Law of Attraction (17 page)

As Green threw the kitchen door open, Anna could see D’marco running through Rose’s backyard, flying over the small lawn like an Olympic sprinter. By the time Green’s feet flew down the porch steps and hit the grass, D’marco was jumping over the fence into the alleyway. Anna and Jack followed Green through the porch.

Green got to the fence as D’marco threw himself into the driver’s seat of the Corolla. D’marco jammed the screwdriver in the ignition, frantically trying to hit the sweet spot. The car roared to life. Green stopped a few feet in front of the car. He braced his feet wide apart, pulled out his Glock, and pointed the gun at the windshield.

“Stop!” Green yelled. “Police! Get outta the car!”

D’marco threw the car into gear, ducked his head down, and floored it. The Corolla hurtled toward the officer.

Green held his ground and squeezed the trigger, firing several shots at the approaching car. Four percussive blasts echoed through the alleyway.
Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop!

Anna and Jack, who had reached the lawn, dove to the ground. The shots cracked D’marco’s windshield in two places and blew out a tire, and the car started swerving. But no bullets hit D’marco. He kept the gas pedal pressed to the floorboard. Green leaped out of the way of the speeding car at the last minute.

The car fishtailed as it passed Green. Anna raised her head from the ground and watched in horror as the car’s trunk swung toward the officer. A moment before the trunk slammed him into Rose’s fence, Green jumped back, avoiding the swerving vehicle. The screech of metal scraping metal pierced the air and the fence buckled into a crooked V. D’marco hit the gas even harder and managed to keep the car going,
although now it was swerving wildly because of the blown-out tire. He accelerated the old car as fast as it would go down the alleyway.

“Fuck!” Green cursed under his breath. He clambered back over the lopsided fence into Rose’s yard and sprinted back to the house. Jack and Anna ran after him. “Call 911!” Green shouted to Rose as the three of them ran up her porch and through her house. The officer slipped on the lemonade and ice cubes spilled on the wood floor of the living room, but Jack put out a hand to hold him up, and Green stayed upright.

The three of them ran out of the front door to Green’s squad car, as Rose picked up her kitchen phone and punched in 911. The children stood leaning against each other in the kitchen looking back and forth between the front and back doors with astonished, wide-eyed stares.

Green chirped the police cruiser open. His hand closed over the driver’s door handle a moment before Jack’s was on the passenger’s and Anna’s was on the back door. “Stay here!” Jack shouted to Anna, but she was already throwing herself into the backseat as Green started the car.

Green screeched away from the curb, leaving black skid marks on the pavement and the smell of burning rubber in the air. Anna was thrown across the seat; she had to use the metal cage separating the backseat from the front to pull herself upright.

The cruiser’s sirens blared, as Green yelled for backup on his radio. He careened the car around the corner onto Texas Avenue, toward the mouth of the alleyway that D’marco had been driving out of. As they rounded the corner, Anna could see D’marco’s car ahead on Texas Avenue, speeding down the street, swerving wildly between the four lanes as he struggled to keep the damaged vehicle under control.

Green raced after him. D’marco’s car veered back and forth on the street, scraping a car parked on the right side of the road and then careening toward an SUV driving toward them on the left. The Corolla swerved in time to avoid the oncoming truck, but then bashed another car parked on the right. It looked like he was playing bumper cars.

Anna caught a glimpse of Green’s face as he steered the police cruiser around the debris left in the Corolla’s wake. He wore a look of extreme concentration—and complete joy. The sirens blasting, the car barreling down the street, the radio squawking as other officers barked that they were on their way—he was loving it.

The Corolla turned suddenly off the main artery onto a smaller street. Green spun the steering wheel around to follow him. D’marco blew through several stop signs, then turned again. He was trying to lose them in the labyrinth of small streets, but he wasn’t able to build up enough speed in his battered car.

As another turn sent her skittering across the backseat, Anna went to buckle her seat belt, but remembered there weren’t any back here. She braced her hands against the cage in front of her and briefly wondered what the hell was she doing here. She was a lawyer, not a cop; she should be back at Rose’s house, calling 911 and waiting to make a police report. That thought evaporated when D’marco’s car seemed to pull farther away from them.

“Faster!” Anna yelled to Green. “Go! Go!”

