FaceOff (34 page)

So Reilly basically repeated what he’d told the man earlier. “He’s a security threat.”

To which Garber said, “No shit?”

The pickup was looming larger in their windshield. Garber could just make out the top of his daughter’s head through the back window.

Both the truck and the cruiser were pushing a little harder as the highway continued its slow climb.

“So once we catch up, then what?” Garber asked.

Reilly reached into his pocket for Garber’s cell phone, put it to his ear, then glanced at the contractor. “We’re still connected. I can hear background noise. Hey! Faustus! You there?”

He kept the phone pressed to his ear. Listened.

“What?” Garber asked.

“They’re talking about the canister.”

“What canister?”

Reilly shot him a look. “Shh!”

The FBI agent listened a few more seconds. “Shit,” he muttered, and tossed the phone back to Garber.

He put it to his ear, shouted his daughter’s name, as Reilly nudged the car up past a hundred.

The truck was right in front of them.

And then Reilly drove right into it.

Which was when Garber asked him if he was out of his mind.

Without a doubt,
Reilly thought.
Without a doubt.

WHEN THE COP CAR RAMMED
them from behind, Kelly screamed as her head was snapped back into the headrest. Before she had a chance to turn around and see what had hit them, they were hit a second time.

The canister fell from her lap, hit the floor in front of her, and rolled around on the floor mat.

Now she twisted around in her seat to see what exactly had happened. The cruiser had dropped back a car length, and there, in the passenger seat, was her dad.

“Dad!” she screamed, even though there was no way he could hear her. But she was sure he saw her mouthing the word.

Kelly waved. Her dad waved back.

“Give me that!” Kristoff shouted, pointing to the canister. “Right now!”

He had an idea how he could get Reilly to back off. He’d threaten Reilly the way the kid had been threatening him. With the canister. He’d dangle it out his window, make like he was going to drop it.

Reilly wouldn’t want that to happen.

“I can’t reach it,” Kelly said, straining to bend over, the shoulder strap restricting her mobility.

“Undo the damn belt!”

“My dad says I’m never supposed to take off my seat belt.”

Kristoff gave her a look that said, “Are you kidding me?” Kelly got the message and hit the button to retract the belt, and slid off the end of the seat to reach down for the cylinder.

And as she did this, she thought.

She thought very, very quickly.

Kelly was not like the other kids. Kelly was only ten, but she’d seen and been through some bad things in her short life. The kinds of things that girls her age shouldn’t have to go through.

The big one, of course, was losing her mother. No little girl should lose her mom. And no little girl should lose her mom the way Kelly lost hers.

But that was just the beginning.

Not long after that, someone took a shot at her house. Blew out her bedroom window when she was in the room.

But it got even worse. Before that very, very bad time in her life was over, a man threatened to end her life. And not just any man, but a man she believed to be a
good
man.

And who got her out of that fix? Well, sure, her dad was there just in time, but it was Kelly herself who took action. It was Kelly who thought of a way to disable that man just long enough for the scales to tip in her favor.

In a split second, too.

Kelly wondered whether a similar opportunity existed now. Something that might give her an edge, buy her enough time for her dad and the policeman to help her out.

That was when her eyes landed on the cup of hot coffee sitting in the center console.

“GREAT PLAN!” GARBER SHOUTED. “RAM
the truck! Is that right out of the FBI playbook?”

Reilly had to admit to a level of frustration. He had no backup, and he had no weapon. (If there was any good news, he knew Faustus had no weapon, either. He’d checked him for one just before the man got the jump on him.) What he needed was a frickin’ helicopter with lasers, but this wasn’t James Bond.

This was real life.

What he needed now was some kind of break. For the truck to have a flat tire. For it to run out of gas, but based on what Garber’d told him, that was unlikely. A goddamn moose trying to run across the highway right about now would be a blessing.

