He righted himself, then swerved sharply to avoid rear-ending a parked BMW. Then swerved again to avoid another car. Will gripped the brake as hard as he could. The bike went into a spin, almost getting away from him before shuddering to a stop.
The on-ramp was packed with vehicles. Again, the Chevy weaved back and forth through traffic. The driver’s luck ran out smack in the middle of the ramp. The Chevy clipped the front end of a Prius. The impact was like two rubber balls colliding. The Prius sucked into an SUV. The Chevy bounced sideways, sliding at a right angle across the asphalt.
Will stood from the bike.
The on-ramp started at the top of a steep hill. Instead of a guardrail lining the left side, there were a bunch of orange barrels indicating where a guardrail would eventually be placed. The on-ramp needed it. The median was a sharp drop down, maybe thirty feet of nothing but sky between the top of the ramp and the highway. The Chevy driver’s hands worked furiously to avoid the obvious, but there was no stopping gravity. The truck knocked out a row of orange barrels as it plunged toward the interstate.
Will felt his jaw drop.
Instead of fighting the fall, the driver steered into it. The truck accelerated. The wheels caught air. The landing wasn’t pretty. The truck bounced and skipped across four lanes of interstate, hit the median divider, then skidded back across the same four lanes. Cars careened around like pinballs. The driver’s arms flew wide as his head slammed into the roof, then snapped down, then slammed into the roof again.
For just a moment, it looked like the Chevy might tip over, but through some act of physics Will would never understand, the truck stayed upright. The driver didn’t argue with luck. The truck’s engine screeched as it lurched down the interstate. The tires had popped from the impact. The rubber flew loose like Silly String. The Chevy was on nothing but rims now. Sparks flew up from the road.
Still, he was getting away.
Will sat down on the bike. He pulled back on the throttle again, gunning the engine. The on-ramp was bottlenecked. Some of the drivers had gotten out of their cars to watch the melee. Most of them had phones in their hands, like nothing was real for them unless they captured it on video.
Will had no choice but to follow the truck’s path down the median. He tried to control the descent, but a large rock sent the bike airborne. He ended up making roughly the same jump to the interstate as the Chevy. It was easier on the bike, and certainly more graceful, but only a last-minute straightening of his knees kept Will’s testicles from sneezing out of his nose.
Up ahead, the Chevy was slowing. The rims had melted down to the axles. Finally, the driver was forced to stop in the middle of the interstate. No one had been speeding, but there were still some collisions as the cars around him came to a stop. In the end, the Chevy looked like the center of a Matchbox display.
Will was around a hundred yards away, the length of a football field, but he clearly saw the driver get out of the truck. A blue bandanna was wrapped around the lower half of the man’s face. A gun was in his hand. He stumbled as his leg started to give out from under him. Blood soaked his shirt and pants. He limped across the interstate, the gun pointed straight out in front of him as he approached a yellow Mini Cooper. Will saw the door open. A woman’s leg appeared, her high-heeled shoe touching the pavement.
The man waved his gun, indicating she should slide over to the passenger’s seat.
Hostage.
Will revved the bike. He didn’t let himself think about what he was doing, because what he was doing was probably the most idiotic thing he’d ever done in his life.
He steered straight toward the driver, the muscles in his arm and shoulders screaming from pulling back on the throttle. The driver turned, but it was too late. By the time he swung around to point the gun at Will, Will was off the bike and the bike was heading straight toward the driver.
Will didn’t slide across the asphalt—there was a limit to his stupidity. What he did was try to hop off. The shift in weight lifted the motorcycle’s front wheel up into the air. Instead of flipping back on itself, it roared across the tarmac on its back tire.
Oddly, Will recalled a show he’d seen on Animal Planet the week before. Bear attacks. Tense stuff. During one of the reenactments, a giant black bear had reared up, mouth open, claws up, as the victim just stood there waiting to get mauled.
