Authors: Creston Mapes
Where Amy had been standing, a thick cloud of brown smoke billowed toward him like a scene from 9/11. Behind the smoke, flames licked the ceiling of the parking deck. He couldn’t even see what had exploded, but knew it was Amy’s car.
He waited a second longer, until he was certain no more car parts were coming his way. He grabbed his keys, which he’d dropped, and got to his knees. The pain in his shoulder took his breath away. Smoke and gas fumes engulfed him. He stood, hunched over, and started toward where Amy had been.
Were the people who tripped the bomb watching?
Would they run him over?
He saw her feet first, recognized one of her brown shoes sticking out behind the rear tire of a green car. She was facedown. The back of her overcoat looked as if it had been clawed by an animal—her white blouse, too. Her back was bleeding.
“Amy.” He gently gripped her shoulders. “Amy. Please, please, be okay.”
She lifted her head slightly and opened her eyes.
Derrick’s ears were ringing loudly, and he assumed hers were too. The smoky air was blazing hot.
“I’m okay,” she said. “Sorry …” She laid her head back to the ground.
“Are your legs okay? Can you walk?”
With her eyes still shut, her right foot lifted straight up and back down, then her left.
“Good. I’ll bring my car. Just sit tight.” He got up and braced his aching shoulder, hoping there wouldn’t be another explosion. “We’re gonna make it.” He started running for his car. “I’ll be right back.”
But he didn’t believe his own words.
He knew he was being watched.
They were targets.
In truth, he wasn’t sure he would even make it back to his car.
* * *
By the time Jack arrived at Farley’s, police cars, ambulances, and a fire truck were parked at all angles around the front of the business. Amid snow flurries, police officers in heavy parkas, and flashing blue and red lights, he ran inside.
The blood on the white floor of the home store made Jack cringe. After explaining to a cop that his family was involved, Jack hurried to the manager’s office, where the girls practically knocked him over with their hugs. Pam and Margaret were seated with blankets wrapped around their shoulders. He knelt and hugged each of them.
“So much for our date.” Pam gave him a wry smile.
Jack squeezed the back of her neck. “We’ll take a rain check.”
They seemed in good spirits—in a giddy aftershock mode, Jack imagined. The manager had given the girls Hershey bars, and Margaret and Pam sipped bottled waters and talked over each other as they explained what had happened.
Jack was floored when he heard it was Granger who had courageously diffused the situation.
“If it hadn’t been for Granger, that maniac would’ve gotten away, and taken me with him,” Margaret said. “I just can’t believe it. I owe him my life—yet, I wanted them to take his.” She dropped her head. “I don’t know what’s what anymore. Life doesn’t make sense.”
Pam nodded and looked at Jack. “He took the guy down. It was amazing. Who knows what he would have done?”
“Where is Granger now?” Jack said.
“In there.” Pam nodded to the room next to theirs. “Police are talking to him.”
Jack cursed himself for not talking with Granger sooner; now it was going to look like he was forgiving him based on his heroics.
“How’s the guy who got shot?” Jack said.
“Going to be fine,” Pam said. “They got him out of here fast.”
“They’re still after the driver,” Margaret said. “I gave them a full description of him, and the van.” She pointed at Pam. “I told you that guy looked suspicious.”
Pam nodded. “Everyone looks suspicious to you.”
They all chuckled.
“I guess I’m just a senile old woman.”
“You are not a senile old woman,” Rebecca spoke up.
“Well, thank you, pumpkin.”
Jack stood. “I’ll be right back.”
Pam nodded. “We’ve told the police everything, so we can go.”
“Okay, give me a minute.”
Jack took in a deep breath and peeked into the room around the corner. There sat Granger, in a chair in the corner of an empty white room, as big and real as ever. Jack pulled back and stood around the corner a second longer, composing his thoughts.
Now or never.
His heart beat hard and strong as he knocked and stepped into the doorway. “Granger,” he said with a nod.
“Jack.” Granger sat very still, clutching a big winter coat in his lap. He looked older but was still a towering guy with short, messy red hair and ruddy cheeks.
“Do you have a second?”
Granger’s red eyebrows went up and down. “He said he’d be right back. That was ten minutes ago.”
Jack pulled up the other free chair and sat, facing Granger.
“You apologized, and I’m sorry I didn’t accept it.” Jack looked him square in his tiny eyes.
“It’s not a problem,” Granger said. “I don’t blame you.”
“My unforgiveness has been wrong; it’s been poisoning me.”
Granger gave a simple nod.
The moment was silent and awkward. Jack hated the man; that hadn’t changed. But he had to let it go, for many reasons.
“I accept your apology.”
Granger nodded again. “Cool.”
“Thanks for what you did here tonight.”
Granger shrugged. “God had me here, that’s all …”
Jack contemplated Granger’s words for what seemed like a minute. He debated what else he should say. Then he stood and stuck out a hand. “Good luck.”
Granger’s body straightened. He stared at the hand, gripped it, and looked up at Jack. “Thank you. You, too.”
Jack left the room, Granger Meade, and a thousand regrets behind him.
Chapter 35
Derrick’s back burned intensely from the heat of the car bomb as he got Amy to her feet and eased her into the front seat of the SUV. She gasped from the pain. He was totally unprepared for this kind of insanity and apologized for having no blanket or anything to put on Amy’s bleeding back.
“Don’t worry.” Her head bobbed. “Just get us out of here.”
He buckled her in, slammed the door, and sprinted around to his side.
Throwing it into reverse, he whizzed the Toyota backward up the ramp some forty feet, swung around, and headed for the exit.
