Pit Stop Read online

  “Then give it back to me,” he said. “Give it back to me and everything will be all right.”

  She raised her head to meet his gaze. He nodded to her, gently, and reached out with his right hand open, tilting his head expectantly.

  He saw defeat and acceptance flush through her expression, felt the tension ease out of his shoulders and neck as she brought the canister back into the car and rested it on her lap.

  “Good girl,” he said.

  A sudden thud from behind shook the truck and shoved him off the back of his seat.

  “What the—?” He glanced into his rearview mirror, his jaw dropped, then he flung his head around to look out the rear window in disbelief.

  It was the police cruiser again, ramming his truck from behind.

  Only, this time, it wasn’t carrying any cops.

  Reilly was at the wheel, with the kid’s dad sitting next to him.

  And he was charging forward again.

  “ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR mind?” Garber asked when Reilly rammed the back of his pickup with the police cruiser. Because the truck sat high in relation to the car, Reilly was hitting the bumper with the top of the cruiser’s grill.

  “Need to get his attention,” Reilly said, keeping his eyes straight ahead, his jaw set firmly.

  “And get Kelly killed at the same time!” Garber said. “You run him off the road, that truck rolls, whaddya think’s going to happen to her? She’ll get tossed out the window.”

  Reilly, eyes still forward, nodded. “She’s got her seat belt on.”

  Taking the police car had struck Garber as a pretty good idea. There was no way the Vega was going to catch his truck. When the cruiser went spinning into the median, and Reilly hit the brakes and jumped out, at first Glen thought the FBI agent was checking to see if the cop was okay.

  Glen figured the cop could look after himself. It was Kelly that Reilly should be focused on.

  But Garber quickly saw that Reilly’s intentions were more pragmatic than compassionate. Reilly was flashing his FBI credentials as he was opening the car door. The cop was awake and reasonably coherent, but his vision was impaired by the blood draining from a gash in his forehead.

  “Need your vehicle!” Reilly barked.

  The cop said, “What?”

  “Is the car operational?” Reilly said. The engine was still running, but the way the car went off the road the steering could be shot to hell.

  The cop wiped blood from his eyes to get a look at Reilly’s ID. “I’m not giving up my car to some dumbass fed who—”

  Reilly reached into the car and grabbed the man by the shirt and hauled him out of the vehicle, tossing him into the weeds. The cop was going for the weapon at his belt as he fell onto his back in the brush.

  “You do not want to shoot a federal officer, pal,” Reilly said, getting behind the wheel as Garber ran around to the other side. “The keys are in the Vega.”

  Reilly dropped the transmission lever down into drive and hit the gas. The car moved, grass and stones brushing the undercarriage as he steered it back onto the interstate, tires squealing as they gripped pavement.

  Once he had the car lined up he put his foot to the floor and the car moved. Garber looked up for a handle to grab on to as the car accelerated.

  “He’s up there, but this’ll catch him,” Reilly said.

  “Who is this guy?” Garber asked. “What the hell do you want him for? What’s he done?” Hoping, maybe, that his daughter hadn’t been kidnapped by a serial killer, but some notorious, but nonviolent, embezzler. That might have made him feel, on a panic scale that went from one to ten, only fifteen instead of twenty.

  Even if Reilly had believed the father deserved the truth, there was no way he would have given it to him.

  Telling someone his daughter was trapped in a car with a man who had the capability to wipe out thousands upon thousands of lives; a man who’d had access to a government germ warfare research project that Washington didn’t even acknowledge existed; a man who believed the best way to get attention for his cause was to start sending messages to the government, under the name “Faustus,” threatening a biological Armageddon—well, telling Glen Garber his daughter was caught up with someone like that was just going to make him a tad anxious, wasn’t it?

  So Reilly basically repeated what he’d told the man earlier. “He’s a security threat.”

  To which Garber said, “No shit?”

  The pickup was looming larger in their windshield. Garber could just make out the top of his daughter’s head through the back window.

