The sedan straightened out and then pulled away, but Jenna’s fleeting hopes that they might be leaving the scene were dashed when she saw their brake lights flash. A figure leaned out the passenger side window and looked back, one hand extended. It was Zack.
“Gun!” Mercy shouted.
Jenna felt the pickup decelerating again. “No. Charge them!”
Mercy was incredulous. “What?”
“Run them off the road.”
A small flash appeared at the end of Zack’s extended hand and something cracked loudly against the windshield. Jenna ducked, but the glass remained intact. A quarter-sized divot had been gouged in the windshield, almost perfectly in line with Mercy’s head.
Jenna was thrown forward as Mercy stomped on the brakes.
“No,” she protested. “You can’t stop.”
“They’re shooting at us,” Mercy challenged, her normally cool tone replaced by strident hysteria.
“And you’re going to make it impossible for them to miss.” Jenna fought to keep her own voice calm. “The only way to survive this is to take them out. Keep your head down, but don’t back off.”
Mercy held her gaze for a moment, eyes squinted. “You sure you don’t have a secret life you want to tell me about, too?”
There was another crack, another round striking the windshield, closer to center this time. A ragged crack appeared, connecting the two impact sites. Jenna knew she hadn’t convinced Mercy. If she wasn’t going to go on the offensive, the only option was to make a U-turn and flee back to Stock Island. Before she could articulate this alternative however, Mercy punched the accelerator, and they lurched forward.
“Maybe you should give them something else to think about,” Mercy said, her body bent forward so that she appeared to be peeking over the steering wheel.
Jenna blinked uncomprehending. Mercy glanced at her with a wry smile, her emotions back under control. “Shoot them.”
Jenna looked down at the pistol, all but forgotten, in her hand. She had never fired a gun in her life, and she wondered now why she had bothered to ask Mercy for it. With a shake of her head, she steeled her nerve and then rolled down the window.
The pickup closed the gap, but as they got to within fifty yards, the sedan’s brake lights went out and the car started pulling away. Mercy jiggled the wheel back and forth, causing the pickup to veer from one side of the road to the other.
“Better use both hands,” Mercy advised. “Don’t drop it, and for God’s sake, don’t fall out.”
Or get shot, Jenna added silently.
She leaned against the doorframe, both arms extended, with the pistol braced in her hands the way she’d seen Mercy do back at the trailer. A blast of air hit her full in the face as she looked down the length of her arms, not sure exactly how to sight the weapon. She slid a finger into the trigger guard.
“Is there a safety?” she yelled. It seemed like the right question.
“No safety. Just point and shoot.”
Jenna tried to imagine an invisible line traveling down her arm, past the gun and ending where she wanted the bullet to go — not at Zack who was still hanging out of the sedan’s window, trying to line up a shot of his own, but at a target that she felt sure she could hit: the sedan’s back window.
She pulled the trigger and felt something move under her fingertip. A piece of plastic protruded from the metal lever like a secondary trigger, but at her touch, it slid back into a recess, flush with the trigger itself. Then the trigger itself started to move, but slowly, as if resisting her. She applied more pressure and suddenly felt the pistol jerk, like a firecracker going off in her hands.
Jenna gave a yelp of surprise, and despite Mercy’s warning, almost let her grip relax. So that’s what it feels like, she thought. Okay, I can do this.
The sedan swerved as her bullet smacked into the rear window, the tempered glass instantly turning opaque with countless fractures. She saw Zack pull back inside, and for a moment she dared to hope that her bullet had been enough to send their attackers packing.
Abruptly, two fist-sized holes appeared in the sedan’s glazed rear window, broadening out as the car’s occupants began clearing away the glass fragments. Jenna saw two men framed in the opening, and just as she was starting to line up for another shot, she saw them thrust their own guns out through the opening.
She squeezed the trigger, but at the same instant the two gunmen fired. A hailstorm of bullets slammed into the pickup, and Jenna’s world transformed into chaos.
12
The windshield exploded inward. Splinters of glass, driven by the wind, stabbed into Jenna. She barely noticed, because in that same moment, the truck yawed, veering to the right, but also tilting like an out of control carnival ride. She tried to find Mercy, but her body refused to cooperate. She felt herself being pushed and pulled in different directions, shaken like a captured gazelle in the mouth of a lion. She was dimly aware that the truck was no longer traveling in a straight line along the flat road surface, but corkscrewing, twisting through the air, and then she was flying free.
The sensation was like nothing she’d ever felt before. It was strangely exhilarating and a welcome relief from the punishment of being thrown about the hard metal cage of the pickup’s cab, but it happened so fast that before she could understand what was happening, it was over.
She slapped against something, a hard surface, only it wasn’t a surface exactly. She felt something like the sting of a belly-flop dive into a pool, which as it turned out was almost correct. Warm water engulfed her, flooding into her open mouth, choking her. A reflexive spasm of gagging brought her out of her daze, but for a few moments, she was nothing more than a thrashing, coughing animal, in the grip of a primal panic.
A cool breeze on her face calmed her by degrees, but her mind still raced to comprehend everything that had just happened.
She looked around, grasping at last that she was floating in the warm waters of the Boca Chica Channel. She saw lights off in the distance, and as she turned her head, she found the elevated hump of the highway, ten feet away. It loomed above her like a great wave about to crash down and sweep her to oblivion. Then she spied a flaw in the dark horizon. A light cut through the night, illuminating a patch of water fifty yards out to sea. It took her a moment to recognize it as a single headlight, shining out from an overturned vehicle that had broken through the guardrail, and was now perched precariously at the edge of the road.
She clutched at her last clear memory: leaning out the window of the pickup…the shots from the men in the sedan.
The pickup had rolled, and Jenna had been thrown clear. She owed her life to the fluke of luck that had catapulted her into the water. She might just as easily have been crushed under the somersaulting vehicle or thrown onto the hard pavement, which would have flayed her raw and pulverized her bones.
Mercy!
Jenna recalled the horrible sound of the bullets striking the truck. Had Mercy been hit or had she just swerved in a misguided effort to avoid that fate?