Rob Thurman - All Seeing Eye

Except I was fucking pissed.

This shit had killed Charlie, someone I’d liked no matter how much I denied it. He’d tried to kill me with napalm and then a goddamn bomb. In the boondocks of Georgia-a bomb. Who does that?

Someone whose ass I was going to kick to the state line and back before doing worse. I didn’t like guns, I hadn’t since I’d held one for the first and last time at the age of fourteen, but there were other ways to get things done. And as we said in these parts, sometimes a man just needs killing. This son of a bitch fit the bill.

I crouched but kept running-right until the asphalt parking lot came up to slam me in the face. Or it would have, if I hadn’t gotten my hands under me in time to avoid a broken nose. I did get some road rash on my chin from the feel of it and the breath knocked out of me as at least two hundred pounds landed on my back. I did discover that some of my hearing was back as I heard shots fired from about thirty feet in front of me and more from about three feet above my ear.

With the hearing in one ear gone again, I depended on the other to hear a truck’s engine revving, the screech of metal hitting metal, and the roar of an engine fading.

“Shit.” It wasn’t me who said it. I didn’t have enough breath in my crushed lungs to say anything, but I wholeheartedly shared the sentiment. King Kong rolled off of me and took a fistful of my shirt to pull me up to my knees and yank me around to face him. “Idiot. Are you dead? You damn well should be.”

I wheezed until I had enough air to snap back. “I had a plan.”

Hector, gun still in his other hand, gave me a light shake. “And what was your plan, Jackson, that was going to save you from running straight at a gun? I’m dying to know.”

“Ducking.” I glared and pushed his hand off. All that anger and adrenaline and nothing I could do with it. It was a little different from using my fake Glock to scare off junkies out to rob my shop. I’d been lucky. None of them had had guns yet, only knives. A fake gun and Houdini were more than enough to take care of them. This time, I had faced a gun, a real one, and my only disappointment in what I’d done was that Hector had been able to catch me. My stepfather had tried to kill me when I was fourteen, and this asshole was trying to kill me now. Enough. I’d had enough.

“Motherf-” Hector cut himself off. He’d cursed more today than I’d heard in the entire week or so that I’d known him-even when a cannibal was throwing his colleagues off a mill roof. His post-Army discipline was failing him. “I blackmail you, almost get you killed, then drive you over the edge to suicidal. Why not? It’s what I deserve. I’m going straight to hell. No doubt about it.”

He stood and turned to a heavyset older man who’d been running to his car, keys out. Unfortunately for him, it was his car next to which Hector had tackled me.

“We need to borrow your car.” Hector didn’t point the gun at the guy. First, Hector didn’t have that in him. Carjacking and giving the man a heart attack were a step beyond blackmail. Second, he didn’t need to point his gun. The guy had taken one look at it down by Hector’s leg, seen me on my knees, and threw the keys and waddled off as fast as he could.

“Get up. We still have a chance to catch the bastard without getting shot in the process.”

He clicked open the lock and climbed behind the wheel. I managed to get into the passenger seat while getting the rest of my breath back. There was the slam of one of the backseat doors, and Meleah had joined us. As Hector started the car and tore out of the parking lot, she fastened her seatbelt before reaching forward to pinch the back of my arm.

“Are you suicidal?” she demanded.

“What’s with you two? I had a plan. Jesus.”

We hit the ramp and two seconds later the interstate. “Yes, he had a plan,” Hector said darkly. “Ask him about his well-thought-out, completely nonsuicidal plan.”

“You were a helluva lot nicer to me when you were blackmailing me.” I searched the road ahead of us for sight of the truck.

“That was before you broke me. Charlie lived with you for months and still remembered you as a friend twelve years later. I’m with you one week, and you make me question my own sanity. Damn, there it is!”

And there it was-miles ahead but within reach. Refrigerator trucks didn’t have the speed of a plush, fast Lexus. Within thirty seconds, we were almost on it. With less than half a mile before we’d be technically tailgating it, Hector pulled his gun back out of his jacket pocket. I should’ve noticed the faint sag of the material. I liked to think I had my powers of observation left over from the days when I only read people’s faces and body movements, but either I was fooling myself or my skills were blunted instead of sharpened by knowing that there was a killer out there. Not a good showing for a former con man.

“What are you going to do with that? Shoot through the metal panels or pull up beside the truck and shoot over my head again?” I asked, not yet willing to forgive the scathing dismissal of my ducking plan.

“It’s not a that. It’s a Beretta 92F, identical to the M9 I carried in the Army. It’s dependable. I like dependable in situations like this. And I’m going to try for the tires.” Hector sounded as if I had insulted his best friend.

“Does that work in real life?” Meleah asked. I heard the tinkle of glass she shook off her shirt and out of her russet-streaked hair.

“You’re handling the bomb thing like a pro,” I commented. Unlike the searing anger that had pumped through me. I hadn’t liked bullying directed at me when I was a kid, when I was at Cane Lake, and I liked it less now. I wished I had a baseball bat instead of a pissant pair of weighted gloves for when we caught up to the son of a bitch. “You’re like every doctor I’ve read. You have repression down to an art form.” It was true. They all had boxes in their subconscious, and the face of every patient who died on them went into that box. It made sense. How else would you move on to your next one if the memories of the deceased ones stayed with you every minute of every day?

“I’ll break a few things later when I have more time. Now I’m more worried about catching the man who killed Charlie. Hector, can you actually shoot out the tires of the truck?”

“With my knowledge of physics, you’d think it would be easy-it’s not. If this doesn’t work, I’ll ram it.”

That had me clicking my own seatbelt into place. Ramming didn’t seem a better plan than ducking, the hypocrite. A Lexus was sturdy, but a refrigerator truck made it look like a Tonka toy in comparison.

Before I could point that out to Hector, he leaned forward over the wheel with his eyes narrowed. “Now, what is that?”

Our semi-stolen, semi-borrowed car was eating up the road, and we were only eight or so car lengths behind the truck. I saw what Hector was referring to. There was a black line across both lanes of traffic-it almost looked metallic. The cars in the slow lane were passing over it as the truck blew past them in the fast lane. Whatever it was, it looked and seemed harmless. It did nothing to the cars or the truck. I didn’t know anything about physics or the ease of shooting tires out of a speeding truck, but I did know one thing: if it looks or seems harmless, it never is.

“Son of a bitch.” I grabbed Hector’s shoulder. “Stop! Don’t drive over it!”

Too late, though. We were going too fast, and by the time I said “Don’t,” I heard the blowout of all four tires. The car skidded off the road, hit a ditch, and flipped over onto the roof. There was the peculiar crunch of safety glass fracturing but not shattering, held in one gluey whole, and the crump of metal buckling against unforgiving earth. I couldn’t breathe for a moment, the seatbelt had tightened around my chest, I was hanging upside down, and I was choking from the force of the air bag that had hit me and the billowing clouds of dust that came with it. But I did abruptly remember. I knew what that strip of metal was, and I hadn’t seen it in the mind of one of my clients. It wasn’t the lingering image of one of my readings. No, I’d seen it on TV while slouching on the couch, drinking a beer, and sharing a cheese pizza with Houdini.