James Patterson - Cross Justice

Pedelini had his back to me. His shoulders trembled slightly, and he started to pivot toward me. We were less than sixteen inches apart. The sheriff’s detective had turned nearly ninety degrees to his left and was facing the narrow cove and the shore road beyond it when the rifle shot rang out. I caught the muzzle flash from across the cove a split second before I heard the blast.

Pedelini spun around, sagged on the railing, and then ragdolled to the deck.

Blood trickled from a head wound.

I dove across the detective to shield him from a second shot, but it never came. All I heard was the screaming of Pedelini’s girls.

“Call 911!” I yelled at Tessa, who’d come to the screen door.

I didn’t wait to see if she complied, just turned to her father, whose eyes had rolled up in his head. He was breathing, though. And his pulse was strong.

I didn’t want to move him, but I turned his head slightly to look at the wound. The bullet had dug a nasty groove through the scalp and along the surface of his skull, like a wood-carving tool had worked it. But I couldn’t see anywhere the bullet had penetrated his cranium.

I heard a car start, wheels squealing. I stood, peered across the cove, and spotted the taillights of a car racing away on the shore road. The car swerved, and I saw an old couple dive out of the way.

The car lost control, hit something hard with a tremendous crash. The brake lights never came on.

I started to run. That was my shooter.

“Wait!” Tessa screamed after me.

“Your dad’s going to be all right!” I yelled, jumping off the porch and sprinting to the rental car.

I threw it in reverse, spit gravel onto the road, and jammed it in gear. I almost lost control going around the hairpin at the back of the cove and slowed at the curve near the spot from where the shooter must have fired. When my headlights came around, I could see an older couple standing, shaken, by the road. But there was no car beyond them.

I roared up to them and they looked frightened.

“I’m a police officer,” I said. “Where did that car go?”

The elderly man’s hand was trembling. “Up the road. A white Impala. Almost hit us.”

A white Impala. I drove away slow, trying not to spin up rocks that might hit the couple, my attention darting off the road to a stripped and gouged stump with bits of steel embedded in it. I figured he’d hit it hard head-on, which meant the radiator might have been damaged, or the front end.

In any case, I couldn’t see the car being able to maintain its pace down the winding mountain road from the lake back toward town. The moment I turned off the shore road onto the main route, I sped up again.

Halfway down the mountain, I spotted brake lights ahead of me, and then they were gone around a curve. I caught up on the next bend, my high beams finding the rear of the Impala. Judging from the silhouettes showing through the back window, there were only two inside.

The passenger twisted around as if to look back at me, raised a pistol. I mashed the pedal and rammed the rear bumper before he could shoot. The impact flung the Impala at a steep angle up the road and away from me. My headlights caught the driver clawing at the wheel.

Finn Davis managed to regain control of the car and picked up speed through the next turn. When I came around the curve, a guy was hanging out the passenger window and aiming a shotgun at me left-handed.

He fired just as I hit the brakes.

Double-aught buckshot shattered the right side of the windshield. I hit the gas again when I saw the shooter awkwardly trying to work the pump action. He wasn’t a lefty.

I swung into the other lane where he couldn’t get an easy shot at me, then caught up and cut the wheel to ram the Impala a second time. My bumper hit the car at a quartering angle. The rear end of the Impala swung hard right. The guy with the shotgun was hurled from the car; he sailed through the air and disappeared into the night.

Finn Davis was in my headlights again, clawing at the wheel.

I didn’t give him a second chance, just sped up and rammed the Impala a third time, hitting it almost broadside. My car threatened to spin, and I had to slam the brakes. But Finn’s car reached a tipping point on the road shoulder.

It flipped off the embankment.

I skidded to a halt, heard sirens coming, dug out my pistol and flashlight, and ran back up the road. The Impala had turned over at least two times and was wedged at an angle against the trunk of an old pine. One of the headlights was still on, cutting deeper into the forest.

I shone my flashlight down into the gully, tried to find the driver-side door and Davis. He wasn’t there.

I flicked the light up to the car’s roofline and found him. He was bleeding, leaning out the passenger-side window, and leveling a scoped hunting rifle at me.

We fired at virtually the same time, me from the hip at fifty feet and Davis at that same distance from a dead rest. His scope had to have been off because, as it had with Pedelini, the bullet went left of me by no more than an inch or two.

I clicked off the light, threw myself flat on the shoulder, and listened for the sound of a rifle’s action over the hissing of the Impala’s radiator and the sirens coming up the mountain. I counted to twenty, stayed belly down, extended my hand to the edge of the gully, and rapidly clicked the light on and off.

Nothing.

I flicked it on again, slid to the side, and looked down into the gully. Finn Davis was rocked back against the tree trunk, blank eyes open and already dulling. A gout of blood showed in the wound at the center of his throat.

“Are you arresting me?” I asked eight hours later.

“Just trying to get the story straight in our heads,” said Detective Frost, rubbing his belly in an interrogation room.

Wearily, I said, “I went to see Detective Pedelini about some lab tests, and someone shot at him while we were talking on his deck. I saw the bullet had hit him hard enough to knock him out, but nothing fatal. So I left, gave chase. Some folks out on the lake, an elderly couple, were almost run down by Davis making his escape. I tried to follow. His accomplice shot at my car. I took defensive action. Davis’s car went off the side of the road. He tried to kill me. I killed him in self-defense.”

“Why would Finn Davis try to kill Pedelini?” asked Carmichael.

Tired as I was, I decided I couldn’t trust the two men interviewing me. I withheld any and all theories spinning in my brain.

“I can’t give you a clear motive,” I said. “His adoptive father might be able to.”

“We put calls in to Marvin’s house and cell,” Carmichael said. “He isn’t answering.”

“Go to his place on Pleasant Lake.”

“A trooper did about an hour ago. No answer at the door, so he went inside. There were signs of a struggle. Know anything about that?”

“Nothing,” I said. “For all you know, Bell ordered Finn to kill Pedelini and is now running, making his house a mess so you’d think otherwise. But whatever. The fact remains that Finn shot at Pedelini and me. Test his rifle. I guarantee it will match the one that killed Sydney Fox.”

“You think Finn killed Sydney?” Frost said.

“I do,” I said.

“Why?”

“Spiteful ex-husband. Maybe more.”

They fell silent. Carmichael drank from a Diet Coke can. Frost sipped his coffee, said skeptically, “You make yourself out to be an innocent bystander.”

“With the attempt on Detective Pedelini’s life, most definitely. How is he, by the way?”

“In a medically induced coma,” Carmichael said. “Mild brain swelling.”