Линвуд Баркли - Find You First

Given that all these various sounds happened within a millisecond of one another, it might not have been any one sound but their combined effect. Rhys heard a minisymphony of chaos behind him, and regardless of how focused he might have been on his current task, which was to shoot Travis Roben in the back of the head, he could not stop himself from whirling around to see what had happened.

It took another millisecond for him to assess what had happened.

The girl — he did not know her name was Sandy, as they’d not been properly introduced — had returned, observed that the two of them were about to kill her boyfriend, grabbed a bat from someplace (he was guessing the van), and crept up behind Kendra before whacking her in the head.

In the time it took for Rhys to spin around, Kendra was hitting the pavement, her face a bloody, pulpy mess. Any movement she was making was due to gravity. After her initial scream, she’d not made a sound, and she’d made no attempt to brace her fall. She went down like a stringless marionette.

Rhys and Sandy locked eyes briefly. That was when he raised his arm and pointed the gun directly at her chest.

While all this was happening, Travis was also reacting.

He’d had his hands in the air, pleading for his life, tears running down his cheeks, wondering how something as minor as trespassing could result in a death sentence. A couple of cops catch you making out on private property, you figure the worst that could happen is you get a ticket. In most cases, they’d give you a stern lecture and order you to get lost.

But the guy had pulled a gun! What the hell was that about? What kind of cops would react that way? Travis hadn’t threatened them. He wasn’t armed.

So when Travis heard the commotion happening behind him, he turned around.

He could not believe what he was seeing.

Sandy standing there with his Louisville Slugger, now smeared with a dark red blotch, in her hands. The woman cop was on the ground, not moving, blood all over the place. The male cop had his back to Travis and was aiming his gun at Sandy.

Travis didn’t think. He just acted.

He wasn’t even six feet from Rhys, but in that short distance he worked up some speed and leapt onto his shoulders, wrapping his arms around his neck and holding on to him as though he were about to go on a piggyback ride.

As Rhys was thrown off balance, the gun in his hand went off. But the bullet went wild, whizzing past Sandy and pinging off the upper shipping container.

Rhys shouted, “Get the fuck off—”

But that was as far as he got because Travis had moved his hands up from Rhys’s neck and was now grabbing him around the eyes and nose. A finger slipped into his mouth and Rhys bit down, hard. Travis cried out in pain, but he held on.

And Rhys released his grip on Travis’s finger when Sandy took the bat to his left knee.

It folded on him like an old, rusted lawn chair. He hit the pavement, Travis still clinging to him. Rhys didn’t release his grip on the gun, at least not until Sandy swung the bat down hard onto the back of his hand.

The gun slipped from his fingers and skittered across the pavement. As he struggled to get Travis off his back, Sandy ran for the gun and scooped it off the ground, holding it as though it were radioactive. She looked about frantically, wondering what to do with it.

She pitched it skyward, hoping to land it atop the shipping containers, but her throw came up short and the gun bounced off the side of the upper container and clattered back to the ground. She stood, torn about whether to go after it or take another swing at Rhys as he lay on the ground.

Sandy chose the latter.

She took a couple of wild swings, the first more or less aimed at his thigh, because if she went for his upper body, she was just as likely to hit Travis. The bat caught him a few inches above the knee that she’d already hit.

Travis scrambled off him, scurrying a couple of yards along the pavement like a crab before he got to his feet.

He pointed to the van and screamed:

“GOGOGOGOGOGO!!!”

Kendra still wasn’t moving, and Rhys was struggling to get up. As Travis and Sandy ran for the van, Rhys tried to get to his knees, but could put no weight on the left one. That bought Travis and Sandy enough time to open the driver and passenger doors and get in. The retractable side doors remained open.

The key had never been removed from the ignition. Travis put his foot on the brake, turned the key, and the engine came to life.

Rhys was on his feet, limping in their direction.

“He’s coming!” Sandy screamed.

Travis, looking ahead through the glass, could see that. By the time he had moved the shifter into Reverse, Rhys had gotten to the open side door and was reaching for the handle to haul himself in.

But Travis hit the gas and the van shot backward, tires squealing. He abandoned the idea of making a three-point turn to get the van pointed forward. He was afraid that would give Rhys an opportunity to jump in.

So he shifted around in his seat to see where he was going, one hand over the back of the seat and one on the wheel, and he backed up all the way along the side of the disused warehouse, the transmission whining like a banshee as the car went far faster in reverse than it was ever designed to do, and when Travis got to the gate he just kept on going, knowing it was not locked and would swing out of his way.

The gate, however, was installed to swing in the other direction, so while it did give way when the van hit it, it snapped violently off its hinges and bounced off the side of the vehicle with a huge metallic crashing sound.

Travis didn’t slow down. Since he’d kept his eyes on where he was going, he didn’t know whether they were still being pursued.

“Is he coming?” he shouted.

“No!” Sandy said.

He kept reversing the van until he had reached the street, cranking the wheel to line up with the road. The front end of the van swerved hard before he brought it to a stop and threw it into Drive. Fast-food debris and the pink blanket slid off the back seat and went flying out the door.

Travis floored it.

“What the fuck was that?” he shouted.

Sandy, stammering, her voice shaky and high-pitched, said, “I decided — I came back — I saw them — he had a gun — he was pointing it — I grabbed the bat — oh my God — fuck I think I killed her — oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck did I kill a cop?”

“Why would they want to kill me?” he asked, his hands gripping so tightly on the wheel they felt welded to it. “The police don’t kill people for trespassing!”

“He was pointing the gun right at your head!” she said. “He was going to do it! I swear he was!”

He glanced over at her quickly. “You fucking saved my life!”

Sandy, too stunned to acknowledge the comment, had her hand braced against the dash, as though expecting them to crash at any moment.

“It was them,” she said suddenly.

“Them?”

“The two people in the bowling alley. The ones I thought were watching us.”

“Are you sure?” Travis asked.

“You didn’t get as good a look at them as I did. It was them .” She shot him a wary look. “Why would they have been watching you?”

“Me?” he said. “No reason. Maybe they were watching you .”

Travis swerved to avoid a dog that had darted out into the street. He cranked the wheel hard left, then right, the van feeling like it was going to roll over for a second.

“You gotta slow down,” she said.

Before easing his foot off the gas. Travis made a few random turns, figuring that if they were being followed, this would shake any possible tail.

Once he’d slowed the van to something close to the speed limit, he said, “What do we do now?”