Red and blue lit up the rest area, moving the shadows of scrub bushes across the grassless ground in a repeating waltz. Nash exhaled and stopped his movement into the Honda.
The gunman came around the far side of the building. Nash froze, but when the man saw the state policeman’s car, he pocketed the gun. When the trooper put the car in park and opened the door, the gunman surprised Nash by firing lies as powerful as the bullets.
“Officer, this man killed my partner. He tried to hijack our truck. He killed him.”
He pointed at the dead body on the ground. The trooper held one hand on his revolver and noticed the crumpled body, then drew his weapon as he turned to Nash.
“Hands behind your head!”
“No, you’ve got it wrong,” Nash said.
“Hands up, now!”
The trooper marched for Nash, gun leading the way in a two-handed grip.
“It was him,” Nash said as he complied with the request to put his hands behind his head.
He saw the trooper’s eye go to his leg, the smear of blood there. The angry snout of his gun came forward steady as a locomotive. Nash’s next plea caught in his throat. The trooper reached him and brought one hand away from the gun to lift a pair of flex cuffs from his belt. The gun remained steady.
“I didn’t do this,” Nash said, weakly, as the trooper spun him and slid the plastic cuffs over his wrists and pulled in the slack. When he looked over Nash’s shoulder, he saw Jacy in the car. The trooper’s gun came back up in two hands.
“Out of the car. Now!”
Jacy stood up out of the car, tears already falling.
“She did it, too,” the skeletal man said. “She was there the whole time.”
The trooper slid cuffs on Jacy and pushed her toward his cruiser. As he passed Nash, he shouted, “On your knees.” Nash obeyed, waiting for his time to tell the truth of it.
Jacy was stuffed into the back seat of the patrol car, then the trooper turned to the gunman.
“You, over here. Stay where I can see you.”
Nash watched the gunman take a few stutter steps toward the cruiser. The trooper walked to Nash, dug in his back pocket and removed his wallet, then went to the car and found Jacy’s purse.
The gunman shifted on his feet, his complexion pulsing red, then blue in the lights of the patrol car. “Officer, I–”
“I’ll get to you. Stay where you are.”
The trooper got on his radio. “One-one-three requesting backup at rest area eighty-four. Man down and suspects in custody. Request checks on–”
Nash heard his name go out over the police radio. Then the trooper dug into Jacy’s purse, brought out her I.D., and read her name into the handset. Nash sank inside. Brian may be asleep back in town, but someone at the precinct would hear that call of a dead body, and then his stepdaughter’s name, and call to wake him. Their escape was over.
“And you,” the trooper shouted across to the gunman. “What’s your name?”
“I don’t think that’s important right now.” He stepped away from the car, moving across the white lines of parking spaces toward Nash, toward the Honda and the trooper.
“Don’t give me any shit. What’s your name, fella?”
“Don’t you see? He killed the guy, not me.”
“Bullshit,” Nash said. “He’s lying.”
“Oh, yeah?” the trooper said as he lifted Jacy’s gun from her purse.
Nash felt the heat of the bullet in flight as it sailed past him and landed in the trooper’s shoulder. Nash looked up to see the gunman and his wavering pistol out in front of him again.
The trooper dropped Jacy’s purse back onto the seat and reached for his sidearm. Another shot hit its mark as the gunman stepped ever closer to the state cop. Whether dumb luck, or a newfound marksmanship, both shots landed outside the perimeter of the Kevlar vest the trooper wore.
Nash flopped from his knees to his stomach and started to roll away, out of the line of fire.
The third shot landed in the trooper’s neck. He fell back, clutching with one hand at the spurting neck wound. The trooper lifted his gun and fired at the advancing skeletal man, missing wide right. The gunman raised his cheap, probably stolen, gun and pulled the trigger again. Empty.
He closed the gap and put a foot down on the trooper’s gun hand, pinning him to the asphalt. The trooper coughed and a spray of blood came with it. The meat of his neck was open, showing the path of the bullet.
The gunman bent down and twisted the trooper’s own gun from his hand. He turned it, put it between the trooper’s widening eyes, and fired.
Nash rolled himself up and over the curb, spinning into the dusty planter area, then crawled to his knees and moved off into the darkness, hiding again from the killer.
The gunman looked down at where the trooper’s eyes should have been and found only a single red Cyclops eye of exposed bone and torn flesh. Jolted from his survival instinct march across the parking lot, he seemed to feel the electric burst of what he’d done.
The gunman scanned the black night around him, his eyes unfocused, as Nash watched him from the shadows. Nash knew he wouldn’t be able to run as fast with the cuffs on. He waited for the killer to make the first move.
“I don’t got time to chase you down again, fucker,” the gunman said. “Just come on out, and let’s get this over with.”
A sound spun the man’s head to the right, and he fired a shot into the black. The crackle of the trooper’s radio filled the space behind the gunshot echo. Backup was on its way.
“Shit,” the gunman said to himself. His eyes flitted across the empty horizon, seeing nothing. Nash wondered how long until the cops showed up and if he could hide out until they did.
Another burst of radio chatter seemed to run like an electric shock up from the gunman’s feet. He turned and ran for the cruiser, taking the trooper’s gun with him. Nash watched from behind a dead bush as the killer slid behind the wheel, gunned the engine, and pulled out, lights still flashing.
As the car swung back to face the highway, Nash caught sight of Jacy’s screaming face in the back window of the patrol car.
CHAPTER 3
The meth addled gunman pushed the police cruiser over seventy and swore at the windshield and the black night outside.
“Shit. Shit. Shit. Fuck. Shit.”
His plan had fallen apart, a throat cut for nothing, and the car wouldn’t seem to go fast enough. The needle passed ninety, but he felt like he was driving through molasses.
“You better fucking let me go, asshole,” Jacy said from the back seat. Her hips bruised on the hard fiberglass seats. No door handles to make an escape. The metal cage in front of her eyes made her feel like an animal while, at the same time, making the crazed shooter driving seem like his own species of dangerous carnivore.
“Shut the fuck up,” he said. “I gotta think.”
“You can’t think. Why the fuck do you think we’re in this mess?”
“Shut up!” He backhanded the metal grate between them and pulled back his hand with a hiss of pain. The speedometer nearing triple digits, he tried to open the shotgun rack next to him with one hand, but a lock held it in place. The car keys had been in the ignition, but he hadn’t thought to search the cop for any other keys. So no shotgun, not that he knew