And so it was with the driver. He stood there motionless with his gun out in front of him. The screaming Indian seemed to leap at him. Metal met metal, then skin, then bone. Blood sprayed. Hair was wrenched from the scalp.
It really was a lot like the bear attack.
Will fared only slightly better. His body didn’t just stop because he was no longer on the bike. The momentum wasn’t entirely unexpected. As he jumped off, Will tried to pitch to the side. Tuck and roll, just like they’d taught him. Of course, drills couldn’t prepare you for the massive shock of hitting the interstate with nothing but your own body fat to cushion your fall. Will hit the pavement like a clapper striking a bell. His entire skeleton jangled inside his skin.
Will was no stranger to getting the shit knocked out of him. He’d blacked out before. Somewhere in his mind, he knew how to fight it, but it was too late for thinking. He saw more stars, then darkness, then nothing at all.
2.
Will was sitting in the back of an ambulance when a black Suburban with smoked glass pulled into the parking lot of the Lil’ Dixie Gas-n-Go.
“You all right?” the paramedic asked. “You just groaned.”
“Yeah,” Will said. He had groaned. And with good reason. “Just having a bad day.”
“No shit, dude.” The paramedic looked back at the Suburban. An older woman with a helmet of salt-and-pepper hair jumped down from the driver’s seat. She called something to the passenger, a blonde wearing the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s regulation dark blue shirt and tan khakis.
The paramedic noted, “Somebody called in the big guns.”
“Yeah,” Will repeated. He angled himself out of the ambulance, wincing from the pain in his shoulder. “Thanks for patching me up.”
“You might wanna get that looked at.”
“It’s all right.” Will winced as he tried to shrug his shoulder, which felt like it had slammed into the pavement going thirty miles an hour. He asked, “That cop gonna be all right?”
“Still in surgery.” The man tilted his head to the side like he had to consider the prognosis. “He’s young. In good shape. That goes a long way.” He glanced back at the Suburban. The driver had her hands on her hips. She wore sunglasses, but even a blind man could see the flames of fury burning in her eyes. “I bet they got some questions for you.” He looked at Will. “You ask me, you’re some kind of hero taking out that guy with your bike. Probably saved that lady’s life.”
“It was a good bike,” Will said. “Closed loop, sequential, port injection with heated oxygen sensor.”
“Damn.” The man slowly shook his head, and they both shared a moment of silence for the fallen Dark Horse.
“Thanks again.” Reluctantly, Will headed toward the Suburban. There was an escort for him, a Clayton County cop who was shaped like a shepherd’s crook. In keeping with the theme, he herded Will toward the black SUV. Will pulled the cotton out of his nose as he walked. It hurt like a bitch, but this was not the kind of crowd you wanted to show weakness to.
Law enforcement officers were everywhere—Clayton County cops, Forest Park cops, Clayton County sheriff’s deputies, some officers from the Georgia Highway Patrol, and a smattering of GBI agents, who were trickling in from the Panthersville Road headquarters. The entrance to the parking lot was blocked by several cruisers. Crime scene tape crisscrossed the broken plate glass. A white sheet covered the dead body inside the store. Yellow cards marked spent shells, fibers, trace evidence.
And yet, no one was doing much of anything. They all knew that jurisdiction wasn’t something that had to be hashed out. Pro forma, the GBI was always a
sked to investigate officer-involved shootings. Even Will’s escort peeled off when they reached the Suburban’s gravitational field. The SUV was a G-ride, short for “government ride.” The vehicles the GBI used were easy to spot if you knew what you were looking for. The rear was lower to the ground than the front because of the heavy metal gun cabinets bolted in back.
The GBI was to the state of Georgia what the FBI was to the country. Despite what Hollywood portrayed, neither agency could just waltz in and take over an investigation. Except in instances of child abduction or drug trafficking, the GBI had to be invited onto a case before they could work it.
Clayton County, by virtue of its squalor, offered another exception. After the county’s coroner was caught running a drug ring out of the back of his funeral parlor, it was decided by all involved that it would just be easier to pay the state to perform all of the county’s medical examiner duties. This included but was not limited to cases of murder. And in this particular case, a man had definitely been murdered. Sure, he’d been in the process of robbing a convenience store, but murder was murder.