  Both the truck and the cruiser were pushing a little harder as the highway continued its slow climb.

  “So once we catch up, then what?” Garber asked.

  Reilly reached into his pocket for Garber’s cell phone, put it to his ear, then glanced at the contractor. “We’re still connected. I can hear background noise. Hey! Faustus! You there?”

  He kept the phone pressed to his ear. Listened.

  “What?” Garber asked.

  “They’re talking about the canister.”

  “What canister?”

  Reilly shot him a look. “Shh!”

  The FBI agent listened a few more seconds. “Shit,” he muttered, and tossed the phone back to Garber.

  He put it to his ear, shouted his daughter’s name, as Reilly nudged the car up past a hundred.

  The truck was right in front of them.

  And then Reilly drove right into it.

  Which was when Garber asked him if he was out of his mind.

  Without a doubt, Reilly thought. Without a doubt.

  WHEN THE COP CAR RAMMED them from behind, Kelly screamed as her head was snapped back into the headrest. Before she had a chance to turn around and see what had hit them, they were hit a second time.

  The canister fell from her lap, hit the floor in front of her, and rolled around on the floor mat.

  Now she twisted around in her seat to see what exactly had happened. The cruiser had dropped back a car length, and there, in the passenger seat, was her dad.

  “Dad!” she screamed, even though there was no way he could hear her. But she was sure he saw her mouthing the word.

  Kelly waved. Her dad waved back.

  “Give me that!” Kristoff shouted, pointing to the canister. “Right now!”

  He had an idea how he could get Reilly to back off. He’d threaten Reilly the way the kid had been threatening him. With the canister. He’d dangle it out his window, make like he was going to drop it.

  Reilly wouldn’t want that to happen.

  “I can’t reach it,” Kelly said, straining to bend over, the shoulder strap restricting her mobility.

  “Undo the damn belt!”

  “My dad says I’m never supposed to take off my seat belt.”

  Kristoff gave her a look that said, “Are you kidding me?” Kelly got the message and hit the button to retract the belt, and slid off the end of the seat to reach down for the cylinder.

  And as she did this, she thought.

  She thought very, very quickly.

  Kelly was not like the other kids. Kelly was only ten, but she’d seen and been through some bad things in her short life. The kinds of things that girls her age shouldn’t have to go through.

  The big one, of course, was losing her mother. No little girl should lose her mom. And no little girl should lose her mom the way Kelly lost hers.

  But that was just the beginning.

  Not long after that, someone took a shot at her house. Blew out her bedroom window when she was in the room.

  But it got even worse. Before that very, very bad time in her life was over, a man threatened to end her life. And not just any man, but a man she believed to be a good man.

  And who got her out of that fix? Well, sure, her dad was there just in time, but it was Kelly herself who took action. It was Kelly who thought of a way to disable that man just long enough for the scales to tip in her favor.

  In a spli
t second, too.

  Kelly wondered whether a similar opportunity existed now. Something that might give her an edge, buy her enough time for her dad and the policeman to help her out.

  That was when her eyes landed on the cup of hot coffee sitting in the center console.

  “GREAT PLAN!” GARBER SHOUTED. “RAM the truck! Is that right out of the FBI playbook?”

  Reilly had to admit to a level of frustration. He had no backup, and he had no weapon. (If there was any good news, he knew Faustus had no weapon, either. He’d checked him for one just before the man got the jump on him.) What he needed was a frickin’ helicopter with lasers, but this wasn’t James Bond.

  This was real life.

  What he needed now was some kind of break. For the truck to have a flat tire. For it to run out of gas, but based on what Garber’d told him, that was unlikely. A goddamn moose trying to run across the highway right about now would be a blessing.

  At least the cruiser was topped up. He needed to get Garber to make some calls, try to get a roadblock established farther up the interstate, or maybe—

  What the hell?

  The pickup was swerving all over the road.

  KELLY SAID, “CATCH.”

