Jeff Abbott - Collision

Three of them, a shade younger than him, nineteen or so. They stood four parking slots away, getting into an old, weathered sedan, but they’d seen him crying like a babe and one acted embarrassed and the other two smiled, amused at his pain.

Behind him, the woman stirred and groaned. He glanced back at her; she lay still again.

Now two of the three boys had gotten into their car but one stood there and mock-rubbed his cupped hand on his cheek, wiping away pretend tears.

Jackie opened the van’s door and stepped out into the cool. The hum of the highway made a throaty murmur and the night sky spilled stars across the darkness. His fist felt primed to hit, his feet ready to kick. He didn’t need a gun. Or the knife.

“What’s your problem?” Jackie asked.

The boy kept his smile locked in place and said, with a twang, “Buy some pride, dude.”

“My brother died today.” He walked faster toward the smiling boy, whose grin faded. “Maybe I should laugh? Do a freaking jig?”

The boy ducked back into the car, started shutting the door.

Jackie caught the door handle. Fury made him strong and he reached in and dragged the boy onto the pavement. The boy twisted and hollered. Jackie punched the mouth hard; the teeth in the vanished smile cracked under his fist.

The two other boys spilled from the other side of the car. One was bigger than Jackie, with the bearing of an athlete, but Jackie didn’t see muscle and speed, he saw only weaknesses borne from overconfidence: a throat left unprotected, a crotch to be kicked, an eye to be gouged. He slid across the trunk to engage the athlete. Take the biggest first, Nicky told him. Jackie nailed him with a hard kick in the guts. The athlete doubled over and Jackie slammed him into the side of the car. The car door stood open and Jackie shoved the athlete’s head into the opening, knocked the door hard against him. The athlete folded, bleeding from both ears.

“See,” Jackie said to the last kid, rounding the car to come at him. “That’s pride, asshole.”

He bounced while the last kid threw a reckless punch; he stepped under it and delivered three close-in blows, to groin, stomach, and jaw. Nicky had taught him the moves. The last kid folded, mouth wide in a gasp. The athlete lay unconscious on the asphalt. Jackie ran around the car and found the once-smiling boy, dazed, trying to crawl into the driver’s seat, blood dripping from his mouth and chin.

Jackie yanked the boy out of the car. He grabbed the keys from the ignition, knocked the boy to the ground.

“Cry,” Jackie said.

“Don’t, please!” The boy’s tears welled, real ones of stark terror.

He pressed the boy’s head to the pavement, jabbed the ignition key into the soft corner of the eye. The boy screamed his own throat raw. Jackie’s grief vanished in the flame of his rage.

Blind him, he thought. Do the other eye. But he glanced up, noticed a couple of people gaping at him in shock from their cars in the drive-through line.

Time to go. He turned and the van was gone.

He dropped the keys and forgot to breathe. Then he saw the van, creaking along toward the exit, the woman driving but weaving. Like the drugs still hobbled her mind, like she hadn’t figured out the relationship between accelerator and escape.

Jackie ran, leaving the boy screaming and writhing on the pavement. The van was thirty feet from careening onto a thoroughfare that bisected the highway. Thirty feet for him to catch her and God don’t let her gun the gas. He cut across to the van’s right side, trying to remember if he’d locked the passenger door. Hoping that she, dazed with drugs, hadn’t.

The van jolted up onto the curb, flattened the spring grass, lurched out of the McDonald’s lot and onto the road.

Ten feet. He ran out into the street and reached the passenger-side door, caught the handle. The van surged out into traffic. He fumbled at the handle, clicked open the door as the woman veered the van back toward him, trying to knock him down and nearly planting him on the pavement. He jumped through the door, landing on his abandoned dinner, a slick of meat and lettuce and pickle.

Now Teach hit the accelerator, ignoring the cavalcade of honks as she dodged through traffic. She veered into the wrong lane, screeched past another car. Jackie grabbed her arms with one hand, seized the steering wheel with the other. Her head bobbed as if she were only half-awake.

He slammed his door shut. “Lady, no.” Jackie grabbed the wheel from her, steered a clear path to the road’s shoulder. He hit her, hard and precise. She went limp. He yanked her from the seat, shoved her into the back of the van. He eased into the driver’s seat, roared back into traffic.

Idiot, he told himself. No control. Why did he care if small-town jerks saw him crying? His bad judgment had gotten him noticed, cut, and bruised, and nearly lost him Teach. He zoomed back onto I-35. He’d have to find another car, dump the van, steal another car, fast. Oh, damn. He imagined Nicky’s ghost crouched on his shoulder, thumping Jackie’s head in disappointment. No more stupidity. It would get him in jail or dead.

The first mistake, he decided, was in feeling grief. Not again. From now on he would simply cause it for others. Gouging the boy’s eye had eased his pain. That was the way to deal with grief: Lose yourself in your work.

Two hours later, Jackie parked a different van at a shopping center on the edge of the growing Dallas suburb of Frisco. He’d abandoned the gunmen’s van and stolen a new one from an apartment complex in Waxahachie, between Hillsboro and Dallas. The stolen van reeked of weed, and this gave Jackie his first, borderline hysterical laugh of the day. A joint didn’t sound bad at all, but then he reminded himself he was running the family business and CEOs should remain sober.

Especially when facing a very irritated customer.

So maybe it would be responsible and smart-both aspects of being the mature and executive-minded Jackie, he told himself-to have a bit of leverage over Mr. Sam Hector.

He pulled into a corner of the lot, far from the few other shoppers, far from the lights. Teach lay on the floor of the dirty van, half-watching him. He stared at her and she closed her eyes. But he could tell from the focus he’d seen in her eyes that the drugs were wearing off.

“Most old ladies been kidnapped, they would have run screaming from the van. Shrieking their throat raw for help. But you wanted to slip away, unseen, unheard.”

Now Teach opened her eyes. Under the gag, under the wicked bruise on her face, the merest trace of a smile appeared. Then wavered and was gone. He went back to the rear of the van and lowered the gag.

“What are you, lady? What’s your line of work?”

“I’ll make you a deal,” she whispered. “A million dollars if you let me go.”

He laughed. “A million. Handsome offer. But my brother’s dead. So money’s not my reason for the game now, sorry.”

“The offer expires in one minute.”

She was used to hardball, he thought. “I don’t need ten seconds to tell you no.”

“All right,” she said. Almost respectfully. It impressed him that she didn’t beg.

“This Pilgrim fellow’s a friend of yours.”

Teach opened her eyes. “He’s going to kill you. It’s guaranteed.”

“I shot him and he fell from a parking garage, and so odds are he’s dead.” Better if she had no hope.

“A man thought he’d killed him this afternoon. He hadn’t.”

Jackie put his mouth close to her ear. “If he’s not dead, I’m going to kill him, and when I’m done, if you’re still alive, I’ll bring you his head and you can kiss him good-bye.”

“Where are the guys who grabbed me?” she asked.