She blinked again. Focused. Amped up.
No way would she let that sick fuck get away.
She had her window down, listening for the sound of an engine. She squinted and smelled smoke. Although the sky was bright, the woods were getting darker, and Drake had to turn on his headlights to plow out of the timber road. She saw him coming when he was still fifty feet back, and then he bounced out of the trees, down through the roadside ditch and up on the highway. He turned right, as she had, and sped away from her. She followed, staying back for a minute, then hit her flashers and dropped the hammer. She knew these roads, that was her advantage, that and a bigger engine in her Jeep.
Drake made a run for it.
Speeding through the ever-closing night, his taillights burning bright.
She drove faster, feeling the tires hum and her heart pound as images of those innocent kids played through her mind.
On a straightaway, heading to a sharp corner, she roared up behind the older, overmatched Jeep until she was no more than six feet behind him. At the corner he swung wide, hit gravel on the far shoulder, a tire catching on the edge of the asphalt. As she slowed she watched his Jeep spin back across the road, headlights arcing, cutting through the night.
“Die, you bastard,” she said, hitting the brakes.
Drake’s Jeep slid off the side of the road, the front-right headlight smashing against a pine, the hood crumpling with a groan, an axle breaking.
Her vehicle slid to a stop on the shoulder.
Service weapon in her hand, she stepped onto the asphalt and screamed at his vehicle.
“Get out. I want to see your hands, and I want you out.”
He didn’t move.
“Now! Get out.”
She advanced, crouching, wishing she was wearing a vest.
He kicked open his door, then slowly, hands over his head, he emerged from the Jeep. He was dressed in black from head to toe. Black dress shirt, black slacks, black shoes.
“What’s this about?” he called out. “You nearly killed me. You some kind of psycho cop?”
“It’s about all those children,” she said, her throat raw. “Keep your hands over your head, and back away. I want you out in the headlights, or, I swear to God, I’ll shoot you.”
“I don’t know anything about any children,” he called to her, but did as he was instructed, and backed away. “I got a bad fire up there, my phone doesn’t work, I was going to get the volunteer fire department. Could you call them for me?”
“Shut up,” she said.
She was at the back of his Jeep and saw through the plastic window the rifle stacked up between the two front seats, ready to use.
“You were going to shoot your way out, if you didn’t get clear, weren’t you?”
So why hadn’t he tried to shoot her? Something wasn’t computing.
“I wasn’t going to shoot anybody,” Drake said, hands still over his head. “I’ve never committed a crime in my life. The worst thing I’ve ever done is let that fire get out of control, and I don’t even have insurance. I think that goddamn Weeks started it, I found out he was doing something in my cabin while I wasn’t here.”
“That’s not what Phillip Weeks told me,” she said.
She pushed the Jeep’s door open, switched hands on her pistol, and used her right hand to fish the rifle out of the Jeep.
“Phillip Weeks is a crazy, drug-addled boy,” Drake shouted. “His old man has fed him opiates since he was ten years old. Nobody’s going to believe a doper like him.”
She looked at him and said, “You’ve almost got me convinced. You might walk.”
“Might, bullshit. I’ve got the best attorneys in California. You’re going to be lucky to have your job when they’re finished with you. The best thing you could do right now is forget all this.”
She looked down at the rifle.
Large-caliber bolt action, like the gun that had killed Cain. She pulled the bolt back an inch, then shut it, seeing the brassy flash of the cartridge going back into the chamber.
“You know, you killed the wrong guy down in the river. The guy who saw the girl in the RV. He’s still back there.”
In a split second Drake reached behind his back and pulled out a pistol.
She fired.
He went down, his handgun flying from his grasp.
The rush in her ears was overpowering, the anger flooding through her veins nearly blinding her. Without thinking, she turned and using one hand, brought the rifle up and fired a single shot through the windshield of her Jeep.
Glass shattered.
“What are you—” Drake began, sputtering as he watched, white-faced, bleeding. “No. Wait. I didn’t do anything.”
She wiped down the stock and trigger with the bottom of her shirt.
“Wait,” Drake said as the sound of sirens cut through the night. “Those kids. They were better off with me. They wanted to do it. I gave them a place to live and food and made them movie stars. They lived like kings and queens.”
Rage swelled.
Blackness pulled at her vision.
Her finger curled over the trigger of her service weapon.
“For Christ’s sake.” Drake scrambled for his gun.
She shot him twice in the chest.
VIRGIL SHOUTED DOWN AT THE Feds, “He’s gone up the gravel road, away from the county road.”
The SWAT team, in the light of the fires, started jogging up the road toward Weeks’s cabin.
“He’s not there anymore,” Johnson muttered.
He and Johnson crashed through the brush on the bluff, waded the shallow river, and ran down the road to the dude ranch, where everybody staying at the ranch, Katy, her siblings, and her parents, were all standing on the edge of the golf course, looking at the fire in the sky.
Jim Waller called to them as they passed, “Is that the Drake place? What’s going on up there?”
They didn’t bother to answer, but piled into Johnson’s Cadillac and headed out to the highway.
“Gotta be a right turn,” Johnson said.
A mile up the road, they found Pescoli sitting next to the right front wheel of her Jeep. She was holding a tissue next to her eye, showing a little blood. Up the road, they could see Drake, spread-eagled in the headlights of his Jeep.
He and Johnson jumped out of the Cadillac and they hurried up to her. She was white faced, her eyes a little glassy, but she answered.
“I’m not bad. I shot him twice, maybe three times. He thought we had him. He had nothing to lose by trying to take me out.”
Her hand was shaking a little.
“He was right about that,” Virgil said and saw the smashed-up Jeep and the body lying in the grass near the shoulder. “You check him?”
“Enough to know we don’t need an ambulance,” she said, chalk white, her voice distant, almost disembodied. She cleared her throat and focused on Virgil, as if seeing him for the first time. “I wish we could have taken him alive. I wish we could have gotten him in court.”
“Probably better this way,” Johnson said, avoiding looking at the corpse. “What if he’d gotten off? If what everybody says is true, the cocksucker deserves to be dead.”
He and Regan both gave Johnson a look, and he muttered, “Okay. Sorry about that ‘cocksucker.’ ”
Virgil stood up from checking the body and looked at Regan and Johnson.
“But you’re right. He deserves to be dead. And now he is.”
LARA ADRIAN AND CHRISTOPHER RICE
THRILLERS COME IN ALL FORMS. The number of subgenres is staggering, and this story is representative of one of the most popular.