  She was perched on the front of her seat, leaning down into the footwell. She had her right hand on the canister and tossed it underhand and to the left, aiming it right toward Kristoff’s face.

  “Jesus!” he shouted.

  He took his left hand off the wheel to catch the cylinder before it flew out his window, batted it down into his lap. Then it started to roll toward his knees. He wanted to catch it before it dropped by his legs, where it would be rolling around his feet, interfering with his operation of the pedals.

  It was during this moment of distraction that Kelly pried the plastic lid off the coffee cup and wrapped her hand around it.

  Her dad was right. It would have stayed hot all the way to their destination. How did anyone drink this stuff?

  As she whipped it out of the cup holder, some coffee slipped over the edge and onto her fingers, scalding them. It hurt like hell, as her father would be inclined to say, but Kelly didn’t have time to whine about it, because she only had about a tenth of a second to throw this too-hot-to-drink coffee in this bad man’s face.

  Which is exactly what she did.

  The black liquid arced through the air, splashing across Kristoff’s right cheek and neck and, judging by the way he was throwing his right hand over his eye, that, too.

  Kristoff screamed. Not “Jesus!” this time. Just a cry of intense pain and anguish. Primal.

  He tried to maintain steering with his left hand, and was still attempting to see the road with his left eye, but the truck was pitching all over the place, and the canister had hit the floor, rolling side to side in time with Kristoff’s erratic steering.

  Kristoff took his right hand off his face long enough to make a wild, retaliatory swing in Kelly’s direction, but she had pushed herself up against the door, out of reach, and was thinking about whether to hop over the seat and hide in the narrow space behind them. But she decided against that, figuring that if the truck came to a stop, or even slowed, she needed to be by the door so she could hop out.

  Indeed, the truck was slowing. Kristoff had taken his foot off the gas. And given that the truck was heading up a slight grade, it was going to lose speed even more quickly. He hadn’t hit the brake yet, but he couldn’t keep up his recent pace when he couldn’t see where he was going.

  After another couple of futile swings at Kelly, the man put his hand back to his face, but then he realized the wounds hurt too much to touch. His right eye remained closed.

  He screamed: “You blinded me! You fried my eye, you little bitch!”

  Kelly was probably more scared right now than she’d ever been in her life—even more than when that man threatened her a few years ago—but she also felt pretty good. For half a second, she’d wondered whether she’d get in trouble for making a man lose one of his eyes, but then thought her dad would probably be okay with it.

  He could be pretty cool about things.

  She glanced back through the window, saw the police car still there. Waved at her dad again as the truck lurched from left to right.

  Then she heard the familiar sound of gravel under the tires. She whirled around, saw that they were veering off the pavement onto the shoulder. Kristoff had his foot on the brake. He hung his head low, moved it languidly back and forth, trying to deal with the pain.

  When the truck was nearly stopped, Kelly pulled on the door handle, let the door swing wide, and jumped.

  “KELLY!”

  Glen Garber screamed when he saw his daughter leap from the passenger’s door of the nearly stopped truck. He bolted from the police cruiser before Reilly had thrown it into park.

  Kelly landed in the tall grasses just beyond the shoulder. Her knees buckled, forcing her into a roll, her body tumbling out of view.

  Glen ran. “Kelly! Kelly!”

  Before he could get to her, her head popped up above the grass. An arm went into the air. “Here!”

  Behind him, Garber heard Reilly shout at the top of his lungs: “Run!”

  IT WASN’T THAT REILLY DIDN’T care about Garber and his kid, but he had a more pressing matter to deal with.

  Like the man he knew as Faustus, who had thrown open the driver’s door of the pickup and was stumbling out. But not before reaching for something on the floor ahead of the seat. He emerged, standing there a couple of steps in front of the open door, clutching the cylinder. Raising it above his head.

  Whoa.

  Reilly didn’t know what the hell had happened in that truck, but half of the man’s face was red and blotchy and blistered and some of the skin looked like it was ready to fall off. His right eye was shut.

