James Patterson - The Quickie

From the occasional rumble of passing trucks, I assumed we were on I-84 heading east toward Rhode Island. How much more time until we arrived at the airport? Another hour?

Slowly, I began to come out of my fit. Just in time to realize who, in all of this, I'd hurt most of all. I turned on my side and brought my knees up until my thighs were almost touching my stomach.

Whoever you are, I told the baby in my womb as I shook with sorrow, I'm so sorry. So sorry, so sorry for you, my little one.

There was a hard shake as the van suddenly jogged sharply to the right.

"Hey!" Ordonez shouted, staring into his driver's side mirror as we swerved back again.

"This guy's gotta be drunk. Pick a lane, buddy."

A second jarring shift flipped me over onto my stomach. Immediately after that, there was a loud, crunching bang, and the driver's side wall of the van bent inward. Jesus! What now?

A steady rumbling noise along with a violent vibration suddenly filled the van. I realized that we had driven over the grooved shoulders that are there to keep drivers from falling asleep. The sound was like a bizarre alarm clock going off inside my skull as my forehead did a drumroll on the van floor.

"Son of a bitch!" Ordonez yelled, gunning the accelerator. The van's engine roared, and the rumbling vibration stopped as we whipped to the left, back onto the road.

I slid in the opposite direction and hit the passenger side wall like a forgotten pizza box.

"Hey! It's not a drunk," Ordonez called back to me. "The driver's covered in blood. I don't believe it! How do you like this shit? It's your husband!"

He gunned the accelerator even more then. The engine whined, and the van began to wobble dangerously from too much speed.

"White boy thinks he's a badass, huh? Want to play bumper cars?" the dealer sneered into the driver's side mirror as he floored it.

My stomach dropped when I saw him reach over and click on his shoulder belt. I didn't even have a lap belt to restrain me.

"That's right, you dumb son of a bitch. Catch up, four-eyes! That's it. Now, how do you like…"

There was a sudden shriek of metal and rubber as Ordonez slammed on the brakes.

"… them apples!" he screamed.

For a moment, the only sound was the whisper of me sliding forward toward the passenger seats.

Then the back of the van blew in with an eardrum-ripping bang.

I did a headstand as the van sprang forward, then a belly flop as it dropped back down with a hard bounce. Through my shock and the gap of the now-bent rear double doors, I saw the smoking front of what had been Paul's Camry. At the very top of the accordioned hood, through the shattered windshield, I could see Paul. He was covered with blood, but blinking at least, as he pawed at the deployed airbag in his lap.

I turned toward Ordonez when I heard a loud, metal clack . He showed me my own Glock as he opened the door.

"Don't worry, Lauren," he said. "Our departure is still right on schedule. Be back in a jiff, honey."

As he stepped out of the van, one thought pounded through me like a sledgehammer.

He's going to kill Paul! After all this, Paul is going to die!

I SCREAMED THEN. One of those wordless, guttural roars that singed my own ears as I scrambled up with my hands still cuffed behind my back.

Headfirst, reckless, without thinking, I propelled myself toward the open driver's side door. I missed the open door by a mile, but I did manage to bang my head a nice lick off the steering wheel before I landed upside down in the driver's footwell. Unbelievable.

The idling engine raced as I thrashed against the gas pedal somewhere behind me. I kicked my legs, trying to get some leverage to push myself outside. My foot was stuck between the steering wheel and the gear shift.

I kept kicking, trying to free myself.

Uh-oh.

The gear slid free with my foot, and suddenly the van was rolling. The van was picking up speed!

Based solely on the sudden sound of car horns and the elongated blast from a semi, I guessed that I was rolling into traffic. I'd managed to sit sideways in the footwell by the time Ordonez arrived in the open doorway at a run and jumped in.

"Where do you think you're going, you crazy bitch?" he yelled. He slapped me across the face before he lifted me up and threw me into the passenger seat, then steered the van back onto the shoulder.

He shut the engine, pulled the emergency brake, and put the keys in his pocket before he stepped outside again.

Then Ordonez raised a finger at me and smiled wickedly.

"Okay, let's try this again," he said. "You stay ri -"

I never got to hear him finish his sentence. Or his word, for that matter.

The truck that removed him and the van door was a car carrier. Loaded to full capacity with Chevy Tahoes and creaking like a trailer park in a tornado. It must have been doing a good seventy-five or eighty.

One second Mark Ordonez was standing there, and the next he was simply gone. Erased, like in a magic trick.

The best one I'd ever seen.

I SAT THERE, blinking at the van's windshield. The car carrier didn't stop. Didn't even hit its brakes. It was as if the driver hadn't even noticed. A hundred feet or so up the highway, I caught the movement of something sailing end-over-end into the thick roadside brush. Van door or drug dealer, I wasn't sure.

Maybe God had heard my prayers after all. Or heard somebody's prayer for me.

Paul was lying on the ground behind his totaled car. I saw his body as I managed to exit the van. My heart was back in my throat again.

"Paul, I'm here," I said as I ran and knelt down next to him. I prayed he was okay. CPR was going to be a stretch with my hands cuffed behind my back.

"Lauren," he said. His teeth started chattering. "I saw the taillights leaving, and I -"

"Don't talk," I said.

The blood seemed to be coming mostly from the back of Paul's head, where the drug creep had hit him, probably several times. My breath caught as the words subdural hematoma flashed from my mental Homicide detective Rolodex. I usually saw it on coroner's reports under cause of death. It seemed like a miracle that Paul was conscious, that either one of us was alive, really.

"Stay still," I whispered in his ear. "Don't move."

Cars whipped past us on the highway as I sat down in the broken glass beside my husband. Blue and red lights started to bubble in the distance. Paul's blood was warm on my legs.

"You saved me, Paul," I whispered as two state troopers' cars zipped out of the traffic and screeched to a stop in front of us.

Again, I thought, but didn't say. You saved me again.

"MILK AND SUGAR OKAY?" Trooper Harrington said as she came toward me across the UConn Health Center ER waiting room.

Ever since she and the other statie, Trooper Walker, had seen my badge, they had gone above and beyond. Instead of waiting for an ambulance, they laid Paul down in the back of Harrington's cruiser and only asked questions as we headed for the nearest hospital at about 110. Trooper Harrington even loaned me a pair of sneakers from her workout bag in the trunk to put on over my bare and cut-up feet.

"How's your baby and your husband?" she wanted to know.

"The ultrasound showed everything was fine," I said. "But Paul has a concussion and needed stitches. They want to keep him overnight for observation. The doctor thinks he's going to be okay, thank God. Thanks to you and your partner."

"Can't say the same about that Ordonez fella," the female trooper said with a shake of her head. "I radioed back to the scene. They found him in the weeds a couple of hundred feet up the road. It was a car carrier that hit him. They said he looks like one of those pennies after you leave it on a railroad track. That's the downside of looking for trouble, isn't it? Sometimes you manage to find a little more than you bargained for.