James Patterson - Gone

Then she reached back and accepted her trusty MGP-84, which the cartel soldier behind her handed up.

“Let’s go over it one more time,” Vida said to Jorge, who was nervously playing with the door latch.

The young man sighed.

“I roll up, make nice, make sure the gang’s all there,” he said quickly. “Then I whistle over to you like I want you to bring the stuff, right?”

“Then duck, Jorge,” Vida said, showing him her Peruvian machine pistol as she draped a motherly arm over his shoulder.

The rough men behind them in the SUV chuckled as they polished gun sights and tightened weapon straps over their burly forearms.

“You don’t want to forget that last part, homey,” one of them said in a low voice as Jorge finally swung open the door.

Jorge was sitting up on the abandoned supermarket’s concrete loading dock as a car pulled into the lot. The new black Audi A4 with tinted everything pulled up directly in front of Jorge, and three Asians immediately got out, leaving the driver behind the wheel.

Vida scanned the men quickly with a pair of binoculars. The young, heavily tattooed Vietnamese thugs might have hidden handguns, she thought, but that was it. So far, so bad. For them, at least.

Vida peered closer at the tallest of them. She quickly looked at some pictures on her phone, comparing. Well, what do you know? A stroke of good luck. The tall forty-something Asian with the handsome, angular face looked an awful lot like Giang Truong, the head Triumph Dragon honcho who, after the port fiasco, had personally told Manuel to go fuck himself. Manuel said if they took out Truong, their crew would split a bonus of $50K!

All of her anxiety had been for nothing. Her and her superstitions. Everything was coming together just fine.

Jorge wasn’t through with the hand slapping when it started. From one of the cruddy houses across the street came a loud bang. Then, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, there was a group of large men wearing blue Windbreakers, running across the street toward them. At the same time, two marked and two unmarked cop cars rolled out from behind the supermarket like they were some kind of circus trick.

“Everyone on the ground!” a bullhorn cried as the first cop car raced toward them. “This is the Los Angeles Police Department! Turn off your engines and exit your vehicles! We have you completely surrounded!”

“Shit! Shit! Shit!” Vida cried as she watched the cops advance and the world end.

When she turned back toward the loading dock, she watched as the Triumph Dragons piled into the already-moving Audi. The sports car squealed past the SUV, almost hitting it as it headed east.

They were running. Good idea , Vida thought. Jorge wasn’t completely in the car when she slammed the SUV into drive and the accelerator into the floor.

She almost collided head-on with the first cop car as she roared out of the lot, heading west. In her rearview, she could see one of the unmarked cars fishtail and hammer after her, its blue light bubbling. It must have been some kind of souped-up copmobile, she thought, because after a minute, it really started gaining on them.

I can’t have that , Vida thought, instantly taking a left in the middle of the house-lined block.

The SUV lurched and almost tipped as it skidded sideways over a grassless lawn. Its big, screeching wheels caught a driveway, and then the front air bags went off in two loud, white puffs as the grille smashed through a chain-link fence into a backyard.

Wood crunched as they blurred through a play set and another wooden fence. Then they swerved alongside another stucco shitbox, veered onto another driveway, and were bouncing over the curb onto the street opposite the first.

Vida checked her mirrors. The following cop car was nowhere, at least for the moment. Wheels smoking, the big-block, four-hundred-horsepower engine howling, she hooked a right at the next corner, back toward the expressway.

Less than half a minute later, they’d made it. They turned another corner, and the on-ramp to the westbound San Bernardino was right there. In a minute, they would be on it and gone.

Instead of gunning it, though, Vida, biting her lip in concentration, pulled over on the shoulder under the expressway overpass beside the on-ramp and put the SUV into park.

“What are you waiting for?” Jorge said, banging on the dashboard. “Are you out of your mind? The cops are coming! I don’t want to go to jail. We need to get the hell out of here. Let’s go!”

Vida shook her head as she lifted her phone.

“Calm down. I won’t tell you twice,” she said. “You let me handle the cops. We can still get this done.”

Everyone in the suv except Vida turned and looked back as the cop car that was following them screamed past on the perpendicular street behind them. Then they watched as it hit its brakes and swung around.

“They saw us! How about now? Can we go now?” Jorge wanted to know.

Vida shook her head.

“Out, men,” she said calmly. “Lay down suppressing fire.”

“Suppressing fire?!” Jorge yelled.

Vida placed her machine pistol to the young man’s temple.

“That means you, too, Jorge. Time to grow some hair on that chest. Get the fuck out of this truck!”

In the falling dusk, in the middle of the busy city street, the cartel hit team poured out of the vehicle and immediately opened fire on the approaching Crown Victoria. Against the iron-and-concrete tunnel of the overpass, the sudden rattling blast of the half-dozen fully automatic AR-15s and AK-47s going off at once was pants wetting. The oncoming cop car swung sideways and halted in the middle of the street, its perforated hood smoking, its windshield torn to shreds.

Still the cartel soldiers fired, without letup. Their shooting stance was textbook, rifle stocks tucked high in the shoulder as they smoothly squeezed off round after round after round.

Despite the war thundering around her, Vida’s eyes were wide open as she put the SUV into drive.

Seconds later, the Triumph Dragons’ Audi A4 appeared in the cross street in front of her, from the east. It was headed directly toward the on-ramp on her left, like she’d predicted. She stomped the accelerator into the floor.

She timed it perfectly. The Cadillac Escalade plowed directly into the side of the small, speeding Audi in a horrible crunch of metal. The Audi, spinning in a dog squeal of rubber, hit two other cars waiting at the light before it came to a stop.

Amid the automatic gunfire and screaming citizens, Vida exited from the now-smoking Escalade with the machine pistol. The Triumph Dragons in the crumpled Audi were moaning as she walked over the broken glass. She emptied a clip into the wreckage, then reloaded and gave each man another short burst in the head just to be sure.

She dropped the machine pistol and took out her phone. People who had been waiting at the light abandoned their vehicles. Between the pauses in the gunfire behind her, she could hear sirens approaching in the distance. Then the phone was finally answered.

“Where are you?” Vida said. “We are in El Monte, just before the Peck Road on-ramp. We need you here now.”

“Thirty seconds,” a voice told her.

Moments later, she could hear them coming. The dozen-strong motorcycle pack that had passed her earlier suddenly poured off the expressway, their big Ninja and Hayabusa bikes raging and growling like starving grizzlies.

They were the insurance plan, Jorge’s buddies, MS-13 members, their backup in case things went to shit. And, boy, had things gone to shit.

Her soldiers, still under the overpass, dropped their guns and rushed forward and hopped onto the backs of the now-halted bikes. Vida counted heads and waited until Jorge and everyone else was accounted for before she hopped onto the back of one of the Jap bikes herself.