“There it is. My gun landed on the lip of the rear spoiler. It’s wedged there.”
“No way—don’t you even think about it, lady.”
“Just hold on to my leg. I can almost reach it.”
“Damn it, Michelle, you’re going to give me a heart attack, and I’m about to have one as it is.”
So focused was King on her that he didn’t see the SUV speed up and come alongside until the last instant.
“Hold on,” he screamed as he instantly downshifted, leaping over gears in a way that probably voided every manufacturer’s warranty Lexus offered. He could almost hear the car screaming at him to Just stop it! and he expected to see his transmission vomited all over the road. He plunged to twenty clicks on the speedometer, both feet on the brakes now, then came to a thudding stop, wheels smoking, as the g’s raced down his torso and washed off his toes. Michelle had a death grip around the rear headrest, her bare feet braced against the back of his seat.
King’s body was misfiring in so many ways he figured cardiac arrest was the least he could expect. He slammed the car into reverse, jammed down on the accelerator, firewalled what was left of his engine, and rocketed backward.
The SUV had stopped so hard that its tires seemed ablaze, such was the volume of smoke pouring from them. The driver cut a swift 180 and was coming at them full tilt, the SUV’s grille resembling bared teeth looking to devour them. It was gaining with every revolution of the wheel.
Michelle stopped inching toward her gun and eyed her partner, who was looking backward as he drove. “You can’t drive faster backward than he can forward, Sean.”
“Thanks for telling me.” His knuckles were turning purple from his grip on the wheel. “Hold on to everything you can. On the count of five I’m cutting a J.”
“You must be nuts.”
“Yes, I must be.”
By cutting a J he meant that from a fast reverse driving position he was going to whip the car into a 180-degree turn, probably on two wheels, slam it into drive, fire the turbos and rocket off in the opposite direction. All that in one neat motion, preferably without killing them both.
Sweat broke over King’s brow as he prayed that all his Secret Service training would come back to him so many years later. He clamped on the door with his free hand for leverage, braced his left foot against the floorboard as a fulcrum point, gauged the exact right moment and whipped the wheel hard, letting go of it completely and then clamping down on it. It worked to perfection. He leapfrogged over the first two forward gears, gunned it and shot ahead. However, five seconds later the SUV was chasing them and gaining.
Smoke was now coming out of the Lexus’s hood, and every single gauge King was staring at was foretelling their doom. Their speed dropped to sixty, then fifty. It was over.
“Sean, here he comes!” screamed Michelle.
“There’s not a damn thing I can do about it,” he shouted back, hopelessness evolving to rage in the course of a single breath.
The SUV roared past, pulled back and took its two and one half tons and broadsided them. King kept one hand on the wheel and clamped the other on Michelle’s ankle as she struggled to get the gun. His fingers dug in so tightly on her skin that he knew he was drawing blood. His arm and shoulder were being torqued almost beyond limit.
“Are you okay?” he called out, gritting his teeth against the pain as he could feel her full weight pulling against his tendons.
“I am now, I’ve got the gun.”
“Well, good, because the bastard’s coming again. Hold on!”
He looked over to see the black SUV swerve toward him about the same time he felt Michelle’s limb twist around in his hand.
“What are you do—” He didn’t have time to finish his sentence. The SUV clipped the rear end of the Lexus, and the car did what King had feared all along. It started to fishtail, and then it went into a 360, totally out of control.
“Hold on!” he called out hoarsely as seemingly every ounce of belly bile started to march upward to incinerate his throat. As a Secret Service agent King had trained relentlessly to master the maneuvers of vehicles in the most hazardous conditions imaginable. Warmed up by the J-turn, he just let instinct take over. Instead of fighting the movements of the car, he went with them, turning the wheel toward the spin instead of against it and beating back the natural impulse to crush his brakes. The thing he was most fearful of was the car rolling. If it did, Michelle was dead and he probably would be too or at best a quad. King didn’t know how many revolutions the car took, but the low-built, bottom-heavy 3,800-pound Lexus held the road despite jettisoning a good deal of its tire rubber and a bunch of its metal guts.
The car finally came to a stop facing in the direction of where they’d been heading; the black SUV was just up ahead and moving away from them fast, apparently having decided to give up the fight. Michelle’s gun fired, and the rear tires of the SUV disintegrated as the ordnance ripped into them. The vehicle started to whip around, went into a 360 and then did what the Lexus had steadfastly refused to: it rolled. Three shuddering flips, and it came to rest on its shattered roof along the right shoulder of the road far ahead of them, a trail of metal, glass and rubber left in its turbulent wake.
King sped forward, as much as he could in his wrecked car, while Michelle slid down in the seat next to him.
“Sean?”
“What?”
“You can let go of my leg.”
“What? Oh, right.” He released his death grip.