Jeffery Deaver - The Vanished Man

Hearing Detective Mary Shanley's words looping through her head, Sachs breathed deeply and kept the gun steady, a bit high, a bit to the left, compensating for gravity and the pleasant April breeze.

When you shoot, nothing exists but you and the target, connected by an invisible cable, like the quiet energy of light. Your ability to hit your target depends exclusively on where this energy originates. If its source is your brain you may hit what you're aiming at. But if it's your heart you almost always will. The Conjurers victims – Tony Calvert, Svetlana Rasnikov, Cheryl Marston, Officer Larry Burke – now seated this power solidly in the latter and she knew that she couldn't miss.

Come on , she thought, you son of a bitch. Put the goddamn car in drive. Try for me. Come on!

Give me an excuse…

The car edged forward. Her finger slipped inside the trigger guard. As if he sensed this the Conjurer braked. "Come on," she found herself whispering.

Thinking about how to handle it. If he just tried to get away she'd take out the fan blades or a tire and try to capture him alive. But if he drove toward her or aimed for the sidewalk, endangering someone else, then she'd drop him.

"Yo!" one of the teens on the sidewalk called. "Shoot the motherfuck!" "Cap his ass, bitch!"

You don't have to convince me, homes. Ready, willing and able…

She decided that if he drove ten feet toward her, at any kind of speed, she'd nail him. The engine of the Band-Aid-colored car revved and she saw – or imagined – that the vehicle shuddered.

Ten feet. That's all I'm asking.

Another growl of the engine. Do it! she pleaded silently.

And then Sachs saw a slow-moving mass of yellow ease behind the Mazda.

A school bus from Zion Prophetic Tabernacle Church, filled with children, pulled away from the curb into traffic, the driver unaware of what was happening. It stopped at an angle between the Mazda and the garbage truck.

No…

Even a direct hit might not stop the slug, which could careen into the bus after it passed through its target.

Finger off the trigger, muzzle safely in the air, Sachs looked through the windshield of the Mazda. She could see the faint motion of the Conjurer's head as he glanced up and to his right, locating the bus in the rearview mirror.

He then looked back toward her and she had the impression that he smiled, deducing that she couldn't fire now.

The raw squeal of the Mazda's front tires filled the street as he floored the pedal and headed toward Sachs at twenty, forty, fifty miles an hour. He bore straight down on the policewoman and her Camaro, which was a far brighter yellow than the Bible school bus, whose presence had cast its blessing of holy protection over the Conjurer.

As the Mazda headed straight at her, Sachs ran to the sidewalk to try for a cross-fire shot.

Lifting the Glock, she aimed at the dark form that was the Conjurer's head, leading him by three or four feet. But beyond him were dozens of store windows and apartments and people crouching on the sidewalk. There was simply no way to fire even a single round safely.

Her chorus didn't care.

"Yo, bitch, lessee you waste that motherfuck."

"Whatcho waitin' fo'?"

She lowered the gun, shoulders slumped as she watched the Mazda streak straight for the Camaro.

Oh, not the car… No!

Thinking of when her father had bought her the '69 muscle car, a junker, and how together they'd rebuilt much of the engine and suspension, added a new transmission, and stripped it, to goose the horsepower skyward. This vehicle and a love of policing were his essential legacies to his daughter.

Thirty feet from the Camaro the Conjurer turned the wheel hard to the left, toward where Sachs crouched. She leaped aside and he turned the other way, back toward the Chevy. The Mazda skidded, cutting diagonally toward the sidewalk. At a glancing angle it slammed into the passenger door and right front fender of the Camaro, spinning it in a circle over two lanes onto the far sidewalk, where the four kids finally showed some energy and scattered.

Sachs dove out of the way and landed on her knees on the concrete, gasping at the pain in her arthritic joints. The Camaro came to rest a few feet from her, its rear end off the ground, jacked up by the battered orange metal trash basket it had rolled over.

The Mazda went over the far sidewalk then back into the street and turned right, heading north. Sachs climbed to her feet but didn't even bother to lift her gun in the direction of the beige car; there was no safe shot. A glance at the Camaro. The side was a mess, the front end too, but the torn fender wasn't binding on the tires. Yeah, she could probably catch him. She jumped in and fired up the engine. First gear. A roar. The tach shot up to 5000 and she popped the clutch.

But she didn't move an inch. What was the problem? Was the drive train cracked?

She glanced out the window and saw that the rear wheels – the drive wheels – were jacked up off the ground, thanks to the trash basket. She sighed in frustration, slammed the steering wheel with her palm. Damn! She saw the Mazda, three blocks away. The Conjurer wasn't escaping that fast; the collision had taken a toll on his car too. There was still a chance to catch him.

But not in a car up on goddamn blocks.

She'd have to -

The Camaro began to rock back and forth.

She looked in the rearview mirror and saw that three of the gangbangers had shed their combat jackets and were straining as they tried to shove the car off its perch. The fourth, bigger than the others, the leader of this crew, walked slowly up to the window. He leaned down, a gold tooth shining bright in the middle of his dark face. "Yo."

Sachs nodded and held his eye.

He looked back at his friends. "Yo, niggers, push the fuckin' car! You makin' like you jerkin' off with it."

"Fuck you," came the winded reply.

He leaned down again. "Yo, lady, we gonna get you down. Whatcha gonna shoot that motherfuck with?"

"A Glock. Forty caliber."

He glanced at her holster. "Sweet. Be the twenty-three. The C?"

"No, the full size."

"That a good gun. I got myself a Smittie." He lifted his throwaway sweatshirt and, with a mix of defiance and pride, showed her the brushed-silver handle of a Smith and Wesson automatic. "But I'ma get me a Glock like yo's."

So , she reflected, an armed teenager. How would a sergeant handle this situation?

The car bounced down off the trash can, rear wheels ready to roll.

Whatever a proper sergeant would say or do, she decided, didn't matter under the present circumstances. The way she handled it was to give him a solemn nod.

"Thanks, homes." Then the woman with wire added ominously, "Don't shoot anybody and make me come lookin' for you. You got that?"

A wide gold grin.

Then, snap, into first gear and the gutsy tires burned wormholes into the asphalt. In a few seconds Amelia Sachs was doing sixty.

"Go, go, go," she muttered to herself, focused on the faint blur of tan in the distance. The Chevy wobbled like crazy but it drove more or less straight. Sachs struggled to get the Motorola headset on. She called Central to report the pursuit and redirect the backup along this route.

Accelerating fast, braking hard… the streets of crowded Harlem aren't made for high-speed pursuits. Still, the Conjurer was in the same traffic as she was – and he wasn't half the driver. Slowly she closed the gap. Then he turned toward a schoolyard, in which kids were playing half-court basketball and whacking softballs into fake outfields. The playground wasn't crowded; the gate was padlocked shut and anybody wishing to play here either had to squeeze through the gap like a contortionist or be willing to scale a twenty-foot chain-link fence.