“Well, that depends on if you survive or not!” Cuthbert said after a moment, and Brady was absolutely done hiding behind his friends.
“Arlen,” he shouted, “it’s you who need to give it up. Your phone is about to hit every news outlet on the internet—including the independent outlets who won’t bury the story because you’ve got people in your pockets. If you shoot me here, in front of all these people, you will have committed murder to cover up a crime—that’s a life sentence right there. And this time I’m not the only witness.”
Arlen’s pallor went absolutely gray. “You can’t do that,” he muttered. “I hired you, you faggot puke—you don’t got those skills.”
Brady scowled at him, but when he moved to swing his leg off the bike, Burton put a restraining hand on his thigh.
“Keep talking to him,” he murmured. “When Ace gets here, he’s gonna clear a path.”
Brady didn’t want to think about how he was going to do that, but sure.
“You’ve got two police departments riding down my scrawny ass,” he shouted back. “How is it you think I don’t have any friends to help me?”
Arlen took a menacing step forward, and with the smoothness of a grooming tiger, Burton pulled a pistol from a slot on his saddlebag, something long and deadly with a suppressor on the end.
“Whoa, now, son,” Cuthbert said, hands up as though noticing Burton for the first time. “You don’t want to start something you can’t finish.”
“You think he can’t finish you?” Brady asked. “You thinkIcan’t finish you? You’refinished, Cuthbert. Your list of friends just went out on broadband. If you’re on that phone, diddling little kids, we’ve got your full moon rising. Whatever your connection to the Kuntz brothers, we’ve got it, and now so does the press, the FBI, and the Center for Lost and Exploited Children.” Brady had to use all his strength of will not to dart his eyes to where Eric sat, bleeding, working frantically to make everything Brady was saying the truth. “You pull out your gun and shoot us all in cold blood, that’s fine. The whole damned world is going to know why!”
Cuthbert’s face went from gray to an unhealthy shade of red. “I ain’t on that phone diddling no kids!” he shouted. “You can’t say I did that!”
“But you didn’t bring the people whoareon that phone to justice!” Brady screamed back. “That was yourjob! You’re as guilty as they are, you pox-ridden asswart!”
“All this coulda been avoided,” Cuthbert whined, all grievance, “if only you’d died in that bank robbery like you were supposed to! This was my territory. I had a handle on things! And you had to go—”
“Do my fucking job!” Brady snarled, and something in his voice must have given away his plan to start shooting.
Cuthbert reached for his gun, and Brady got ready to start taking out every cop who aimed at him and Burton, when the sudden tension-ridden silence was broken by Eric, shouting from the SUV.
“Yes! It’sout! Eat shit, Arlen Cuthbert, and all your fucking cronies!”
Cuthbert turned around, literally since the SUV was parked behind him on the shoulder, and stared, putting everything Brady had said together with Eric’s outburst, and as if in slowmotion, he pulled out his gun, aiming for what he now knew was therealdanger.
And the sirens that had been growing louder and louder behind them reached a crescendo, and the sound of a heavy vehicle mounting the flatbed behind them filled the air with stressed metal and the scraping of the oil pan belonging to a Subaru Forester as it grated along the top of the cab.
A smoking shadow darkened the air, and Brady looked up to see the SUV impossibly high above them, rotating as it flew, so he saw the chassis, then the passenger window, Sonny gripping the chicken stick and screaming “Yeeeehawwwww!”as they passed. And still the car kept twisting, until, just before landing on the top of the nearest police cruiser, the Forester righted itself, bounced off the roof in a crunch of metal and LED light strips, and then continued onto the road, slamming into every car in its way and leaving a trail of dented, maimed vehicles in its path.
For a moment, everything stopped, every officer behind the wheel counting their minor injuries, and greater fortune held its breath as the group of cars careening behind the flatbed truck and streaming around it wreaked its own havoc.
And in the center of this, Arlen Cuthbert, whose days as a petty tyrant of a desert police department were over, finally identified the only foe he could vanquish that day.
The unarmed man in the back of the SUV.
Brady saw him aim his gun and, heedless of the swarming, crashing police units all around him, advance toward the side of the road, aiming with the concentration of somebody who had nothing left to lose.
Brady saw in that moment of chaos and destruction that finally,finally, he had something to lose in this fight, and he would be damned if he watched it die in front of him.
He knew his weapon, fired it regularly, felt it like a dangerous friend in the palm of his hand.
He’d aimed and shot before a single doubt could twitch a whisker, and as if frightened by the noise, not a single doubt ever did.
Cuthbert fell to his knees, driven by several shots to his trunk where the Kevlar protected him from penetration, and by one irrevocable shot to the side of his head.
“Jesus, kid,” Burton said through Bluetooth, “I was going to let him live and suffer through the court system.”
“No,” Brady said, his throat thick. “He was going to shoot Charlie. No.” In the SUV, Eric was staring at him, anguish in his eyes, but Brady wouldn’t let him mourn Brady’s lost innocence. Not for this, the best thing he’d ever done. He raised his gun, pointed upward in a salute, and Eric nodded, holding his fist to his heart.
And as the three of them watched, the corpse of Arlen Cuthbert pitched face forward on the dusty tarmac.