Then there was the guy Will had plastered with his bike. Like the cop who’d been shot, the driver of the Chevy had been rushed to the hospital. Unlike the cop, he probably wouldn’t make it. Will didn’t know if that counted as an officer-involved death or vehicular homicide. The only thing he was certain of was that his boss was about to stick her foot as far up his ass as it would go.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Deputy Director Amanda Wagner snapped off her sunglasses. Will had been right about flames of fury in her eyes, though up close, they certainly burned a lot hotter. “You were supposed to be in Macon this morning. You should be checking in with your parole officer right now.”
Will looked to his partner for help. Faith Mitchell’s gaze settled on the giant sign in the window that advertised cold frozen drinks inside. She looked back at Will, offering an almost imperceptible shake of her head.
Amanda said, “Arrest him.”
Faith looked as surprised as Will felt.
“Bill Black is a material witness to a crime who is also on parole and who also has a history of armed robbery.” Amanda’s voice turned into a low hiss. “Seventy-five thousand dollars, Will. That’s how much it cost to put you undercover. And that doesn’t include the thirty grand we’re going to owe Fulton County for the motorcycle. You are officially costing me more than you’re worth.”
“I’m sorry,” Will said, trying hard not to make it sound like a question.
“You’d better just be damn glad no one was close enough to get your face in those videos.” She nodded to Faith. “Cuff him.”
Faith mumbled something that was just loud enough for Will to hear. Still, she took out her handcuffs. “Turn around.”
“My shoulder kind of hurts.”
Faith gave a heavy sigh. “Hands out front.”
Will held out his hands, mindful that cops from at least five agencies were watching his arrest. Amanda probably had a point about his cover. He still had an undercover case to work in Macon, which was about an hour from where they stood. Cops talked to each other all the time. They would share the story of the con who ran his bike into a guy standing in the middle of the interstate.
Will wondered if it looked as cool as he remembered.
Amanda said, “Read him his rights before you bring him into the store.” She slid her sunglasses back on. Her high heels made a snapping sound as she walked across the parking lot. Probably from her cloven hooves rubbing together.
Faith ratchetted down the handcuffs. “You stopped for an Icee, didn’t you?”
Will exercised his right to remain silent.
“Did you lose consciousness?”
“No,” he lied.
“Are you going to tell Sara about this?”
“Of course,” he lied again. In order to tell Sara what had happened, he would have to tell her why he was on his way to Macon.
“So,” Will said. “There’s video?”
“Amanda’s right. From what we’ve seen, nobody got a good shot of your face.”
He tried, “How about that motorcycle trick? Cool, right?”
“It reminds me of Evel Knievel.” She made sure the handcuffs were tight. “You know, when he tried to jump over the Snake River Canyon on his bike.”
He gently corrected, “The X-2 Skycycle was a steam-powered rocket, not a motorbike.”
“Whatever, Will. How’d it go for him?”
Will didn’t answer her. There was a reason Knievel still held the world record for the most broken bones in a lifetime. “You look nice today.”
Faith jerked him toward the store. Will wasn’t certain whether it was kindness or forgetfulness that made her drag him by his uninjured arm.
They found Amanda standing in front of an old tube television set behind the counter. She was surrounded by beefy, tall cops, but her presence was such that the men seemed reduced around her. Amanda had spent her life in law enforcement. Her father had been a cop. She’d come up when the only thing the Atlanta Police Department could agree on was that women didn’t belong in uniform. To say there was a chip on her shoulder was to say that Chuck Norris was kind of a badass.
She didn’t look up when Faith dragged Will inside, but obviously she knew he was there. “Mr. Black, would that be you hiding behind the Yodels?”
Will leaned in, squinting at the paused image. The camera was mounted over the front counter, but instead of capturing the front doors, the lens was pointed toward the back of the convenience store. There Will was—curled into a ball, hands over his head.
