“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.