Deadly Dozen: 12 Mysteries/Thrillers (271 page)

Nelson leaned forward in the driver’s seat and peered into the mirror, his attention so taken with the lunatic approaching that he nearly drove off the road. The damned fool was going to kill somebody and Nelson didn’t want it to be him. He eased off the gas and flicked on his right turn signal, letting the nitwit behind him know that he was getting as far out of the way as was possible without actually leaving the road.

He could see quite clearly now that it was a Ford F-150 that was endangering his life. The pickup was maybe ten or twelve years old, with dents and dings all over the front bumper and grille and a right quarter panel that was a markedly different color than the rest of the truck. It was one ugly piece of shit.

Nelson gasped as the rattletrap truck picked up speed, its body shaking and shimmying, barely under control. An oily blue cloud belched out behind the rustbucket, trailing the truck like smoke behind a skywriting airplane.

The vehicle veered sharply left, almost as if the driver had just now seen Nelson’s car, which was of course impossible. The truck was now
right behind
the Sebring, and Stevie Wonder would have to be driving to not see the Chrysler convertible dead ahead. Nelson breathed a shaky sigh of relief as the truck swerved into the thankfully empty oncoming traffic lane to pass him. He began increasing his own speed in anticipation of the truck roaring by.

As the truck blew noisily past, Nelson risked a glance into the cab and was surprised to see a blond-haired, surfer-looking dude of maybe twenty-five years old looking intently at him from the passenger seat. The kid had no reason to be angry with Nelson, but he seemed to be glaring at him.

Nelson caught a glimpse of the driver and felt a strange, disorienting stab of recognition.
Who the hell is that guy and how do I know him?
he thought.

And then all at once it hit him, like a piano falling on a cartoon character. The maniac driving the truck on this secluded road in the middle of nowhere was the same man he had met in the park today on his lunch hour.

Confused, Nelson turned his attention back to the winding road, and as he did, the truck suddenly whipped back to the right, slamming into the left front of the Chrysler and sending it careening directly toward a stand of trees just off the shoulder. Nelson registered a loud
bang
as his left front tire blew out and the steering wheel began shimmying violently. The car lifted onto its right two wheels, and the panicked Nelson jerked the wheel left, overcorrecting and nearly sending the vehicle tumbling end over end into the woods.

For one crazy second Nelson thought he might get the badly damaged Chrysler under control and coast to a stop along the side of the road. Then the pickup nudged his left front quarter panel again, just kissing it, touching it so lightly it seemed the vehicles might not even swap paint this time. But the contact was enough to eliminate any illusion of control Nelson may have felt he retained over the car. The Sebring started a long, slow slide to the right and into the thick forest.

He had just enough time to think
They did that on purpose!
before the car rocketed into a tree, the sound of the crash much shorter and more abrupt than Nelson would have expected based on a lifetime of watching action movies with the drawn-out car crash scenes Hollywood was so fond of. A quick explosion of grinding metal and shattering safety glass, a painfully bone-jarring deceleration inside the vehicle, the rag-doll-like feeling of his body being held in place by the safety belt—thank God for the safety belt—and then darkness overtaking everything.

Nelson felt the coppery taste of blood burst into his mouth with frightening force, and then consciousness disappeared.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

One hundred yards from the crash scene, just shy of another hairpin curve, the F-150 idled loudly on the road’s thin, sandy shoulder. Time was critical; there was no telling how long it would take before someone encountered the wreckage. If that happened, Tony and Brian would be forced to eliminate more people, something Tony wanted to avoid if at all possible. It wasn’t that he minded wasting another worthless civilian or two, but he didn’t want or need the added attention from the authorities that killing more people would inevitably bring.

Still, they sat for a little longer, biding their time, carefully watching where Nelson W. Michaels’s car had entered the woods and smashed through a small line of scrub brush and into a stand of trees roughly thirty feet into the forest. Tony wanted to see if the guy would be able to escape his damaged car. If so, he would come stumbling out onto the road any minute now, and they could simply drive back and pick him up. It didn’t seem a very likely scenario given how fast the guy had been going when he impacted the trees, but you never could tell.

Another minute went by, and still no sign of Michaels. Tony shifted the creaky automatic transmission into reverse, and the truck chugged slowly back to the spot where the victim’s car had slid into the woods. A thick black slash on the road from the screeching tires made the location impossible to miss. It had been close to three minutes now since the collision, and still no other vehicles had passed the scene. Michaels really did live in the middle of nowhere; the feeling of isolation was completely at odds with the knowledge of how close they were to Washington, D.C.

