“C’mon, man,” the driver said.
“Call!” I shouted. “Tell them I want the sheriff out here. Now!”
He reluctantly punched in the number, said some crazy guy had a gun aimed at him in the middle of Route 20 near Pig Lick Road.
That brought sirens ten minutes later, and flashing blue lights and three cruisers. I was right where I had been, gun to the passenger’s head, when they arrived. Deputies exited their cruisers with pistols and shotguns drawn.
“Put down your weapon!” one shouted.
I pulled it away from the man’s head, holstered the gun, and climbed down. Putting my hands up, I yelled, “My name is Alex Cross. I am a homicide detective with the Washington, DC, police. These clowns tried to run us off the Pig Lick Road during the course of an investigation.”
“Fuck,” the passenger said. “A cop. Fuck, Billy, you said—”
“Shut up, Clete,” the driver said. “Don’t say a damn thing.”
“Gun on the ground,” a blond female deputy shouted, still aiming at me.
The driver got out while I put the Colt on the pavement. He shouted, “This crazy fucker can’t drive, was going too fast, went into three-sixties up there in front of us, and next thing we know, he’s up on the cab, gun drawn and shooting!”
“That’s not what happened at all!” Ava yelled. She’d come up in back of me. “They hit us from behind, just like Alex said.”
“No way!” the driver yelled. “No way.”
“Everybody calm down!” called a frail voice.
I could hear the click of Jones’s walker and the wheels of his oxygen tank crunching on the gravel.
The female deputy lowered her gun several degrees. “Atticus? That you?”
“Who the hell else looks like this?” Jones said as he came up beside me. “And these frickin’ idiots hit us from behind, no doubt about it. They meant to crash us, for some goddamned reason.”
The driver said, “This is bullshit. We’re gonna get railroaded here. I want an attorney.”
The passenger climbed out, spilling glass from the lap of his coverall. He looked at me like I was dirt, said, “They’re lying, all three of ’em. But I can see where this is going. I want an attorney too.”
After the deputies cuffed the two mine workers and put them in the backseat of a cruiser, the blond one, Anne Craig, came over and hugged Jones.
Deputy Craig looked at me, said, “I know who you are, Dr. Cross, and what’s happened to your family. It’s all over the news. I’m sorry, very sorry, for your losses. But why are you here?”
I hesitated. Jones said, “He’s looking into the old Mulch case.”
Craig rolled her eyes. She’d obviously heard about the case from Jones, probably several times.
“It could be connected to the man who has my family,” I said.
“Really?” the deputy said.
“Looks likely, as a matter of fact,” I replied.
She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “These pukes involved?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “You find out, you let me know.”
“Need you to come into town to make statements,” Craig said.
“Deputy, we’re on a tight deadline,” I told her. “I wasn’t expecting all this.”
“What kind of deadline?”