RAM
the truck! Is that right out of the FBI playbook?”

Reilly had to admit to a level of frustration. He had no backup, and he had no weapon. (If there was any good news, he knew Faustus had no weapon, either. He'd checked him for one just before the man got the jump on him.) What he needed was a frickin' helicopter with lasers, but this wasn't James Bond.

This was real life.

What he needed now was some kind of break. For the truck to have a flat tire. For it to run out of gas, but based on what Garber'd told him, that was unlikely. A goddamn moose trying to run across the highway right about now would be a blessing.

At least the cruiser was topped up. He needed to get Garber to make some calls, try to get a roadblock established farther up the interstate, or maybe—

What the hell?

The pickup was swerving all over the road.

KELLY SAID, “CATCH.”

She was perched on the front of her seat, leaning down into the footwell. She had her right hand on the canister and tossed it underhand and to the left, aiming it right toward Kristoff's face.

“Jesus!” he shouted.

He took his left hand off the wheel to catch the cylinder before it flew out his window, batted it down into his lap. Then it started to roll toward his knees. He wanted to catch it before it dropped by his legs, where it would be rolling around his feet, interfering with his operation of the pedals.

It was during this moment of distraction that Kelly pried the plastic lid off the coffee cup and wrapped her hand around it.

Her dad was right. It would have stayed hot all the way to their destination. How did anyone drink this stuff?

As she whipped it out of the cup holder, some coffee slipped over the edge and onto her fingers, scalding them. It hurt like hell, as her father would be inclined to say, but Kelly didn't have time to whine about it, because she only had about a tenth of a second to throw this too-hot-to-drink coffee in this bad man's face.

Which is exactly what she did.

The black liquid arced through the air, splashing across Kristoff's right cheek and neck and, judging by the way he was throwing his right hand over his eye, that, too.

Kristoff screamed. Not “Jesus!” this time. Just a cry of intense pain and anguish. Primal.

He tried to maintain steering with his left hand, and was still
attempting to see the road with his left eye, but the truck was pitching all over the place, and the canister had hit the floor, rolling side to side in time with Kristoff's erratic steering.

Kristoff took his right hand off his face long enough to make a wild, retaliatory swing in Kelly's direction, but she had pushed herself up against the door, out of reach, and was thinking about whether to hop over the seat and hide in the narrow space behind them. But she decided against that, figuring that if the truck came to a stop, or even slowed, she needed to be by the door so she could hop out.

Indeed, the truck was slowing. Kristoff had taken his foot off the gas. And given that the truck was heading up a slight grade, it was going to lose speed even more quickly. He hadn't hit the brake yet, but he couldn't keep up his recent pace when he couldn't see where he was going.

After another couple of futile swings at Kelly, the man put his hand back to his face, but then he realized the wounds hurt too much to touch. His right eye remained closed.

He screamed: “You blinded me! You fried my eye, you little bitch!”

Kelly was probably more scared right now than she'd ever been in her life—even more than when that man threatened her a few years ago—but she also felt pretty good. For half a second, she'd wondered whether she'd get in trouble for making a man lose one of his eyes, but then thought her dad would probably be okay with it.

He could be pretty cool about things.

She glanced back through the window, saw the police car still there. Waved at her dad again as the truck lurched from left to right.

Then she heard the familiar sound of gravel under the tires. She whirled around, saw that they were veering off the pavement
onto the shoulder. Kristoff had his foot on the brake. He hung his head low, moved it languidly back and forth, trying to deal with the pain.

When the truck was nearly stopped, Kelly pulled on the door handle, let the door swing wide, and jumped.

“KELLY!”

Glen Garber screamed when he saw his daughter leap from the passenger's door of the nearly stopped truck. He bolted from the police cruiser before Reilly had thrown it into park.

Kelly landed in the tall grasses just beyond the shoulder. Her knees buckled, forcing her into a roll, her body tumbling out of view.

Glen ran. “Kelly! Kelly!”

Before he could get to her, her head popped up above the grass. An arm went into the air. “Here!”

Behind him, Garber heard Reilly shout at the top of his lungs: “Run!”

IT WASN'T THAT REILLY DIDN'T
care about Garber and his kid, but he had a more pressing matter to deal with.

