"Shit!" Willy yelled, shifting directions to aim for his own car, parked within sight. No longer simply irritated at his man for being half rabbit, he was already visualizing ranks of irritated senior officers looming in his proximate future.
He unlocked his car at a run using the remote, half fell in behind the wheel, and jammed the key into the ignition. His one hand controlling the car, he used the same technique as Nugent to slam his door, and swerved around the baffled, dispossessed driver, now staggering in the middle of the street.
From the air, Bellows Falls fit roughly between two major streets that matched up at either end like parentheses placed too close together, and which therefore formed an oval-shaped loop. The one cutting through downtown proper was named Rockingham-where Nugent had spent half the night drinking. The other was Atkinson, where, with Willy in hot pursuit, he was now driving north at exuberant speed. As Willy could have predicted given his present turn of luck, the Bellows Falls Police Department was located just beyond the northern juncture of this loop. And, naturally, it was just as Nugent was approaching this spot, hoping to burst through it and beyond to the interstate entry ramp some five miles off, that a patrol officer, no doubt bored with his own paperwork, left the office in his cruiser and began heading south.
He didn't need a radar to interpret what was approaching. Nor did he have to think twice before hitting his blue lights.
Willy saw the light bar burst to life ahead of Nugent's stolen car. This time, however, his reaction was almost muted. "Christ," he snorted quietly, by now philosophical. "What next?" He quickly moved to turn on his own hidden grille strobes.
Nugent's response was finally predictable. He cut his wheel right, went sliding broadside toward the oncoming cruiser, and, just shy of collision, shot into the parking lot of a gas station at the juncture of Atkinson and Rockingham, intent on heading down the latter in the opposite direction.
The cruiser skidded to a stop, unable to turn without hitting Willy, and swung around instead in his wake, his siren now joining the light show that was jaggedly bouncing off the nearby buildings.
Willy hit the radio transmit button he had mounted to his steering wheel to favor his disability.
"BFPD, this is VBI two-four, directly in front of you. Do you copy?"
The response was a delayed and breathless "Ten-Four. This is M-eight-five-one. What's going on?"
By now, all three cars were tearing down Rockingham, the nearby red-brick walls whipping past at white-knuckle speed. Willy could only hope that no one else would be taking in the sights on a wintry night.
"In pursuit of a stolen vehicle. Better alert everybody on both sides of the river."
A woman's calm voice then broke in. "This is Bellows Falls Dispatch. Do you have a description of the vehicle?"
With a small sigh at the inevitable reprimands to come, Willy rattled off the make, model, and registration of the car ahead, mentioned that it was stolen, and identified Wayne Nugent, knowing that his criminal record would pop up on the dispatcher's screen.
Nugent, in the meantime, was fast approaching a choice: to turn left at the bottom of the village's small square and cross the bridge into neighboring New Hampshire, or continue south to the village limits and select Route 5 into Westminster and the interstate's southern ramp, or west toward Saxton's River and the back roads beyond.
He skipped the bridge, eliminating New Hampshire for the moment, and led the way up and out of town, abandoning, among other things, its quaint and demure twenty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit-something Willy thought he'd include on the list of offenses he was mentally tallying up, for fun if nothing else.
"Eight-five-one-Dispatch," he heard over the radio from the car behind him, "we're proceeding south on Westminster toward Red Light Hill."
"Ten-four," was the laconic reply.
Westminster Street was merely Rockingham renamed, wider and flatter than it was in the village. Nugent took advantage of this to extend the gap between himself and his pursuers, apparently not knowing, as they did, what lay ahead. At the aforementioned Red Light Hill-actually a four-way intersection-his two easiest choices were either a hard left or a steep hill straight up, unless he opted for an even tougher right turn back onto Atkinson all over again. In all cases, the one common denominator was a need to slow down.
Willy didn't know if Nugent was too new to the area or too drunk and scared to care, but as they approached the junction, he began to realize that the lead car wasn't going to survive.
He eased off the accelerator and keyed his mike, "This is VBI two-four. I think we're looking at a ten-fifty in the making. I recommend we drop back."
The cruiser driver didn't answer, but he made no effort to pass Willy in the straightaway.
Now far ahead of them, the stolen car chose the left-hand turn, not surprisingly shooting for the distant interstate he'd been aiming at when the patrolman had changed his plans. Willy saw little puffs of smoke in the car's red lights as the rear end swerved and the tires burned with a sudden braking, and then the whole package yielded to simple physics. Nugent broke into an uncontrolled skid, his car slithered both sideways and to the right until it caught the edge of a concrete median, and then it flipped, vaulting spectacularly into the night air. It hung there for a split second, as if arrested by a movie projector glitch, before coming down into a gas station driveway, careening into both of the station's outermost pumps.
There was a flash, a flicker, a long and bated pause, and then, almost mercifully, a fireball explosion that made Willy drop onto the passenger seat for cover. A thunderous whump filled the air and compressed his lungs, even inside the closed car, followed by a showering of small, hard objects all around, including one that smashed his windshield.
With the patrolman's yelling on the radio as a backdrop, Willy got out of his car and surveyed the scene before him-a beautiful, constant fountain of flame, with the car and the mangled pumps at its heart.
"Guess there won't be a trial," he said to himself.
Chapter 21
Joe heard about Wayne Nugent while he was lying in bed beside Lyn, shortly after his cell phone started vibrating from deep within his pile of clothes on the floor. He'd tried sliding his arm out from under her head in order to retrieve the phone and slip out into the hallway, but she'd heard it, too, and urged him to get back into bed with it in order to stay warm. It was an attractive offer, and not only because of her presence. She'd been right-the rest of the apartment had become uncomfortably cool.
"Gunther," he answered, pulling the covers back up over them both.
"Hey, boss," Sammie said. "Sorry to bother, but I thought you better get this hot off the presses. Willy was just in a ten-eighty in Bellows Falls with the guy he says raped Andy Griffis. Swears he was just going to talk to him, that he came on soft and gentle, but that he got knocked on his ass for his efforts. Wayne Nugent's the dirtbag's name-did I mention that? Sorry. Anyhow, Nugent took off down the street, jacked a car at a stop sign, blasted off like a rocket, and then proceeded to lose control and blow himself up at that gas station on the south side of the village. He's dead."
Joe didn't respond. He was too busy both processing and stifling a collection of mental outbursts.
"Oh," Sammie continued, either oblivious or, more likely, nervous for her partner, "Willy's fine. Bellows Falls PD was there with him-at the end-so it looks pretty up-and-up."