He said, “I believe those are Little Debbies.”
The laughter died down as quickly as it started. A pointed look from Amanda cleared the front of the building. She waited until just Will and Faith were left in the store with her.
“Run it down for me,” she told Will, though history told him that she likely had more information than he did.
Still, he gave her the highlights, substituting the Icee quest for a gas run. “I guess he got scared when he heard the sirens,” Will said, meaning the driver of the Chevy. “He ran out of the store, jumped into his truck. I pursued. You know what happened next.”
“Everyone does. It’s all over Hooter.”
Will hoped she meant Twitter.
Amanda supplied, “The driver of the truck has been identified as Wayne Michael Walker. He’s at the hospital now. It doesn’t look good. The cop got off a shot before your little chase. Nicked the femoral artery. Of course, that pales in comparison to taking a full-body slam from a ten-thousand-pound motorcycle.”
Will said, “It’s probably closer to seven hundred.”
She pressed together her lips before continuing, “Walker’s fifty-three years old. He’s a high school counselor, recently fired from the Clayton County school system.”
Faith gave a low whistle. It took a lot to get fired from Clayton County. “What’d he do, slap a kid?”
“Yes.”
Faith seemed a little shocked.
“At any rate,” Amanda continued, doling out the information she’d obviously gleaned on the drive down, “Walker’s accomplice worked at the same school—Spivey Senior High. Math teacher.”
“He didn’t look like a teacher,” Will said. “He looked like a homeless man.”
Amanda picked her way across the debris littering the floor. Will stepped in to help her when she knelt in front of the dead body, then he remembered he was in handcuffs and that people in handcuffs didn’t tend to help the police.
She pulled back the sheet. “Douglas Raymond Pierce. Doug-Ray to his friends. Coached girls’ softball. School-wide teacher of the year last year.”
Will accepted that he really was some kind of idiot. The John Deere baseball cap was tilted back on Doug-Ray Pierce’s head, giving Will a clear view of where dreadlocks had been sewn into the rim. Likewise, the bushy porn mustache was a fake. The spotty goatee was all Doug-Ray. Ta
ke off the disguise, and he looked like every math teacher/coach Will had ever had.
“What about their next of kin?” Faith asked. She was scrolling through the closed-circuit footage. Will looked at the set. He saw himself dive behind the Little Debbies. And then the film reversed and he ran backward. And then the film played out and he went down again.
Amanda supplied, “The driver, Wayne Walker, was born and raised in Forest Park. He got his degree from Clayton State College. He’s twice divorced, currently single. Both exes live outside the state—one in Idaho, the other in Massachusetts. He has a twenty-year-old daughter who’s stationed in Afghanistan. We’re trying to track them all down, but it’s rough going.” She paused, and Will could tell she was exasperated for other reasons now. “Walker has no history of violence except for slapping that student. He’s as financially stable as you’d think a high school counselor would be, usually pays his bills late, but he always pays them. He hasn’t been issued a speeding ticket in the last seven years. He has a master’s in social work, for what that’s worth. And I should add that universally, one word came up in all the interviews we’ve conducted so far: ‘asshole.’ ”
“And Pierce?” Faith asked, not looking up from the TV. Will saw himself diving again.
“On paper, Doug-Ray Pierce is more of the same. We found nothing on his record but a speeding ticket in Florida three years ago,” Amanda told them. “Personal details are still being filled out. He’s new to the area—been here less than two years. Before that, he taught in west Georgia. We’ve got people heading over to Spivey High to conduct interviews. Preliminarily, no one seems to know much about Pierce. His emergency contact is his father, who died three months ago. Pierce was a loner by all accounts, never talked about his private life. Except for Wayne Walker, he didn’t seem to have any friends.”
“Gay?” Faith asked.
“Not if you take off the mustache,” Amanda quipped. “What exactly are you doing?”
The Will Trent Series 7-Book Bundle Page 295