  Reilly told Garber and his daughter to run.

  “I’ll do it!” the man yelled. “I’ll smash it right into the road! I’ll crack this thing wide open. You want that?”

  Reilly raised an unthreatening palm.

  “Come on,” the FBI agent said. “You’ll take yourself out, too. You’ll never have the fun of seeing your handiwork.”

  “Doesn’t much matter now,” he said.

  Behind them, other motorists on the highway slowed. A couple honked their horns.

  Reilly ignored them, instead staying focused on Faustus. He couldn’t stop himself from asking, “What the hell happened to your face?”

  “Hot coffee,” Faustus said. “Maybe I’ll sue.”

  Reilly noticed that the truck was moving, ever so gradually. They’d all stopped on a very slight, uphill grade, and the Ford was starting to roll back. Faustus had bailed out of it so quickly he must not have put the shift solidly into park.

  By the time Faustus noticed, it was too late to react.

  The open driver’s door caught him on the back and threw him down onto the highway like he’d been tackled. The bottom edge of the door hit the back of his head hard enough that he did a face-plant on the pavement, arms outstretched.

  He wasn’t moving. Only his fingers, twitching, releasing their grip on the cylinder, which started to roll along the asphalt toward Reilly, bumping over small stones and irregularities in the surface.

  Please don’t have opened, please don’t have opened.

  Reilly bolted forward, threw his body over the cylinder, trapped it below his torso, smothering it like it was a grenade. Even though it was not going to explode, it had the potential to do more damage than a thousand grenades. The truck rolled past him to his right, the front wheels turning slightly, angling the truck’s back end toward the ditch.

  As it rolled by, Reilly saw Garber and his daughter a good fifty yards away, heading for a wooded area beyond the highway’s edge. Garber glanced back, saw Reilly on the ground, grabbed Kelly by the elbow to stop her.

  Reilly could just barely hear him tell her, “Stay here.”

  And then he came running.

  “Are
you hit?” Garber shouted.

  “No!”

  “What about him?”

  “I’m guessing dead. That door hit him hard, and then his head hit the pavement. He hasn’t moved.”

  “Why are you lying on—?”

  “Have you got a bag in your truck? A plastic bag? A couple of them? Anything airtight?” A thought hit him. “Evidence bags in the cruiser!”

  Garber stopped, ran for the police car, grabbed the keys and ran around back to pop the trunk. It took him about fifteen seconds to find what he was looking for. Clear plastic, sealable bags, like oversized sandwich bags. He grabbed a handful and ran back to Reilly as his truck slowly backed into the ditch, the engine still running.

  The agent, still keeping his body pressed to the pavement, reached up for a bag. “Give it to me.”

  Garber had some sense of how serious the situation was.

  “Should I start running again?” he asked.

  Reilly grimaced. “Probably not much point. We’re either safe, or we’re not. You couldn’t run fast enough to save yourself.”

  He worked the bag under his torso, then, in one swift motion, got up on his knees, shoved the cylinder into it, and sealed the top.

  Garber realized he was holding his breath.

  “You’ve got the end of the world in that bag, don’t you?”

  “Pretty much,” Reilly replied. “Hand me another. I’m going to double bag it. Maybe even triple.”

  “Did anything leak out?”

  “If we’re still standing a minute from now, I’d say no.”

  He reached out a hand to Garber, and he took it. He helped the agent to his feet, and they regarded each other for a moment. Garber kept glancing at his watch.

  “Thirty seconds.”

  “Give it a little longer,” Reilly said.

  “If it happens, what, exactly, will happen?”

  “You don’t want to know. The good news is, it’ll be quick.”

  Garber kept his eye on his watch. “That’s a minute and a half now.”

  “I’d say we’re going to live.” Reilly smiled. “Your kid threw hot coffee in his face?”

  Garber nodded.

  The smile turned into a grin. “Get her over here.”