He took the curve. The truck leaned and she leaned with it, knuckles white on the door frame, everything in her body fighting the centrifugal pull while she kept the weapon up and the muzzle tracking. They came out of the curve and the road opened ahead of them—flat and empty, a quarter mile of nothing but cracked asphalt and the heat shimmer rising off it.
Two shots came in fast succession from the SUV. One punched through the tailgate—she heard the hollow bang, felt the truck shudder. The second caught the trailer hitch with a sound like a hammer striking an anvil and the whole rear of the truck vibrated with the impact.
"I need you to breathe," she said. Her own voice surprised her—flat, almost conversational, the voice she used when the world was on fire and conversation was the only thing that kept it from getting worse.
"Working on it."
"Closer." She adjusted her grip, squared her shoulders against the wind. "Close the gap just a little. Ten feet. Can you do that?"
"You want me to slow down while they're shooting at us?”
"Yes."
"And you think me living with gators is nuts." He lifted off the throttle, and the SUV rushed forward in the mirror, filling it, thirty feet and then twenty and she could see the shooter more clearly now—passenger seat, upper body out the window, rifle braced on the door frame. Experienced. Anchored. Taking his time because he thought he had it.
He didn't have it.
She breathed out.
Found the left rear tire—not the center, not the inner edge, the sweet spot just behind the valve stem where the sidewall met the tread and the rubber was thinnest—and fired twice.
The first round clipped the sidewall. The second punched through dead center.
The tire didn't slowly deflate. It detonated—a sound like a second gunshot, and then the SUV lurched hard left, dropping onto the rim, the back end swerving and fishtailing and dragging along the shoulder in a rooster tail of sparks and shredded rubber. The shooter disappeared inside. The rifle dropped out of frame.
"Move to the right, give me the angle,” she said.
"They're still?—"
"Move right."
Trent drifted the truck toward the centerline. The SUV wrestled itself back to the road—two-wheel drive on a flat rim, still doing forty, the driver working hard to keep it from spinning out. She'd give him credit. He was good.
Not good enough.
"Lift off again," she said. "Just for two seconds."
“Are you serious?”
"Two. Seconds."
He came off the gas.
She breathed in. Breathed out. The wind tried to drag the barrel left, and she compensated without thinking, the same micro-adjustment she'd made a thousand times from overwatch positions in places that didn't exist on maps. The right rear tire filled her sight picture. The truck's motion. The SUV's motion. The wind variable, twelve miles an hour out of the southwest?—
She fired.
The right tire exploded.
The SUV dropped hard on both rear corners simultaneously, the chassis slamming down onto two bare rims, and the sound of it was catastrophic—metal on asphalt, shrieking and grinding, a fountain of sparks that lit up the shoulder like something burning. The vehicle slewed sideways across both lanes, tires gone, momentum carrying it in a long, ugly arc, and then it scraped to a stop half on the road and half in the shoulder with the driver's door crumpled against the guardrail and both rear quarters torn open.
Still.
Smoke rising from the wheel wells.
For one second, nothing moved.
"Go," she said. “Straight to my place.”