Amy slumped low in the seat.
“You okay?” he said, out of breath.
She nodded. Her eyes were enormous, her face ashen.
“I’ll get you some water once we get clear of here, okay?”
She simply waved her hand. “Go, go.”
In his rearview Derrick saw a dark red sedan with black windows lurch out of its parking space just seconds after they passed it.
“Shoot. We got someone on our tail. I knew it.”
Amy whimpered.
Derrick’s whole body shook. His hands were numb.
He couldn’t see inside the car behind him, but it was menacingly close to his rear bumper.
“Here.” He handed his phone to Amy. “Call 911.”
She didn’t hesitate.
They got to the exit of the parking garage and stopped at the cashier.
Derrick dug out a ten and handed it to the older Asian woman in the booth. “Please, call the police,” he said. “The car behind us … they’re trying to kill us. Please, get their tag number, call the police.”
Derrick wondered if she’d understood what he said. She was still holding the bill, staring at him, looking at the car behind them. Its engine roared.
“Keep the change. Please, just let us out.”
The gate went up.
“Call the police!” Derrick hit the gas and bounced out onto the city street.
Before the gate closed, the dark sedan shot through, bouncing onto the street right behind him.
“Here.” Amy stuffed the phone back in Derrick’s hand. “Go … talk!”
“Hello?”
“Is this an emergency, sir?”
Derrick checked a street sign. The red sedan was approaching fast on his left.
“Yes, yes. We are in a Toyota FJ Cruiser, maroon, heading up East Long Street toward I-71 North.”
The car was directly beside them now. Its windows were black, but Derrick was certain the person inside could see him on the phone.
“They just blew up my friend’s car in the parking deck … on East High Street and North Long. Now they’re following us.”
Crunch.
Derrick gasped and fought to keep the SUV on the road as the red car smashed into them. It was riding right there, meshed with his car!
This cannot be happening.
He floored it, jerking his wheel to the right. The other car broke away, veering back into its lane. But it must’ve had a monstrous engine, because it kept up with him without hesitation.
Amy had retrieved the phone and handed it back to him.
“I’m getting on I-71 North, then 161 east,” he told the operator. “Please, send officers. Hurry!”
“Is anyone with you, sir?” The tension in the operator’s voice had ratcheted.
“One person, a woman.”
“Who is driving the other car, and what is the make and model?”
“I can’t see in. It’s a dark red sedan, the windows are black. BMW … it’s a BMW.”
“What is your tag number, please, sir?”
“Shoot, I don’t even know. Look, I’m a reporter with the
Trenton City Dispatch
. The Trenton City PD knows all about this—Officer Dennis DeVry.”
Derrick’s car got rammed so hard, Amy’s feather-light frame slammed into the door. She groaned as Derrick swerved, banging onto the sidewalk and ramming a trash can and bench before he could maneuver the SUV back onto the street.
Amy’s eyes were scrunched closed, and she was biting her bottom lip.
The other car was weaving, as if playing cat and mouse.
That’s
it.
Derrick checked his rearview, saw no one, and told Amy to hang on. He jammed on his brakes and screeched sideways to a halt, facing the other lane. Amy grunted. The red car flew past by about thirty feet before skidding to a stop, then squealed backward, tires smoking.
“Hold on, we’re gonna ram him.”
Amy cried, “You’ll kill us!”
“Just hold on!”
As Derrick had hoped, the BMW barreled straight backward, and, when it got equal with the front of Derrick’s SUV, Derrick locked his hands to the steering wheel, braced his arms straight out, and floored it. He didn’t take his eyes off the BMW’s right front quarter panel until he smashed it to smithereens.
“Take
that,
bad boy.”
The BMW spun in the opposite direction.
Amy moaned.
Derrick whipped his car right, scraped a lamppost, and got it back on track. When he checked his rearview, the BMW was turning around slowly, steam rising from beneath its hood.
“We’re going home,” he said. “No matter what it takes.”
* * *
“Pam, hold up,” Jack called at the exit of Farley’s.
Pamela had bundled Rebecca and Faye up and was about to head for her car, Margaret in tow.
“I’ll see you at home,” she said. “You
are
coming home … ?”
Jack approached her. “Hon, listen, this Demler-Vargus thing is getting really dangerous. I had an interview over there today. They know how much I know. There’s a lot going on right now that I haven’t even had a chance to tell you.”
“Well, we can talk about it at home. The girls are wiped out, and so is Mom. We’re ready to call it a night.”
“That’s what I’m saying. I don’t want to take any chances.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was thinking maybe we should get a hotel room—just for tonight.”
Pamela tilted her head and glared at him. “What do you know that you haven’t told me?”
“For one, Spivey Brinkman is dead. They found him hanged today.”
Pamela’s head whirled. Her earlier anticipation about the date with Jack seemed a million miles away.
“Amy Sheets is being followed. Derrick’s in Columbus now, trying to get her to go on record about Demler-Vargus’s crimes.”
Jack’s phone rang, and Pamela’s heart rate climbed with the sound of it. “A hotel’s going to scare the girls, not to mention my mom,” she said.
He looked at his phone. “It’s DeVry. Let me grab this.”
Jack answered, then listened. “You. Are. Kidding me.” He arched his shoulders and looked straight up.
Pamela’s anxiety intensified.
“Are they okay?” Jack said. “Is that the last you heard?” He nodded and asked Dennis to hold on. “Derrick and Amy are being chased,” he told Pamela. “They got run off the road on the way out of Columbus. They’re trying to get back here.”