"You're going to kill me," Brand said in the same low monotone. "Right?"
"What little birdie whispered that in your ear?"
"You're a killer. It's what you do."
"Maybe I'll go easy on you."
"You won't. You can't. You're the big dog in the ring. All you know is kill or be killed."
Leaving the Caddy behind, Gray eased back into the fast lane. "You might have a point there, Sarge."
"Kill or be killed amp;" Brand's voice trailed away.
"As mottos go, it ain't half-bad." Gray smiled, warming to his theme. "The way I see it"
He had no time to finish. Beside him, Brand's right hand came up fast, and in it was a gun, a little snub-nosed job that had appeared out of nowhere like a magic trick.
Gray spun the wheel hard to the left, slamming the Crown Vic up against the guardrail. The car made a grinding noise and slewed across two lanes. Every horn in the world started blasting, headlights flying everywhere as the vehicles behind the Vic peeled around the car, some of them scraping the rear end and throwing new shudders through the chassis.
Brand, flung half-out of his seat by the collision, twisted around and fired the gun, and even though there was no way he could miss at a distance of two feet, somehow he missed anyway. He had time for only one shot, and then Gray squeezed the trigger of his Beretta.
He didn't miss.
Blood splashed him. He blinked it out of his eyes. Brand flopped and spasmed in the passenger seat, his butt-ugly face shredded like a Halloween mask. Gray snatched Brand's gun away before the cop fired it again in some kind of death twitch.
"You was right, Sarge!" he yelled over the ringing in his ears. "You ain't smart!"
He floored the brake pedal, stopping the car. A moment later, the engine died. Smoke rose from under the hood.
By now he'd conned what had happened. Brand carried an extra gun in his personal car. Kept it under the seat, it seemed. He'd been waiting for Gray to let down his guard. Nearly scored on that play, too. If Gray had been a split second slower, he would be the one barfing up his own brains right now. But he'd come through. He was alive, and the shit-eating, dick-stroking son of a black-eyed whore was dead.
"You hear me, Sergeant Fuck?" he screamed at the pale, shaking, faceless thing bleeding all over the other seat. "You're dead!"
Gray exploded out of the car. The freeway was backed up in the two lanes blocked by the slant-parked car. A frozen chain of headlights stretched for a half mile. The other lanes were clear, traffic whizzing past, leaving red comet tails of taillights.
Directly behind the ruined Crown Vic, some asshole in a green Volkswagen Beetle was tooting his horn and making faces through the windshield, pissed about the delay but too chickenshit to risk nosing around the obstruction.
Gray had never liked Volkswagenshe still thought of them as hippie carsbut he wasn't in a position to be choosy. He ran up to the door on the driver's side and rapped his gun against the glass.
"Out, motherfucker! Outta your clown car now!"
The jerkoff had stopped honking. He stared at Gray through the glass, not resisting, just plain paralyzed with fear. Gray knocked out the window with a swipe of the gun barrel, dusting the moron with crumbs of safety glass. "Out!"
It registered. The guy got out, Gray assisting with a tug that sent him tumbling to the asphalt. He jumped behind the wheel and swerved into the next lane, not giving a shit about the high speed of traffic or the flurry of horns and squealing brakes behind him.
With his foot stamping the gas pedal, he crossed the remaining lanes and took the next exit to the surface streets. Freeway would've been faster, but he couldn't stay on that road after jacking a ride and fleeing an accident. The Chippies and the city cops would all be after his ass, especially if Joe Volkswagen had made him as the city's most wanted fugitive.
He wasn't far from Doc Robin's digs anyway. He could make it there in another three, four minutes, even on surface streets.
He wondered what he would find when he got thereand whether the doc would still be alive.
Chapter Fifty-two
For Hammond, everything was falling apart. They had failed to net Gray in Hollywood. The TV crews had been there to capture the debacle. That was bad enough. What was happening now was worse.
"I don't understand it," he said from the backseat as his driver chauffeured him and Lewinsky and Banner to the Hoover Street exit of the Santa Monica Freeway. "I just don't get it."
"Doesn't make sense," agreed Banner, sitting next to him. "Whole goddamn thing is spinning out of control."
Hammond gave Banner a warning glare. "No I-told-you-sos, Phil. I don't need any bullshit from you right now."
Banner frowned. "Just because this gamble of yours didn't pay off, you don't need to take it out on me."
"Why the hell not? I've got to take it out on somebody. Anyway, it's too soon to say it didn't pay off."
"Come on, Chief, it's a fucking catastrophe. We're talking Bay of Pigs here. We've got Sergeant Brand's car wrecked on the freeway. A DB inside that's probably Brand himself, and an armed carjacker ID'd as Justin Gray. It's a total meltdown."
"We don't know for sure it was Gray. The carjack vic might've been seeing things. You know how unreliable eyewitnesses are."
"That's a pretty thin branch to cling to," Banner groused.
"Are you forgetting the chain of command here, Lieutenant?"
"I'm not forgetting anything. Including the fact that I warned you not to stick your finger in this particular pie."
"That's an I-told-you-so. I don't want to hear any I-told-you-sos, God damn it."
"Sir?" Lewinsky broke in. "We're here."
The car had come to a stop on the left-hand shoulder of the freeway. Hammond hadn't even noticed.
He stepped out. Cones and flares had been set up by CHP, cordoning off three lanes and forcing eastbound traffic over to the right. Highway Patrol officers stood waving flashlights to direct the vehicular flow.
Brand's Crown Victoriathe plate had been traced to him by the first officers on the scenelay crosswise on the road, straddling a lane division. The front was all crunched in and busted up, and the dented guardrail some distance to the west showed why. The rear of the car had taken some scrapes as well. Both taillights and one headlight were out. The engine was dead. The occupant of the passenger seat was likewise.
Hammond approached the driver's side and looked in, not touching anything.
It was Brand, all right. His face was largely gone, but his build and the dark windbreaker he'd been wearing in Hollywood were still identifiable, although the windbreaker had changed color, having been dyed in a geyser of blood.
"It's him," he said as Lewinsky and Banner joined him. "Gunshot to the face. Where's the carjack vie?"
"First officer said a unit took him to Saint Vincent's," Banner reported. "He wasn't hurt, just shook up."
"Damn." Hammond shook his head. "I need to talk to him, confirm it was Gray. We got anybody at Brand's residence?"
"Hollywood unit is on the way," Lewinsky said.
"Maybe they'll find something that makes sense out of all this." Hammond took another look at the dead man in the passenger seat. "Somebody has to."
Chapter Fifty-three
During her hospital internship Robin had seen a few cases of smoke inhalation. She knew the smoke could kill her in a variety of ways. It could squeeze the oxygen out of the room, replacing it with carbon dioxide, leaving an inadequate supply of breathable air. It could irritate her respiratory passages until her airway swelled up and closed, choking off breath. It could poison her body with carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulfide, hydrogen cyanidetoxins that would render her unable to metabolize oxygen. Most likely, it would kill her in all three ways at once.