At least the cruiser was topped up. He needed to get Garber to make some calls, try to get a roadblock established farther up the interstate, or maybe—

What the hell?

The pickup was swerving all over the road.

KELLY SAID, “CATCH.”

She was perched on the front of her seat, leaning down into the footwell. She had her right hand on the canister and tossed it underhand and to the left, aiming it right toward Kristoff’s face.

“Jesus!” he shouted.

He took his left hand off the wheel to catch the cylinder before it flew out his window, batted it down into his lap. Then it started to roll toward his knees. He wanted to catch it before it dropped by his legs, where it would be rolling around his feet, interfering with his operation of the pedals.

It was during this moment of distraction that Kelly pried the plastic lid off the coffee cup and wrapped her hand around it.

Her dad was right. It would have stayed hot all the way to their destination. How did anyone drink this stuff?

As she whipped it out of the cup holder, some coffee slipped over the edge and onto her fingers, scalding them. It hurt like hell, as her father would be inclined to say, but Kelly didn’t have time to whine about it, because she only had about a tenth of a second to throw this too-hot-to-drink coffee in this bad man’s face.

Which is exactly what she did.

The black liquid arced through the air, splashing across Kristoff’s right cheek and neck and, judging by the way he was throwing his right hand over his eye, that, too.

Kristoff screamed. Not “Jesus!” this time. Just a cry of intense pain and anguish. Primal.

He tried to maintain steering with his left hand, and was still
attempting to see the road with his left eye, but the truck was pitching all over the place, and the canister had hit the floor, rolling side to side in time with Kristoff’s erratic steering.

Kristoff took his right hand off his face long enough to make a wild, retaliatory swing in Kelly’s direction, but she had pushed herself up against the door, out of reach, and was thinking about whether to hop over the seat and hide in the narrow space behind them. But she decided against that, figuring that if the truck came to a stop, or even slowed, she needed to be by the door so she could hop out.

Indeed, the truck was slowing. Kristoff had taken his foot off the gas. And given that the truck was heading up a slight grade, it was going to lose speed even more quickly. He hadn’t hit the brake yet, but he couldn’t keep up his recent pace when he couldn’t see where he was going.

After another couple of futile swings at Kelly, the man put his hand back to his face, but then he realized the wounds hurt too much to touch. His right eye remained closed.

He screamed: “You blinded me! You fried my eye, you little bitch!”

Kelly was probably more scared right now than she’d ever been in her life—even more than when that man threatened her a few years ago—but she also felt pretty good. For half a second, she’d wondered whether she’d get in trouble for making a man lose one of his eyes, but then thought her dad would probably be okay with it.

He could be pretty cool about things.

She glanced back through the window, saw the police car still there. Waved at her dad again as the truck lurched from left to right.

Then she heard the familiar sound of gravel under the tires. She whirled around, saw that they were veering off the pavement
onto the shoulder. Kristoff had his foot on the brake. He hung his head low, moved it languidly back and forth, trying to deal with the pain.

When the truck was nearly stopped, Kelly pulled on the door handle, let the door swing wide, and jumped.

“KELLY!”

Glen Garber screamed when he saw his daughter leap from the passenger’s door of the nearly stopped truck. He bolted from the police cruiser before Reilly had thrown it into park.

Kelly landed in the tall grasses just beyond the shoulder. Her knees buckled, forcing her into a roll, her body tumbling out of view.

Glen ran. “Kelly! Kelly!”

Before he could get to her, her head popped up above the grass. An arm went into the air. “Here!”

Behind him, Garber heard Reilly shout at the top of his lungs: “Run!”

IT WASN’T THAT REILLY DIDN’T
care about Garber and his kid, but he had a more pressing matter to deal with.

Like the man he knew as Faustus, who had thrown open the driver’s door of the pickup and was stumbling out. But not before reaching for something on the floor ahead of the seat. He emerged, standing there a couple of steps in front of the open door, clutching the cylinder. Raising it above his head.