“I hope he’s burning in hell,” George said, still stunned at how angry he was. That man… that man had beenplanningto kill them!
“Told ya,” Ernie said, a quiet sort of smugness at the corners of his mouth. “His brain was full of bugs.”
George shuddered. “Also a good fate for his corpse. I’ll leave it to you.”
Ernie shrugged. “I know a place,” he said, setting one of the gallons down in the garage—they could use it by the end of the day. “I’m just glad I’ll be able to find a ride.”
George drove the SUV over the pit so Dimitri could do his thing, and he and Ernie set about cleaning up—including running to grab one of Ernie’s old sweatshirts from the spare room so George could wash his hands and not look like a bit player in a horror movie. They got the body in the back of the cruiser, and George finished dumping sand and gravel over the blood stain, effectively hiding it until they could power wash it out later, when they heard another set of wheels on the hardpan.
George nodded to Ernie to get in the cashier’s cube, the better to hide under the counter with guns, and he wandered to the side of the garage to meet whoever this was and hide all the bullet fractures in the once-bulletproof Plexiglas.
It was another goddamned cop. This one seemed tired, though, and he rolled his window down as George approached, taking his sunglasses off to be accessible.
“What can I do for you, Deputy?” George asked, and for the first time since he was in college, calling his parents and lying to them about his grades, he felt some of the benefits of a misspentyouth. He had an adorably bland face, and he could lie like achampion.
“No worries here,” the man said. “I’m looking for another cruiser, actually. Dispatch said he was supposed to come out this way to check for an escaped fugitive, and Officer Daily hasn’t reported in a while. Even his cruiser’s GPS has gone offline.”
Wow—go Dimitri!
“Well, somebodydidstop by to check on us,” George said guilelessly. As he spoke the radio at the deputy’s knees began to squawk like something big was going down. “We’ve been pretty quiet all morning, same old same old, lots of flat tires ’cause of the road construction, right?”
The man nodded in sympathy. “I get that. I was thinking maybe Tim had picked up a nail himself and maybe had you guys change his flat.”
“Well, we would have,” George said, “but he just stopped by for a minute, and then continued off down the road—west I think.”
At that moment, the noise on the radio grew to critical levels, with the finale being a shout of “Fuckin’ Cuthbert’s getting out of his vehicle, and that fuckin Forester ain’t stopping!”
His new friend grimaced and put his sunglasses on. “Whelp, Tim’ll probably turn up, but it sounds like I’m needed elsewhere. Be safe out there today—it’s a bit of a mess!”
“Will do,” George said, waving cheerfully as the man pulled a wide U-turn on the hardpan and then headed onto the highway and turned west himself.
He drove away, and George walked casually back to the front of the cashier stand and sagged against the spiderwebbed Plexiglas.
“Why’d he leave?” Ernie asked, and George remembered the squawking of the man’s radio.
“’Cause shit’s going down,” he said, almost too drained to be worried.
“Well, let’s finish up with the cruiser here,” Ernie said, “then I’ll drive it into the desert and you and Dimitri can go back to fixing flats.”
It was really all they could do. But that didn’t mean George didn’t wonder fiercely what was going on with “that fuckin’ Forester” and all the ruckus on the good deputy’s CB until he got Jai’s call.
“WHAT THE…?”Brady muttered, not sure if the helmet could pick up what he was saying or not. It didn’t matter. The sight of Arlen Cuthbert swinging his avocado-pit-on-toothpicks body out of his cruiser was too bizarre to worry about talking to oneself.
“What the actual fuck?” Burton breathed.
It was straight out of a Clint Eastwood movie.
“You can call your friend off!” Arlen shouted, his voice almost too raspy to be heard, although all the units facing them had killed their sirens, probably at his request.
“The fuck are you talking about?” Burton demanded, and Arlen took a startled step back.
He didn’t look… well, Brady thought critically. His face—normally an alcoholic red—seemed to be pasty under the coarse skin, and he had, if anything, less lank hair than he had two weeks ago.
“The one raising all the hell,” Arlen replied, gesturing behind them to where Ace—with another dozen vehicles on his tail—was bearing down at speed. “We gotcha dead to rights. You ain’t gonna save that fugitive.”
“Sir,” Burton said politely, “I actually belong to a law enforcement organization. That and the fact that you just said ‘save’ tells me you’re not tracking a man down to bring him tojustice, you’re tracking him down tokill him, and my superiors will beveryinterested in that.”
Arlen Cuthbert gaped at them, mouth open, and Brady peeked over his shoulder, tempted to wave.