The two men looked at each other inside the cab of the F-150, and Tony nodded. Without a word, they stepped down to the ground and picked their way into the woods, heading toward the wrecked Chrysler, walking slowly and carefully but at the same time confident they had nothing to fear. Each man drew his weapon, identical Glock semiautomatic pistols—undoubtedly overkill, pun definitely intended, against an injured and disoriented middle-aged lifelong government bureaucrat—but Tony Andretti was not one to take unnecessary chances, especially since he was now so close to achieving his goal.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Everything felt hazy and fuzzy and a little unreal. Nelson was angry with Joy for waking him up when he was so goddamned tired, especially considering how she did it: lying across the foot of the bed, the full weight of her body covering his legs. He struggled to kick them free, to pull them out from under her, but he hadn’t realized how much weight she must have gained recently because he couldn’t move his lower body at all. He kicked again, hard, and was rewarded for his efforts with lightning bolts firing up each shin all the way to the knee.

The bright, throbbing pain in his legs dragged Nelson fully back to reality from his haze of semi-consciousness. He wasn’t at home in bed at all; he remembered now that he had just been involved in a very serious automobile accident after being forced off the road by his contact from earlier in the day, the man whose name he didn’t even know and furthermore didn’t
want
to know. His legs were pinned in the wreckage between the car’s dashboard and firewall, which had slammed together like pincers from the force of the impact and trapped his shins in their viselike grip.

Nelson knew he was in big trouble. His legs were shattered, and blood was flowing freely down the side of his face. His head pounded with what felt like the world’s worst migraine—concussion, anyone?—and he was having considerable difficulty breathing. He wondered about internal injuries and felt the first real stab of panic.

How far into the woods had the car gone before smashing into the trees? Was the wreckage even visible to anyone who might be driving by on the road? If not, Nelson knew there was a good chance he might die right here before ever being discovered. This road was remote, but it wasn’t so far out in the sticks that no one would come by for hours on end. Nelson felt confident that if his car were visible to motorists driving past, help would come along relatively quickly.

And if it wasn’t, well, he didn’t want to consider that possibility.

The sounds of cracking branches, of people working their way steadily through the heavy underbrush penetrated Nelson’s consciousness, and even in his state of panicked confusion and pain, he knew the best-case scenario had already occurred. Someone had seen the wreck and called for help or perhaps stopped on the side of the road to investigate before calling the authorities.

Nelson wondered how long he had been trapped in his car and realized he had no way of knowing. But it didn’t matter. The main thing—the only thing, really—was that help had arrived and he was going to survive.

“Help me!” he tried to scream, succeeding only in issuing a soft breathless croak. This frightened Nelson more than everything else combined—more than seeing the guy from the park driving the truck that had forced him off the road, more than crashing into the trees in the forest, more even than the utter certainty that both his legs were broken and he was quite possibly suffering from life-threatening injuries.

And the pain was worsening. Rapidly. Nelson tried to take a full breath and could only manage to force a short little bubbling gasp through his windpipe. Where the hell were the people he had heard approaching through the woods? Didn’t they realize they had to hurry? He peered out what was left of the smashed driver’s side window, and his heart leapt as he saw what looked like two fuzzy, indistinct shadows approaching. They seemed to be moving with frustrating slowness.

Finally the shadow people made it to the door and wrenched it open. A loud screech told Nelson that there had been significant damage to that side of the vehicle—he was lucky they were able to get the door open at all. A chunk of shattered safety glass fell to the ground. He tried once again to tell his rescuers to hurry but succeeded only in rasping out something unintelligible, even to him.

“You okay, buddy?” one of the men asked.

It seemed like a stupid question to Nelson, who shook his head. “Need help,” he croaked. The coppery taste of blood in his mouth was getting more pronounced, and he could feel the torrent of blood running down the side of his face like a small stream. And he was freezing.

“No problem. That’s why we’re here,” the guy answered.

Nelson smiled in gratitude and forced himself to focus on the faces of the Good Samaritans, and when he did, he felt his bowels clench instinctively in fear. It was the men from the truck, the men who had intentionally forced him off the road in the first place.

The olive-skinned man from Lady Bird Johnson Memorial Park grinned when he saw the recognition dawning in Nelson’s eyes. He pulled the door open a little wider and reached into the car with both hands.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

They approached the Chrysler cautiously. The car was canted at an angle and wedged up against a tree. Tony and Brian could see that Michaels was alive but he was trapped inside and clearly in bad shape. He was dazed, moving slowly and clumsily, sliding into shock.

Michaels smiled out the window in misplaced gratitude; his eyes were glazed over from pain and it was obvious he did not yet recognize them.

Tony managed to pull open the damaged door. Broken glass littered the car’s interior, and a steady pulse of blood washed down the side of the man’s face. It wasn’t exactly streaming, but it was flowing steadily, and in addition, both of his legs seemed to have been swallowed up by the car. He looked exactly like a helpless bug being devoured by a Venus flytrap.