“Damn it!” J.R. shouted, and flinched as the truck flew in front of the semi, then swerved to the shoulder of the road, before passing everything on its left. “Can you see Bobby? I need to know if he’s still got my boy.”
Cody glanced down. There was a mile of space between a cell phone tower and another span of electric lines. It would be tricky getting down and getting out before flying into the wires, but it was a risk he was willing to take.
“Look hard!” he yelled. “We’ve only got time for one pass.”
With that, he shoved the stick forward, sending the chopper into a shallow dive.
J.R. leaned forward, bracing his hands against the dash, and fixed his gaze on the cab of the truck.
Closer, closer, they drew until they were almost even with the pickup.
Suddenly a small, dark head popped up in the window. It was a little boy with two black eyes and a swollen nose. When he saw the chopper, he started beating on the window, and even though J.R. couldn’t hear him, he could tell the boy was screaming one word over and over and over.
For the space of a heartbeat J.R. couldn’t think past the sight of that panicked expression and the battered face. Then he saw the driver grab at Bobby’s arm and pull him away from the window. At the same time he saw Bobby take a swing at the driver’s face, fighting to get away.
Suddenly the truck skidded sideways.
J.R. moaned. Before he could see what happened next, the chopper suddenly lifted straight up, yanking him back to reality. He watched with his heart in his throat as the truck skidded off the shoulder, down into the grass, and then back up onto the shoulder and straight across two lanes of traffic onto the center median.
“Sweet Jesus…no, no, no, no,” J.R. prayed, hoping no one would hit them before they came to a stop.
To his relief, they managed to escape being hit, but once the driver regained stability, he took off again.
All J.R. could do was watch helplessly from above as the truck pulled back onto the highway and accelerated wildly, with the Louisiana troopers still in hot pursuit.
J.R. was sick to his stomach. His child was only seconds away from dying. He kept remembering that look on Bobby’s face, and while he hadn’t heard the word his son had been shouting, he knew what he’d been saying.
Daddy.
He’d been screaming, “Daddy!”
And that was when J.R. lost it.
“Damn it. That’s enough. Cody! Get in front of him! We’ve got to stop that truck before he kills my son.”
Cody frowned. It was a risky move. The crazy bastard could just decide to drive straight into the chopper and take everyone, including himself, out. But he, too, had seen the look on that little boy’s face and could only imagine what the child must already have suffered.
“Shit, J.R. You’re gonna owe me big-time,” he muttered.
“Whatever you want, it’s yours,” J.R. said. “Get about a half mile ahead of him, then turn around and set it down. I’m thinking that son of a bitch won’t have the balls to play chicken with a chopper.”
As they shot past the truck and the highway patrol cars, it was evident that people in the cars ahead were tuning in to what was happening behind them. They were pulling off the highway at alarming rates, some going into the center median, others taking off into the grass off the shoulder. No one wanted to become involved in the race, much less some fiery crash.
Cody took the chopper up, then swooped, making a perfect U-turn and coming in dead center over the interstate. He could hear chatter from the highway patrol, shouting orders that he blatantly ignored.
J.R. was right. The crazy bastard was going to kill himself and the kid unless someone got them stopped.
“We’re going down,” he said.
J.R. gritted his teeth. The blue truck was about a half mile in front of them and coming fast.
“God…please let this work,” he muttered, and braced himself for the sudden jolt.
Newt was bawling and cursing at the top of his voice.
Bobby was on his knees on the seat, looking out through the cracked glass of the back window of the truck. He could see the highway patrol cars. He could see the chopper flying up, up, up, seemingly flying away. He began beating on the glass with the flats of his hands.
“Stop! Stop! Stop!” he screamed. “That was my daddy. You have to stop and let me out! Daddy! Daddy! I want my daddy!”
Newt doubled up his fist and hit the kid on the side of his head, knocking him against the passenger side door, where he slid quietly onto the floorboard.
