“Been holding off all day,” I said, looking at the sky.
“Humidity building, though. Bound to cut loose soon.”
“We need to get a cab.”
“What, you’re not up for the walk? Can’t be more than a hundred and thirty blocks.”
“The rain’s coming,” I said. “Otherwise, I’d be right there with you. Good exercise.”
“We’ll take the rapid.”
There was a Rapid Transit station maybe fifteen blocks away. We walked west down Storer Avenue, then south to the station, took the blue-line train back down Lorain. There was another station at Fairview Hospital, just down the street from the office.
We were upstairs and Joe had his key in the door when the office phone began to ring. He unlocked the door and got to the phone quickly, spoke in low tones for just a few seconds, and hung up.
“Richards,” he said.
“He finally got the message?”
“Didn’t say anything about that. Just told me he wants to see us immediately. Says your boys from last night are with him.”
“Mason and Dean?”
“Yeah. They’re in Berea.”
“Why?”
“Didn’t say. Just told me to get to Berea City Hall.”
“City Hall?” Berea was a small, middle-class suburb just southwest of us, home to Baldwin-Wallace College. I wondered what had brought a Cleveland homicide detective and members of the corruption task force together there.
“Uh-huh. He didn’t explain it other than to suggest we haul ass down there. He didn’t sound particularly happy with us.”
“Pissed off that I didn’t call him after the fires, probably.”
“Could be.”
I’d turned to go back out the door when I saw Joe had taken the snub-nosed Smith & Wesson he favors out of his desk drawer and slipped it into a shoulder holster. While I watched, he pulled a light jacket on over that. The rain was beginning again, pattering against the window.
“Planning to shoot a cop today?” I said. Joe always avoids wearing a weapon when he can, so to see him putting one on before we went to meet with police was damn strange.
“I’ve been put in the backseat of a van by an asshole with a gun in his hand once too often today. That kind of got under my skin.”
He led the way out of the office and shut the lights off behind us. The stairwell was filled with an eerie green glow. When we opened the door and stepped out into the parking lot, the air seemed to hum with the building storm’s energy, greenish clouds skimming across the gray ones as raindrops splattered against us. Joe moved to his Taurus, but I took my truck keys out of my pocket.
“I’ll drive.”
“No, thanks,” he said. It was a control thing, for both of us. Anytime we were heading into unknown circumstances, we both wanted as much control of the situation as possible. Driving didn’t give a whole lot of that, but it was better than nothing. Joe slid behind the wheel of his Taurus without allowing a chance for further debate.
He drove out of the parking lot and across Rocky River, hung a right on Lorain, heading west. Instead of following Lorain as it headed over the bridge, though, he slipped off onto Old Lorain Road, a two-lane offshoot that wound down into the park, past Fairview Hospital. It was the same route we ran together several nights each week. This road would tie into the Valley Parkway down in the river basin, and we could take that all the way into Berea. The speed limit was reduced, but there weren’t the stoplights or traffic delays you’d get on the main roads. The rain was falling harder, and Joe clicked the wiper setting up a few notches, the blades sweeping rapidly across the windshield. The soft patter of raindrops abruptly turned to a harsh clatter.
“Hail,” Joe said. “Great. Probably put dents all over the car.”
His voice was almost drowned out by the pounding of the rain and hail on the car. Rivulets of water rushed alongside the road. A roll of thunder began with a slow rumble and built into a harsh, clattering crescendo, like sheet metal passed through the gears of a powerful machine. A strobelike flash of lightning followed, and for a moment the tree-lined road was bright. I saw that the leaves on some of the trees had rolled upside down, the way they will when responding to the energy of a severe storm. Then the thunder and lightning faded and the world grew darker again. This time, the darkness was heavier, though. The clouds were shifting again, the green glow gone in favor of blackness.
“Hell of a storm,” Joe said. “Car behind us doesn’t even have its lights on yet.”
Joe’s headlights had turned on automatically, the sensor telling them it was night even though it was midday. We wound down a series of S-curves that would eventually straighten out and point us at the river. Behind the trees outside Joe’s window was one of the MetroParks golf courses, brief glimpses of bright green fairways showing when the lightning flashed.
“What the hell,” Joe said, twisting around to look behind us as he eased the car around one of the steep curves. The car that had been running without headlights had suddenly swung into the opposite lane, just off our rear bumper. Now the driver hit the accelerator hard, and the car, a black sedan, pulled close.
“Shit,” Joe said, then he pressed down on his own accelerator while I reached behind me and freed my gun from its holster.
The sedan had the head start, and the Taurus was no race car. Before we made it out of the last curve, the sedan pulled up beside us, and a clatter of automatic gunfire rang out. The sound was deafening, even over the rain and the hail. Glass and metal exploded around us as bullets tore through the car. I got the Glock up but didn’t fire, because Joe slammed on the brake and if I’d managed to hit anyone, it would probably have been him.
The pavement was soaked, and we’d been accelerating just before he hit the brake. The Taurus was a sure-footed car, low and wide, but even it couldn’t take that sudden adjustment. We fish-tailed as we shot out of the curve and toward the straightaway that led to the bridge, the back end of the car whipping first one way, then the next, as the black sedan slid ahead of us. The driver tried to spin the car around and block us, but he soon discovered, as we had, that these weren’t good conditions for fast maneuvering. Before the sedan could get sideways, it skidded across the wet pavement, popped over the curb, and plowed into one of the supports at the front of the bridge. The hood crumpled and the windshield ruptured and spiderwebbed, but that was the last I saw of it, because we were spinning off the road ourselves.
Joe’s abrupt braking had put us out of control, but he’d also done it just early enough to keep us from sliding into the bridge, as the sedan had. Instead, we slid onto the steep embankment on the opposite side of the road. Joe’s foot was still on the brake, but it didn’t matter now—any end to our slide was up to physics, not the car.
We scraped down the embankment at a dramatic angle, and I was sure the car was going to overbalance and roll. Outside my window I could see only grass. Below us was a shallow pool formed by excess river water. Before we went into it, though, we thumped against the slender trunk of the one young tree that stood on the hill. It bowed but didn’t break, holding us perched halfway up the hill.
“You okay?” I said, turning to Joe. I saw then for the first time that he’d been shot.
He was slumped back against his seat, his head at an angle, his face a mask of pain. Blood was running down his jacket, spotting his tie underneath.
“Joe!” I unfastened his seat belt and leaned across the console, trying to see how badly he was hurt. Blood seemed to be coming from his left shoulder and his chest. It was flowing quickly from the chest wound, and his eyes were distant, his face white.
“We’ve got to get out of the car, Joe. They’re going to come down here and kill us if we don’t.”