The Getaway God (Sandman Slim 6)

“Screw this up and you can go back to calling me Sola. Marshal Sola.”

“I’m fine. Just point me at whatever you want dead.”

She plugs together several pieces of electronics, including a joystick and a small flat-­screen monitor.

“With luck, dead won’t enter into things tonight.”

“That’s not my experience with breaking into secure places, but fingers crossed.”

The monitor comes on, displaying an image looking straight down Wilshire Boulevard.

“You ready?” Julie says.

“Not really. I can hoodoo us inside the building right onto the tenth floor, but I don’t like doing that kind of thing. I like coming out places where I at least know the terrain. That way I avoid walking into deadfalls and snake pits.”

“Here,” she says, handing me another small tablet. “There’s blueprints of the tenth floor, along with surveillance photos.”

I flip through the shots.

“How many guards will there be?”

“If we’re lucky, none. Most of the time no one is on the tenth floor but Saint Nick.”

“But someone might come up for a smoke or a chat.”

“If there’s anyone there, let me handle them.”

“Carrying another nonlethal, are you?”

She moves the joystick, getting a feel for it. The image on the monitor vibrates slightly. It takes me a minute to see that the image is looking out through the sixteen-­wheeler’s windshield.

“We always start with nonlethals,” Julie says. “But we carry regular backup pistols.”

“Fine. You’re the one with shooting theories. I’m just the help. What’s the stuff after diversion?”

“Intrusion and extraction.”

“Yeah. Get in clean, then run away. Two of my favorite things, especially the last one.”

She flips a switch on the box with the joystick. The camera jumps as the truck shifts into gear.

“You ready?”

I think about Candy strapped to the exam table in the clinic and I want someone to shoot at me just so I can strangle them.

“Ready.”

She pushes the joystick forward and the truck moves out into the flooded street. Julie has the windshield wipers on full. The truck picks up speed and blasts through a red light at the corner. Then she floors it.

As the truck picks up speed, the wipers can’t keep up with the rain, and the windshield shows nothing but splotches and colored lights. Without missing a beat, she thumbs a switch and the camera shifts to infrared. The scene is clear again, the building straight ahead.

Out the window, the truck barrels past us. Julie hits a button and the truck’s air horn blows three times.

At the corner of Robertson, she hits the front brakes and the trailer starts to swing around, threatening to pull the cab over on its side. But she hits the accelerator and lets up on the brakes at just the right moment so that the truck slides across the intersection, up over the curb, and crashes into the front of the Pickman Building broadside.

Smashing through the glass and steel walls, the truck doesn’t slow until most of it is resting comfortably in the lobby. Julie cuts the engine. This isn’t the time for random fires. Just a distracting truck with a dead driver. How tragic.

“What about emergency response? We just set off a shitload of alarms.”