One of the troopers in pursuit had already seen the boy in the truck and was relaying information that the child was alive when he saw the driver hit the boy with a fist. When the child disappeared, he winced, then stepped on the gas. They had a roadblock set up just a mile and a half ahead. If the truck stayed upright just a little while longer, that was where they would stop him.
Then suddenly, the oil company chopper disappeared from his immediate line of sight. Just when he thought they’d gone, he saw it swoop back into sight, make a sharp U-turn over the highway and then set down.
“Oh, shit,” he muttered, and reached for the radio.
Except for the radio chatter, the Bordelaise Police Department was as silent as a wake. Sometime after the chase began, the radio chatter between the chopper and the highway patrol had ended. Katie didn’t know what had happened to Cody and J.R., and was desperate to learn if Bobby was even inside the truck. Everyone was just standing around the front desk, listening to the troopers relaying information back and forth to headquarters.
For Katie, it was like hearing her worst nightmare coming true. She knew the chief was in the room, as were Lee and Carter, but no one talked. No one moved.
She hovered beside Vera, praying to hear something positive.
Then all of a sudden a trooper began broadcasting the words she’d been praying to hear.
“The boy’s inside. I have a visual on the boy.”
When it became apparent that Bobby was alive, she screamed for joy, but the joy quickly dispersed at the next piece of information.
“Suspect is moving at one hundred and seven miles an hour. Request confirmation that roadblock is in place.”
When she realized Bobby was inside a truck hurtling down a busy interstate at a speed of more than a hundred miles an hour, she nearly lost it.
“They have to stop him! Why don’t they stop him?”
Vera grabbed Katie’s hand and gave it a quick squeeze, but Katie couldn’t bear to hear any more. She wanted this to stop, but she couldn’t move away. Instead, she hovered with her hands over her mouth and her heart in her throat, silently praying for both Bobby and J.R., because she no longer knew where her husband was.
Then out of the blue, she heard one of the troopers shout, “The chopper is going down!”
She nearly fainted.
“Oh, my God, oh, my God…this isn’t happening,” she moaned, and turned away from the radio with her hands over her ears.
Suddenly Lee Tullius was grabbing her by the arms and yanking her hands away from her face.
“It didn’t crash, Katie! It didn’t crash. The chopper is setting down on the interstate. It’s a good thing. They’re trying to force Newt to stop before he wrecks.”
She couldn’t think past the words
didn’t crash.
By the time she managed to refocus on the radio chatter, all she could hear was someone shouting, “Get down! Get down!” and then what sounded like gunshots.
Katie blanched.
“Are they alive? Did they crash? Dear God…what’s happening to my family?”
Newt was in the worst place he’d ever been in his life. Not during his longest stretch in prison had he ever been this scared. He was going so fast—faster than he’d ever driven in his life. He didn’t know why they were still upright, or why he hadn’t crashed a dozen times over. The tires on his truck were emitting a high-pitched whine, and the instruments on his dash were going crazy. The truck engine was overheated. The oil light was on, and he could smell smoke. Something was on fire. Was it going to blow? Was that how he was going to die—blown to kingdom come all over Interstate 49?
He glanced down at the speedometer. It was topped out at one hundred and ten miles an hour. It wouldn’t take much to cause a wreck. All he would have to do was tap the brakes and turn the wheel, and the sucker would roll like a burrito, scattering him and everything he owned all over a solid acre and then some.
But did he have the guts to do it? He didn’t know. What he did know was that he didn’t want to go back to prison, and especially in Louisiana. The state prison in Angola had a rep he didn’t want to test.
He glanced down at the kid on the floorboard. He wasn’t moving. If the little bastard had gone and broken his neck, then they would get him for more than kidnapping. He would go down for murder.
He sobbed. If only he could turn back the clock. If only he’d driven away when the storm sirens started blowing. He’d spent so many years living under the radar of the law. He’d taken pride in getting lost in the system. And then he’d fixated on this kid and screwed himself straight back into hell.
His fingers ached. The steering wheel was vibrating beneath the palms of his hands. Vehicles ahead of him were taking to the ditches on either side of the road. The Louisiana Highway Patrol was hot on his heels. All he had to do was tap the brake and turn the steering wheel just a little. At one hundred miles an hour, it would be over in seconds.
