Джеймс Паттерсон: The Red Book

“No PC,” Carla says. A summary and a warning. We stop the car. Without probable cause, we have a problem in court.

But we don’t need probable cause to follow it for a while. It’s a free country.

I figure he’s headed for the main road from which we just came, Rawlings. But he isn’t. The van turns left down an unmarked path. Another dirt road.

No crime in that. And he used his blinker.

Still. I glance at Carla, the expression on her face probably the same as mine, gearing up.

“Baird Salt,” she says, noting the logo visible on the side panel of the van when it turned.

I follow the van onto the turnoff. It hardly qualifies as a road—it’s more like a clearing through the foliage and heavy tree cover, enough for a single lane of traffic, barely. The bumps are enough to challenge our Taurus’s suspension and the fillings in my teeth. The canopy of trees keeps it dark, but the piercing beams of the lowering sun manage to penetrate here and there.

The van keeps moving at a normal clip down a path that wasn’t meant to be noticed, much less traveled. I feel like I’m driving through a jungle, overhanging branches tapping our windshield and scraping the sides of the Taurus.

We still haven’t taken any official police action, but there’s no longer any doubt that we’re following. If this guy’s innocent, he has to be wondering about our intentions.

But he’s not, I think to myself, my pulse banging. This is our guy.

And he knows we know.

“Sosh, where are you?” Carla says into her radio. Another SOS team, Detectives Lanny Soscia and Mat Rodriguez, are in this area doing the same thing we are.

“West of Archer near…Hogan?”

“We’re just south of Rawlings, traveling westbound on an unmarked dirt road. We’re following a white van, driver fits the description. We need assistance.”

“Where on Rawlings?” Sosh calls back.

Carla cusses at the GPS, which is spinning right now, unable to connect. “We’re the first turnoff west of the Equestrian Lakes subdivision, south side. West of…Addendale, I think.”

“On our way.”

I keep a distance of two or three car lengths as the van bounces along.

The van begins to slow. I nudge Carla, who nods.

Up ahead, a clearing, sunlight blanketing the ground. No tree coverage.

A road of some kind? An intersection?

“What’s that up ahead?” I ask Carla, not wanting to take my eyes off the road.

“Can’t get GPS to pull up yet,” she answers. Then, into her radio, she calls to the state police chopper: “Air 6, this is CPD 5210. Do you copy?”

“Air 6 to 5210, what’s your twenty?”

These state troopers and their formality. Carla repeats our location, best she can.

“We’ll try to find you,” the pilot calls back. “GPS is a nightmare out here.”

No shit. The van slows still further, so I do, too.

Then the van reaches the clearing, suddenly cast in the glow of sunlight, while we remain in the darkness of the trees.

The van rolls carefully up onto a small incline, a tiny hill, then comes to a complete stop.

“He stopped,” I tell Carla, who’s busy banging the GPS on the laptop. “What the hell’s he doing? What’s he on? Are those…” I lean forward, squinting.

“Wait—GPS is up,” says Carla.

We say it at the same time: “They’re railroad tracks.”

Not a public right-of-way. No crossbucks or gates or flashing lights. “One of those old crossings, out of use for decades,” says Carla.

“So what the hell is he doing?” I mumble.

“Parking on the tracks.”

Then we both hear it, from our right, the north. The rumbling sound of a train coming.

“Shit.”

“He’s done and he knows it,” Carla says. “Suicide by train.”

With a fifteen-year-old girl inside.

We burst out of the car.

Chapter 3

WE RUSH toward the van, feeling the vibration of the oncoming train underfoot, fanning out on each side as the train horn bellows its warning. The screeching sound of metal on metal as the train tries in vain to halt ahead of the van stopped in its path.

“Chicago police! Chicago police!” I shout as I approach the driver’s door, the side panel emblazoned with the salt-company logo.

In the rectangular side mirror, I catch sight of the man’s face, his eyes intense. The van’s tires screech as they spin into motion, blasting the vehicle off the platform and over the tracks. Just as the train barrels past us, the deep blare of its horn, sparks flying, a high-pitched screech from the brakes.

I’m blown backwards and almost lose my balance. Carla is calling into her radio to the state police chopper, to all units, as we lose sight of the van on the other side of the tracks, blocked now by the freight train.

The train shudders to a halt. “No!” I yell. “Keep moving! Clear this crossing!”

That will take forever. The conductor has protocols. And he’s well down the track. He probably can’t hear me. He’s probably cursing the idiot van driver who just played chicken with him.

Carla drops to the ground, looks under the train. “Can’t see anything underneath!”

I look around me, a tree branch raking across my face.

A tree.

I grab onto the thickest low branch I can find and do something I haven’t done in twenty-five years. I pull myself up onto the branch and look out. No view. Still blocked by the idled train. I find another branch, pull myself up, and straddle it. There.

I spot the van just as it’s turning left through what looks like a cornfield. “He turned south a few hundred yards up!”

I lose sight of him. But at least I know the direction he’s heading. I climb back down, jumping from the branch and scraping my hands, falling face-first into some foliage that may or may not be poison ivy. “C’mon,” I shout, heading back to the car.

We get into the car. I drop it into gear. I turn the same direction the van is headed, south, and drive along the sloped gravel right-of-way next to the train tracks on my right.

“Air 6, you got this asshole?” Carla shouts. “We’re near Rawlings and the train tracks! A white van. It’s heading southbound now, probably a half mile southwest of the tracks and Rawlings.”

“CPD 5210, we are responding.”

We race along the sloped gravel, our tires slipping and sliding.

“Twelve o’clock,” Carla says to me.

I see it: a large structure on the right-of-way, a big black junction box mounted in the gravel. I can’t plow over it. To the left is unknown terrain, and we could be screwed. Only choice is to go right, nearly hitting the train tracks. Carla braces herself.

“Hope all those years of video games paid off,” I say.

I speed up and swerve to the right, the angle dangerously sharp, Carla nearly falling into me from the passenger seat. We scrape the embankment of the railroad tracks, bouncing downward against the junction box, but the momentum carries us past, the Taurus nearly nosediving into the very terrain I wanted to avoid to the left. We kick up rocks and dust, but the Taurus rights itself, and we barrel forward again.

“Air 6 to 5210, we have a twenty on the white van.”

So do we. Up ahead, maybe a hundred yards. Flying across the train tracks again, back to the side that we’re on, the Baird Salt logo unmistakable.

He’s driving in a square. He’s heading back where he came from.

“CPD 5210 is in pursuit,” Carla says.

“CPD 5210, we can’t track him in those woods.”

Which is why he came back. He knows these woods. He knows where to hide.

We’re on him, at least. But he has a head start. I can only go so fast without losing control of the Taurus on this uneven gravel.