Authors: Penny McCall
Sure enough, about fifteen minutes after Vivi’s shadows took off, an unremarkable SUV slid up to the curb and two guys got out. They wore black, no face masks, not expecting him to survive to ID them. They didn’t bother to hide from the neighbors, either, not that the neighbors could see much of anything, surrounded as Daniel’s house was by hedges that had been neatly clipped when he bought the place. Seven years ago. Gardening wasn’t exactly his strong suit.
The two guys split at the curb, one taking the front, the other heading for the back. This time Daniel was ready for them, armed to the teeth, fully prepared to wound one or both of them if that’s what it took to get some answers.
He took up a position in the archway between the front room and the kitchen, giving him a clear view of both doors, ready for whoever came inside first.
They set the place on fire instead.
The house was brick, the windows were vinyl replacement, but the doors were wood. Really flammable, original-to-the-house, seventy-year-old wood. Daniel was perfectly placed to see the smoke curling under the front and back jambs, and completely trapped.
There was no basement, and the windows upstairs only faced front and back. There were windows on the first floor end walls, but they weren’t going to do him any good. All the hit men had to do was take opposite corners and they’d each be able to cover two sides of the rectangular structure.
The house was rapidly filling up with smoke, leaving him two choices, go out and get shot or stay in and die of asphyxiation. What he did was dive out of the way because he saw headlights coming straight for the bay window. About a mile of ancient Ford pickup hood crashed through the front wall of his house, glass and wood exploding in a cloud of plaster dust and smoke.
“Get in,” Vivi yelled.
Daniel struggled to his feet, cussing as his bad leg tried to give out. He managed to drag himself to the passenger door of the pickup, but it was blocked by debris. Vivi slid over and fought to crank the window down, barely breaking pace when shots sounded, shattering the driver’s side window.
Daniel plucked a brick from the rubble and lobbed it over the top of the truck, in the general direction of the gunman, then another before bellying through the truck’s passenger window. “Punch it,” he said. Then, “hold it,” because she was already back in the driver’s seat and jamming her foot to the floor, and his legs were still hanging out the window. One of them was already close to useless. He wasn’t keen on making them a matched set.
The tires spun, long enough for him to muscle himself the rest of the way inside the truck, long enough for the front gunman to get off a couple more shots. Long enough for Daniel’s life to flash in front of his eyes.
The truck finally plowed itself clear of the house debris, the bullets went wide, and Vivi yelled, “Hey, my grandma left me this truck.” She was a little wild-eyed, looking like she might run over the shooter, and while that wouldn’t hurt Daniel’s feelings, odds were better the guy would manage to hit one of them. Probably him, seeing as he was the intended target. And somewhere along the line he’d lost his gun.
So he reached over and cranked the wheel around, adding a couple of nice lawn ruts to the wreckage before they bumped down the curb and into the street, still going backward until they hit the cross street.
“I’m driving,” Vivi screeched at him, wrenching the wheel out of his hand, and jamming the truck into first.
It shuddered, gears grinding before the engine caught with an irritated grumble, coughing and stuttering like an old man clearing his throat in the morning. It finally started to wind up, and by that Daniel meant make noise. The thing was pretty close to deafening, more sound than fury since zero-to-sixty was taking . . . Hell, the thing would shake itself to pieces before it even came close to sixty.
“I could run faster than this,” Daniel yelled to Vivi.
“Should I let you off here?”
“I don’t think it’s going to matter.” He glanced over his shoulder. The SUV was bearing down on them, and the men inside were probably reloading.
“Stop with the negativity and give me a suggestion.”
“Next time run over the guy with the gun.”
She gave him a look, but she didn’t waste her breath making comments like “too late” or “there may not be a next time,” mostly because there was a black BMW parked in Daniel’s cul-de-sac and it chose that moment to pull away from the curb. Vivi honked her horn and flashed her lights, and when those didn’t have any effect she put the gas pedal to the floor. She caught the Beemer just behind the front tire, the weight of the truck punching it out of their way.
“Your neighbor has a death wish,” she yelled to Daniel. “I hope they don’t come after you for the damage.”
“They won’t come after me, they’ll come after you. And it’s probably not—”
Daniel lost the rest of that sentence because Vivi decided to take the first turn on two wheels. She was going for last minute, he figured, but since it took her entire body to muscle the manual steering, she didn’t catch anyone but him off guard. He slammed into the passenger door, which saved his life since a bullet came through the back window right where his head had been.
They wound up and down the neighborhood streets, bullets pinging off the truck, front porch lights popping on. There were enough cars parked on the street to keep the SUV from coming up beside them, especially with Vivi swerving from side to side. But they had to get out of the residential area—
“These guys don’t care where they’re aiming,” Vivi said before the thought could fully form in Daniel’s mind. “We have to get out of the neighborhood.”
“And do what? This thing couldn’t outrun an old lady with a walker.”
“This thing saved your life.”
“You saved my life.”
“So far,” she mumbled, her eyes on the rearview mirror. “We get out on the open road, and we’re all dead.”
“Are you including the truck?” That earned him another look. But she didn’t deny it. “The open roads around here aren’t exactly open.”
“So we lead them out into traffic and what? Hope they get into an accident with some poor, unsuspecting driver?”
“You have a better idea?”
“No.”
They both ducked down as a fresh barrage of lead came at them.
“The spirits picked a bad time to take a night off.”