But could he do it?
Should he do it?
He took a deep breath. Just as he started to lift his foot off the accelerator, the kid stirred.
Newt glanced down, then flinched.
A tiny stream of blood was running from Bobby Earle’s hairline past his two black eyes and down the bridge of that swollen little nose. And in a moment of blinding clarity, he couldn’t believe what he had done.
It was time to end this.
He looked up, but instead of a clean stretch of blacktop rolling out before him, a big black helicopter was coming straight at him.
He screamed.
One look at those massive, spinning rotors and he knew he didn’t have the guts to be sliced and diced on his way to hell.
“Son of a bitch!” he cried, took his foot off the accelerator, counted to ten, hoping it would slow the truck down enough to keep from rolling, then hit the brakes.
The truck started sliding. The hood popped up, then broke off, flying over the cab and then the back of the truck bed to go bouncing end over end down the interstate. Steam and smoke began pouring from the engine as he rode the brakes.
A tire blew, sending the truck into a spin.
Newt took his foot off the brake and hung on to the wheel for dear life, managing to steer out of the spin and onto the grass of the center median, where the truck finally came to a shuddering stop.
He reached down and turned off the key.
Smoke was boiling into the cab. He could feel the heat on his legs.
He opened the door and started to jump out, then thought of the kid and looked back.
Bobby Earle was climbing up onto the seat with a panicked expression on his face.
“Grab my hand!” Newt yelled.
Bobby didn’t hesitate. He reached out.
Newt grabbed him by the wrist, yanking him out of the truck, and then they started running—away from the truck and the fire, away from the chopper and its crazy spinning blades. Just running. Just running.
Because there was nothing else left to do, and he was still afraid to stop.
J.R. knew when smoke began coming out from under the truck that his son’s life was hanging by a thread. He saw the driver hit the brakes, watched the hood pop off the truck and fly over the cab and then nearly died of fright when the truck blew a tire and spun out of control.
“Put it down! Put it down!” he screamed.
He was out of the chopper before it fully landed and was running down the middle of the interstate toward the truck when he saw the driver jump out, dragging Bobby with him.
He didn’t see the highway patrol cars coming to a sliding halt from the other direction, or know that both troopers were also out of their cars and running, too.
All he could see was his little boy in the clutches of a devil.
A shot rang out. Then another.
The troopers were shouting, “Get down! Get down!”
Newt heard the shots, and then the troopers’ orders, and stumbled. Breaking stride was like a slap in the face. All of a sudden he was done. He turned loose of the kid and threw his hands in the air. He was turning around to face the cops when something hit him from behind.
The pain from the blow radiated from his back to his head, then down to his feet. It felt as if he’d been cut in half. Then there was a blow to his head, followed by another, then another, and then blows to his stomach, his face, and all the while he kept screaming, “I didn’t touch him! I didn’t touch him!”
Suddenly, in the middle of chaos, his gaze connected with his assailant and he found himself looking straight up into J. R. Earle’s eyes. It was like looking at an adult version of the kid, only there was so much hate in this man’s eyes. J.R.’s fingers curled around his throat, and Newt knew he was about to die.
“I didn’t touch him,” Newt croaked.
The man’s eyes were black with rage. His nostrils flared from the exertion. But it was the soft, deadly whisper in Newt’s ear that sent him over the edge. “If you don’t die now, the day you get out of prison I will kill you.”
Then those fingers tightened around his neck and everything went black.
Bobby didn’t know what was happening. He’d seen Daddy, and then Daddy was gone. He’d seen the police cars behind them, but then they disappeared when he got knocked into the floor. When he woke up again, smoke was coming inside the truck, and the monster was screaming and yelling. All of a sudden they were out and running, and he kept trying to pull free, but the monster wouldn’t let go.
They were running, running, so fast—too fast. Bobby couldn’t keep up. His legs were hurting, his chest was burning, and he needed to stop, but there was no breath left in his lungs to cry out for help.