“They didn’t,” I mumbled.
“Well, shit.” Barber kicked the pavement before dragging out a lighter. “Want me to fire you up, Prez?” He nodded at the cigarette behind King’s ear.
“Nah, better not. Dallas doesn’t want me doing it, but we also don’t want any cigarette butts with saliva and fingerprints and whatever the fuck else here alongside the road.”
The walkie-talkie crackled to life. “The bikes passed me. I see the cruiser. You have one minute.” Dallas’s voice started counting down from sixty.
Goose bumps prickled on my arms and gave me a violent shiver. My heart raced and I sucked in a deep breath.
“This is what it’s all about,” Scar said, running past me. He smacked my shoulder. “Get the fuck over here.”
Bike engines roared in the distance, not too far away.
“Twenty-eight, twenty-seven.” Dallas’s calm voice kept counting down.
“Go! Get against that embankment. Get ready to kill that headlight!” Scar leaped to the bike with the light on and the rest of us scrambled a bit up the steep embankment.
The bike engines roared toward us.
“Shit, they’re coming too fast. What if they go over the edge?”
King grabbed my arm and held me in place at his side while we both dragged deep breaths into our lungs. “Timmy and Red can fuckin’ ride. They know the plan.”
The bikes slowed down and came around the sharp turn, slamming on their brakes. Undertaker’s bike wobbled, and I wanted to laugh. All his shit was fancy, and this old beat-up Harley must’ve come out of a junkyard. He dragged it over near our bikes, and Red brought hers over as well, hustling just as fast as Undertaker.
“Kill it!” Red yelled. For a tiny redhead, she had a big voice.
Scar cut his light and both of theirs were already out. We heard an engine in the night, flying along behind them. The red lights bobbed in the trees, a dangerous lure.
“This is dastardly,” Undertaker said, then chuckled, a cold sound that had me shivering again.
We all held our breath.
“This won’t work,” I muttered.
“Have faith in a good plan,” Red said, and she sounded damned cheerful. We were all nuts.
“I can’t believe you agreed to do this,” I called over my shoulder toward her.
“Those cops deserve this and more. One of our girls had a run-in with them, and they’re?—”
The cruiser whizzed past us, headlights blazing, and I staggered back a step at the screech of metal as it careened through the camouflaged guardrails and out into the dead space beyond. The cruiser caught air. I almost thought it would fly up into the stars, but then it descended. There was an unholythud. The ground actually shook and the sound of a tree falling had us all scrambling back toward the embankment, but it must’ve gone the other direction, far away from us.
Those red lights swayed in the dark. Whichever tree went wasn’t the one they were dancing in.
“Go, go, go!” The headlights all flared to life, and I turned mine on as well. I grabbed one of the water canisters and so did King and Barber. We washed away the chalk paint, more so that the next person to drive out here wouldn’t get into an accident than because we were worried about the cops figuring out what happened.
“What about the lights?” I asked.
King dragged out his cell phone. There was apopand two bright flashes in the night.
“What did you do?”
“Controlled explosion. If they do find pieces of the lights, they’ll probably just think it’s wreckage from the car, unless they really drag the CSI team out here. I doubt it. They have two drunk assholes and a wreck.” He shrugged.
Everyone who wasn’t working took off on their bikes, driving much more slowly and carefully than the way Red and Undertaker had ridden in.
The second we were done, we rushed to the bikes and secured the water tanks, popped on our helmets, and then we took off, too.
