Max Collins - Fate of the Union

“... Does it get easier?”

“With luck, you’ll never find out.”

Even though I-95 was more direct than, say, veering over to I-81 and down the west side of the state, this route was usually slowed by traffic and what seemed like endless construction.

But tonight they’d gotten lucky and Rogers had made good time, only having to drive on the shoulder twice, a major victory, even with flashers going.

Off the interstate now, she wound around to Virginia 20, hurtling south toward Charlottesville. She hadn’t slowed much for the two-lane, but he was fine with that — no sign of ice, just snow lining the shoulders — and he trusted Rogers implicitly. She was a hell of a driver.

Just before Charlottesville, two vehicles in the oncoming lane, less than a car-length apart, caught Reeder’s attention, the rear one getting ready to pass perhaps. He figured Rogers might slow a little, but she didn’t. She blew by them and he had just enough time to make out two black SUVs with tinted windows. Not a passing situation, but a two-car caravan.

“I’d say those boys were going just under the speed limit,” he told her.

“Yeah? So?”

“Kind of a rarity here in Dukes of Hazzard country.”

“Dukes of what?”

In the side mirror, the taillights of the two SUVs were barely blips in the night, then gone.

Reeder said, “Counterfeiter I busted early on told me, ‘Never commit a misdemeanor while committing a felony.’ We’d just tracked him down on unpaid parking tickets.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Maybe nothing.”

Rogers made the last turn onto the two-lane to the industrial park.

“Should be coming up on the left,” she said, slowing to something less than the speed of light.

They passed a service road lined with trees. A car was parked along there, lights out, pluming smoke, condensation from the exhaust on the cold night. Reeder looked back but the row of trees blocked his view.

She turned into the industrial park. A cluster of buildings were on the right side of the road, but only two on the left, their silhouettes in the moonlight tallying with Bryson’s photo of one such building. She swung into a drive that took them into a snow-covered parking lot between the pair of concrete bunker-like structures. These buildings didn’t seem to get a lot of traffic, but tire tracks said someone had been here, and recently.

She shut off the engine.

He asked her, “Did you see a car parked back there?”

“Where?”

“On that service road — just sitting there in the dark. Engine running?”

“What service road?”

“Never mind.”

“Joe, we can go back and check it out if you like.”

He considered that. “No, just me being jumpy, I guess. I get that way after ducking bullets.”

She half smirked. “Then maybe you should stop jumping into the line of fire.”

“I’ll try to remember that.”

She opened her door and crisp cold air came in. But she glanced at him and asked, “You’re sure you don’t want to go back for another look?”

“What,” he said, opening his own door, “and interrupt some kids playing hide the salami? Let’s do what we came for.”

He joined her on her side of the Fusion, a building on their left and right. There was a compact battering ram in the trunk but first he and Rogers would check the buildings out. By current rulings, they had enough probable cause and needed no warrants.

“Which one first?” she asked, patting gloved hands, her breath visible. “Joe?”

That parked motor-running car he’d seen — what kind was it? He’d gotten just a glance, not even a glimpse of plates... but was it a Nissan? An Altima, like the rental he’d seen at Bryson’s office? He grabbed Rogers by the arm and threw her to the snowy cement and fell on top of her.

“What the hell?” she said, from under him. He would have explaining to do, if he was wrong; one minute from now, he would seem some aging letch or maybe paranoid over-the-hill former man of action, on edge from what had gone down at Constitution Hall.

“Joe!” she said into his coat. “Goddamnit, what—”

The two buildings exploded.

Two buildings but one big blast, the first concussion wave from the right hitting the car and shaking it like a brat before the wave from their left struck them, flopping them back against the driver’s side door; they slid down as blasting heat came from both sides at once, Reeder doing his best to protect Rogers as fiery debris rained down on them.

The main blasts were over in seconds that felt much longer, and when he finally uncovered his head, orange and blue flames were dancing madly in both buildings, mirror-image conflagrations, flickering limbs reaching skyward through blown-off roofs.

He rolled off her and she sat up, leaning on her gloved palms.

“You okay?” he asked. With his ears ringing like that, he must have been shouting, but she’d be experiencing the same temporary hearing loss.

“Yeah,” she said, just as loud, getting to her feet, brushing off snow and debris.

The all-encompassing sound of buildings on fire always struck Reeder as oddly similar to a rainstorm, even generating its own thunder.

Wild-eyed, she asked him, “How did you know that was going to happen? You’re not a damn building reader.”

He brushed himself off. “I didn’t know, and I could have been wrong, and God knows how I would have explained jumping you like that. But it came to me that car I saw could’ve been the Nissan at Bryson’s office that night.”

“The missing rental?”

He nodded. “The BOLO we sent out didn’t turn it up, so he must have switched plates.”

“You think he made us and waited till we were close before hitting a detonator?”

“I do. Or else the explosives had been set shortly before we got here, and we were just in the wrong place at the right time.”

But halfway through that she stopped looking at him, in fact staring past him, and he was about to turn and see for himself when she took off at a dead run for the building on their left.

They’d both survived twin explosions, and now she was running into one of the burning buildings? Was she crazy? Was he crazy, too?

Because he found himself instinctively dashing right behind her...

Covering his mouth and nose with his bent, Burberry-clad arm, he followed her through what was left of glass doors that were only a scorched framework with not even the shattered remains of their panes in sight. Smoke rushed to greet them as they stepped into a furnace at least equal to the explosion’s heat waves.

While what remained of the post-blast concrete structure itself wouldn’t burn, plenty of flammable material had been in here, judging from the flames licking all around them. Despite thickening smoke, he could make out the twisted remains of a sort of lab-cum-machine shop. That meant chemicals in here might any moment ignite into secondary explosions; he shoved that thought away as he went to Rogers’s side, just a few feet into the hellish sauna that had been a building.

Covering her face with her coat sleeve, Rogers knelt over a body on the floor. If it hadn’t been near the exploded doorway, neither of them would have noticed it from the parking lot. The blackened thing that had been a person lay on its stomach, and the only way Reeder could tell this had been a male was the body’s size and its work boots.

Rogers gripped a hand under one arm of the charred victim, and Reeder grabbed the other one by the forearm. The blackened limb came off at the elbow. That sent both Reeder and Rogers off balance, almost falling, but then Reeder discarded the limb and got a better hold on the body’s shoulder and dragged the remains well out into the middle of the parking lot, next to the Fusion, where an oasis of air existed between where plumes of black and gray smoke surged into the sky and met each other, creating a terrible roiling storm cloud that held no moisture at all. Both Rogers and Reeder were coughing now, and the corpse fell from their grasp, onto its side.