Ryan paused at the door to the conference room, knocked twice,and entered without waiting for a response. Luke held back, and Faith took the lead. This was her case. Her fellow agent.
Despite everything that had happened, the look Janice gave Faith had Luke twitching to step between them. She exuded hatred and cold fury. “What areyoudoing here?” Janice apparently didn’t feel the need to disguise her dislike for Faith.
“It’s my case.” The words were pleasant enough, with only a hint of an inflection on the wordmy, but Faith’s meaning was clear. She had every right to be here. She knew it. Janice knew it. Everyone knew it. And Janice could cooperate, or their boss would know it.
“I’m tired of being treated like some sort of regular citizen.” The way Janice snapped her words reminded Luke of an alligator. There was a vicious streak in her, and if she ever got you in her jaws, she would destroy you.
Was she planning to destroy Faith? Could she have set all of this up? Was there even a shooter?
Gabe stood and extended a hand. “Special Agent Malone, I presume?” At Faith’s nod, he grinned. “It’s a pleasure. Welcome to Carrington. Anything you need, just holler. We have snacks.” He pointed to a tray of goodies on the table. “Can I get you a coffee? Tea? Hot chocolate?”
“Do you guys have Cherry Coke?” The question earned Luke a glare, but he didn’t care.
“Maybe? I can check the machine.” Gabe walked over to Luke and threw a light punch at his good shoulder. “You hanging in there, man?” The question was spoken in a low voice and rang with sincere concern. Coming from Gabe, that meant a lot. Gabe was the class clown 90 percent of the time, but he was as solid as they came.
“I’m good. I’ll be clear to dive in a few weeks, once everything heals. You guys need to let me join you on a training exercise.”
“We’ll do it.” Gabe pointed to the door. “You want coffee?”
“Is it fit to drink?”
“Man,” Gabe put on a lofty air, “we have an espresso machine. I’ll fix you up. Be back in a few.” Gabe and Ryan left the room, and left Luke wondering if he should join them.
“Janice, I need you to tell me what happened. From the beginning.” Faith sat, her iPad and pencil at the ready. She hadn’t ordered Luke out, so he maintained his position by the door.
Janice took a cookie from the platter and broke it in half. Her attitude had shrunk with the size of her audience. Her hostility remained. “I was driving home. No big deal. It’s Saturday night, for crying out loud. We’ve all worked nonstop”—she glanced at Luke—“since Monday.”
Did she just glare at him? Like it was his fault a madman was running around Raleigh shooting at agents?
“I was tired. It takes me forty-five minutes to get home. A little less on a Saturday. It’d been such a nasty day, and I wasn’t in a hurry. I listen to audiobooks on the commute. I read four or five books every month that way.”
Did she want them to give her a gold star?
“I wasn’t paying attention. Decompressing. Listening.” She frowned at the cookie. “If he hadn’t revved the engine right before he hit me, I wouldn’t have seen it coming.”
“He sped up?”
“I guess he did. He must have. I hadn’t noticed anything. Then I heard a truck barreling down on me. Because of the rain, I couldn’t tell make or model. Just big, loud, dark. I thought it was some jerk trying to prove how big he was, and I slowed down. Figured he could ride my bumper for a few minutes. My turn was only a mile away.”
Leave it to this idiot to antagonize someone already demonstrating signs of road rage.
“But he didn’t stop. He didn’t back up. When he first tapped my bumper, I assumed it was aggressive driving gone bad. I sped up a touch, expecting him to fall back when he realized what he’d done. But then he hit me again. Harder. That’s when I knew he was doing it on purpose.”
She took a bite of the cookie. Chewed. Swallowed. Continued. “I still thought it was some road rager. Maybe a drunk. I considered slowing down more, but I wasn’t in the mood to deal with the drama. I sped up. By that time, I was almost at my turn, but I decided to drive past. No sense in leading a maniac to my front door.”
She had that part right.
“But as I sped up, so did he. Eventually he hit me so hard, it pushed me over to the side. I’m a good driver, and I was able to recover. Anybody else would have spun out of control.”
Arrogance aside, she was probably right about that part too.
“I started looking for a place to get off the road. I thought I would pull over, he’d drive by, I’d get a license plate, call it in, and go home. The locals could pick him up. He’d fail a sobriety test, and that would be the end of it. I barely slowed, pulling over in a little parking lot and whipping around so I could tear back onto the road and head back in the other direction before he realized what had happened. But he whipped into the next entrance of the same lot and drove straight at me.” She took another bite of the cookie. “These are good.”
Faith didn’t respond. She’d barely responded to anything Janice had said, other than to write faster.
“He slammed into the back corner of my car. I tried to pull forward, but the car wouldn’t respond.”
“You were in the vehicle when he hit you. Then you exited your vehicle?” Faith spoke with so much formality, you’d think she didn’t even know Janice.