“I don’t talk to spirits,” Vivi said, “but if I did they’d have a hard time making themselves heard over the commotion.”
She tried to shut out the pounding of her heart and the panic tap-dancing on her nerve endings. She tried to ignore the roar of the truck’s engine, the gunfire, and traffic, the feeling that Daniel was sitting there waiting for inspiration to strike her and save both their lives. Inspiration was having a hard time battering its way through the panic, so she did what she always did—fell back on impulse, taking the first turn at random. She found herself on a four-lane road heading toward one of the bridges that spanned the Charles River.
“You’re heading into downtown Boston,” Daniel pointed out.
“I know that.”
“It’s not the best place to avoid injuring innocent bystanders.”
“I know that, too,” Vivi said, and she had no intention of leading two men with guns into an area that would be jammed, on a balmy summer evening, with people on foot and people in cars, all of them going nowhere fast. “Can’t you think of something besides criticism and second-guessing? For a guy with your history, you’re pretty stingy with helpful ideas. You used to be an agent, remember?”
“You used to be calm in situations like this.”
“Still not helping.”
Daniel didn’t say anything, which was surprising enough to make Vivi glance over at him. He was looking at an eighteen-wheeler ahead on their right, and she had her hands full, what with the SUV determined to come up alongside them. The fact that they were probably going to start shooting was almost as big a problem as running out of room—as in two lanes, three vehicles, one of them being really big and not likely to give way . . .
Before she could finish that thought the solution popped into her brain, as crystal clear and fully blown as if she’d just seen John McClane kicking ass on the big screen.
Step one, slam on the brakes. Her pickup might not have the greatest acceleration, but it was damn good at stopping. The SUV flew past them just like it was supposed to, slowing down when the driver realized what had happened. By then Vivi had the gas pedal to the floor, and the truck had shuddered its way up to about fifty miles per hour, fast enough so that she was able to swing in behind the SUV. And inspiration was talking loud and clear again.
She swerved every time they did, managed to keep the truck moving fast enough to stop them from pulling the same stop-and-drop ploy she’d used to get behind them. Waiting for the right opportunity, waiting while the hit man in the passenger seat of the SUV turned around and pointed his gun at them, waiting until the semi in the right lane wasn’t more than a few yards away.
“Stay . . .” Daniel started, then, “don’t let . . . Get right up—”
“—behind him,” Vivi finished. “Got it. Hold on.” And she jammed her foot to the floor, leaning forward and willing the truck to
move
. It gave a little hiccup and leapt forward, pulling off enough speed so that when her front bumper impacted the SUV’s rear bumper and the driver’s eyes met hers in his rearview mirror, she could turn the wheel just so and drive the SUV into the side of the eighteen-wheeler. Speed and physics did the rest, not to mention the fact that the SUV’s hood was just the right height to fit under the side of the semi. Snugly.
Metal crunched, glass exploded out of all the SUV’s windows, air bags went off. The SUV stuck, tire rubber burning as the semi dragged it down the road sideways, air brakes shrieking when the driver figured out what had happened and tried to stop. Vivi sent the pickup in a little jog around them and sped away from the scene of the accident.
She knew she had a stupid grin on her face, but she couldn’t help it. She’d saved Daniel’s life, her own, too, and she was feeling pretty good about it. Until she got a look at his face.
Chapter 9
DANIEL STILL LOOKED . . . IRRITATED, ANNOYED, HARASSED.
Dyspeptic. For the life of her she couldn’t figure out why he was so cranky— Okay, he’d been shot at, again, and his house . . . Better not to think about his house. He was alive, right? That was the important thing.
She risked another glance at his face. He didn’t look all that grateful.
“She drove a pickup through the front of my house,” he said into the payphone.
“It didn’t do my grandmother’s truck any good,” Vivi pointed out, “since you’re keeping track.”
Daniel’s eyes cut to her. His expression was set to pissed off, just in case she hadn’t gotten that from the tone of his voice. “Then she ran the hit men into an eighteen-wheeler.” He listened for a second, said, “Yeah, I’m still alive,” and then he hung up. “Mike says the hit men are still alive, too—at least they were when they fled the scene of the accident.”
Vivi took the first deep breath since she’d rammed them into the truck.
“They tried to kill us,” Daniel reminded her.
“They’re just doing their job. And if they die, whoever hired them will just send somebody else.”
“First you won’t shoot them, now you’re squeamish about death by car crash?”
She lifted her eyes to his. “And you think it’s because I’m working with them.”
“You have to admit it sounds bad.”
“It could be that I don’t want to be responsible for anyone’s death. Even someone I don’t like.”
He chose to ignore the look she sent him. And the argument for innocence she made. “Mike is going to have my house boarded up. I gave him a description of the hit man I saw when he was shooting at us outside my house, but it won’t do him any good. Too generic. He told me to lay low, watch my back.”
“You mean, like take precautions? Gee, what great advice.”
“We can’t go to my house,” he said, taking all the fun out of her I-told-you-so moment.
“We?”
“And we can’t go to yours since they’ve probably run your plates by now.”
“What, you’re just going to ignore me . . . Wait a minute, they know where I live?”
“Not yet, but it won’t be long.” They were parked at an outdoor payphone, and Vivi had gotten out of the truck while Daniel talked to Mike because she needed to walk off the aftermath of the car chase. Now the nerves came back full force, along with a knot in the pit of her stomach.