Like the man he knew as Faustus, who had thrown open the driver's door of the pickup and was stumbling out. But not before reaching for something on the floor ahead of the seat. He emerged, standing there a couple of steps in front of the open door, clutching the cylinder. Raising it above his head.

Whoa.

Reilly didn't know what the hell had happened in that truck, but half of the man's face was red and blotchy and blistered and
some of the skin looked like it was ready to fall off. His right eye was shut.

Reilly told Garber and his daughter to run.

“I'll do it!” the man yelled. “I'll smash it right into the road! I'll crack this thing wide open. You want that?”

Reilly raised an unthreatening palm.

“Come on,” the FBI agent said. “You'll take yourself out, too. You'll never have the fun of seeing your handiwork.”

“Doesn't much matter now,” he said.

Behind them, other motorists on the highway slowed. A couple honked their horns.

Reilly ignored them, instead staying focused on Faustus. He couldn't stop himself from asking, “What the hell happened to your face?”

“Hot coffee,” Faustus said. “Maybe I'll sue.”

Reilly noticed that the truck was moving, ever so gradually. They'd all stopped on a very slight, uphill grade, and the Ford was starting to roll back. Faustus had bailed out of it so quickly he must not have put the shift solidly into park.

By the time Faustus noticed, it was too late to react.

The open driver's door caught him on the back and threw him down onto the highway like he'd been tackled. The bottom edge of the door hit the back of his head hard enough that he did a face-plant on the pavement, arms outstretched.

He wasn't moving. Only his fingers, twitching, releasing their grip on the cylinder, which started to roll along the asphalt toward Reilly, bumping over small stones and irregularities in the surface.

Please don't have opened, please don't have opened.

Reilly bolted forward, threw his body over the cylinder, trapped it below his torso, smothering it like it was a grenade. Even though it was not going to explode, it had the potential to do more damage
than a thousand grenades. The truck rolled past him to his right, the front wheels turning slightly, angling the truck's back end toward the ditch.

As it rolled by, Reilly saw Garber and his daughter a good fifty yards away, heading for a wooded area beyond the highway's edge. Garber glanced back, saw Reilly on the ground, grabbed Kelly by the elbow to stop her.

Reilly could just barely hear him tell her, “Stay here.”

And then he came running.

“Are you hit?” Garber shouted.

“No!”

“What about him?”

“I'm guessing dead. That door hit him hard, and then his head hit the pavement. He hasn't moved.”

“Why are you lying on—?”

“Have you got a bag in your truck? A plastic bag? A couple of them? Anything airtight?” A thought hit him. “Evidence bags in the cruiser!”

Garber stopped, ran for the police car, grabbed the keys and ran around back to pop the trunk. It took him about fifteen seconds to find what he was looking for. Clear plastic, sealable bags, like oversized sandwich bags. He grabbed a handful and ran back to Reilly as his truck slowly backed into the ditch, the engine still running.

The agent, still keeping his body pressed to the pavement, reached up for a bag. “Give it to me.”

Garber had some sense of how serious the situation was.

“Should I start running again?” he asked.

Reilly grimaced. “Probably not much point. We're either safe, or we're not. You couldn't run fast enough to save yourself.”

He worked the bag under his torso, then, in one swift motion, got up on his knees, shoved the cylinder into it, and sealed the top.

Garber realized he was holding his breath.

“You've got the end of the world in that bag, don't you?”

“Pretty much,” Reilly replied. “Hand me another. I'm going to double bag it. Maybe even triple.”

“Did anything leak out?”

“If we're still standing a minute from now, I'd say no.”

He reached out a hand to Garber, and he took it. He helped the agent to his feet, and they regarded each other for a moment. Garber kept glancing at his watch.

“Thirty seconds.”

“Give it a little longer,” Reilly said.

“If it happens, what, exactly, will happen?”

“You don't want to know. The good news is, it'll be quick.”

Garber kept his eye on his watch. “That's a minute and a half now.”

“I'd say we're going to live.” Reilly smiled. “Your kid threw hot coffee in his face?”

Garber nodded.

The smile turned into a grin. “Get her over here.”

Garber waved Kelly in. She arrived, nearly breathless, several seconds later. Shaken, but relieved, too.

Reilly rested his hands on her shoulders. “You are something else.”

Kelly smiled weakly.

“Really, you are,” Sean Reilly said. “You ever need anything, you just name it.”

Kelly thought a moment. She said, “I never did get my chicken nuggets.”