Chapter Thirty-Three

IT WAS A good hit. Precise. Effective. My thoughts slowed, only the hardest, most rational aspects of the crash coming to mind. It was a trick I’d learned in the academy. Think about the crisis as though you’re observing it from outside your own body. The truck with the two construction workers in it nudged our bumper on the right-hand side, sending us into a fishtail. Our truck spun twice before we flipped and then crashed down the wide slope beside the forest. Two, maybe three seconds after impact, we were off the road, only a handful of glass and some skid marks indicating that we’d ever been there. That was the goal. We were under attack. The airbags smacked into us, knocking me unconscious. When I woke, I was upside down. Susan was unbuckling my seat belt, dragging me from the driver’s side onto the wet grass.

The battered truck that had hit us pulled up beside ours. I was so buzzed from the concussion, I saw the lettering on the side of the truck, but couldn’t read it. Big red letters. A truck bed full of rolls of black plastic and toolboxes. Susan was bleeding from the nose. I shook my head to clear the fog, but that only made things worse. The two men in flannel shirts were on us immediately, one grabbing and lifting Susan by the arms, the other looping a big hand under my armpit and shuffling me into the woods ten yards or so from the crashed truck.

“Where’s the old lady?” my captor asked. He let me go and I stood there, numb, taking in the sight of him. Big black beard. Bucky white teeth. He shoved me, smacked me in the jaw to get me talking. “Hey! Dude! Pay attention. Where’s the old lady?”

I looked around. Had there been another victim of the crash? A passenger in our truck that I didn’t remember? The guy tried to smack me again and I blocked it, pulled my gun out of the back of my jeans. I didn’t even get time to aim it before he had it and was poking the barrel into my chest.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” I roared.

The guy shoved me again and I managed to maintain my balance, arriving beside Susan. We were under the gaze of two guns now, the second guy having pulled one from the waistband of his jeans. Susan stuck to my side, trembling gently but quiet, trying as hard as I was to make sense of what was happening.

“What’s this about?” she pleaded. “Who the hell are you guys?”

“Just shut it, woman.” The smaller guy with bucky teeth gave Susan a lazy look. “You’re spitting blood everywhere.”

I looked at Susan. She was indeed bleeding profusely from the nose, the airbag punch to the face having really worked her over. I lifted the hem of my T-shirt and wiped her face, holding her head close to me so I could pretend to murmur comforts into her ear.

“You got a gun?” I whispered.

“Knife in my boot,” she said. “That’s all. You?”

“Nothing.”

The big guy with the beard was digging through the cabin of our truck, now and then glancing up as cars passed on the highway out of sight of us on the embankment. I watched him take our wallets, check our IDs. He made a phone call, wedging the phone against his shoulder as he searched the glovebox.

I could finally make sense of the lettering on the truck.

DRIVER CONSTRUCTION SERVICES.

“Boss, your contact pulled through with the APB. We got the truck,” the big guy said. “But there’s no old lady. Just a couple of randoms.”

A pause while the big man listened to his boss. Even with all that I was seeing and experiencing, I still couldn’t make heads or tails of our situation.

“We got William Theodore Robinson,” the big guy read from the license he had taken from my wallet. Then switched to Susan’s. “And Susan Ann Solie… I don’t know. They were just driving it. Maybe she sold it or gave it away or somethin’? Beats me, Boss. I’m asking them where she is, they’re either acting dumb or they genuinely don’t know… Could be… Let me try.”

The big guy leaned out the open door of the car and looked at me.

“Where’s Marris?” he asked.

I looked at Susan. She was blank.

“Who?” I shrugged.

The man listened on the phone call for a few seconds, then hung up. He jutted his chin at his partner, which seemed to mean something, and the two of them came toward us.

“Listen, folks,” the big guy said. “I’m real sorry. Seems like what we got here is a real bad case of mistaken identity.”

“Yeah, no shit,” Susan snapped. “Look, whoever this old lady named Marris is, we don’t know her, and we’ve never met her. You picked the wrong people, the wrong truck, and the wrong mode of approach. You idiots just nearly killed an ex-cop and an ex-FBI agent. A world of trouble is about to fall on you right now. So put the gun down and back away.”

The two construction workers looked at each other.

“Huh.” The little one made a surprised noise at his buddy. “They’re the law?”

“We better do this right, then,” the big one said. “No cutting corners. We bury them deep, dump the guns, and burn the truck.”