They were coming up on an open yard near a public housing complex; a bunch of kids in white T-shirts were hanging out on either side of the street. When they heard the sirens, the younger kids yelled, “Po-po! Po-po!” A few boys threw ziplock baggies to the ground or walked quickly in the other direction. But when they saw that the police cruiser was chasing another car—that it wouldn’t stop for them—they gathered at the curb to watch.

As they drove past the kids, Green slowed down, and Anna saw that the boys were screaming, waving their arms, cheering and booing. They seemed to be rooting for D’marco, she thought. That was confirmed when an aluminum can struck the cruiser’s windshield.

“Fuck you, 5-0!” a kid yelled.

Then a bunch of the kids were throwing stuff at the police car, rocks and glass bottles and trash. It was a small thunderstorm of garbage and curses. Anna ducked as a rock hit the side window near her face, spreading a web-shaped crack along the glass. Green kept driving, and then the kids were behind them.

They tailed D’marco through a few more turns, then they were heading back in the direction they’d just come from, and the side street was about to end at the intersection of Texas Avenue. When D’marco reached the big street, he tried to turn left. Green yanked the wheel to follow him. But D’marco’s maimed car couldn’t handle the sharp turn, and it spun out in the middle of the intersection.

Green hit the brakes, but couldn’t stop in time. The cruiser smashed squarely into the passenger side of the Corolla, T-boning it, plowing
the car to the side of the road, where the concrete curb stopped it. There was a screeching crash of metal as the two vehicles crumpled into each other.

Anna was thrown forward by the impact. Her chest and face hit the metal cage despite her braced arms, and she landed halfway between the seat and the floor. Then there was stillness.

Anna sprawled, dazed and disoriented. The only sound was the hissing coming from the police cruiser’s engine. With effort, she pulled herself up. Her breath was knocked out, but she wasn’t hurt. She looked to the men in the front seat. No one had been wearing a seat belt. Green was lifting his head slowly from the steering wheel, and Jack had a bleeding cut over his left eye.

“Are you okay?” Jack slowly turned back to ask her.

“Yeah.” She took a deep breath. “You?”

Jack nodded, then closed his eyes.

Green shook his head to clear it, and looked at the Corolla ahead of them. As the officer tried to focus on the car, D’marco bailed out of it and started limping down Texas Avenue. Green cursed, climbed out of the police car, staggered for a moment, and then hobbled after the suspect.

D’marco looked back and broke into a limping run. Jack groaned and climbed out of the car, heading to follow Green. Anna tried to get out of the backseat, but she was locked in. She banged on the window and Jack turned back and opened her door.

Anna climbed out of the police cruiser and looked down Texas Avenue. D’marco and Green had picked up speed and were jogging down the street. “Come on!” she yelled to Jack, and ran after Green. After a moment of surprise, Jack ran after her. D’marco Davis and Officer Green were already two blocks ahead of them.

The street had small homes on the left and a wooded park on the right. As D’marco ran left onto Ridge Road, Jack grabbed Anna’s arm and steered her up the driveway of a house on their left. At the end of the drive was a dirt track through the trees behind the houses. Anna never would have noticed it herself.

The track opened into the backyards of some single-family homes on Ridge Road. Anna and Jack ran to the side of a house, where Jack stopped and put out his arm for Anna to stop, too.

Jack’s eyes darted around the side of the house until they landed on a couple of metal trash cans. He pulled the lid off one of the cans
and gestured for Anna to press herself up against the brick wall so that D’marco, running up from the right, wouldn’t see her. Then Jack crept up the driveway of the house, using the cars parked in the driveway to shield him from D’marco’s view. Jack crouched behind a car that was parked by the sidewalk.

Anna strained to hear anything, but only heard the shouts of some kids playing down the block. She wondered if D’marco had veered off in another direction. Then she heard the faint sound of irregular running footsteps crunching up the sidewalk from the right. The footsteps grew louder and more distinct until she could hear D’marco’s heavy breathing. Jack lifted the garbage lid to his shoulder, sprung onto the sidewalk, and braced himself.

D’marco crashed into the makeshift shield with a clanging thud. Both men went flying to the ground in opposite directions.

Green was just a few yards behind D’marco. He ran up to the sprawled man, used his foot to flip D’marco onto his stomach, and dug his knee into his back. The officer yanked D’marco’s arms behind him and slapped the handcuffs on.

“You have the right to remain silent, asshole,” he panted with a smile. The officer was obviously enjoying this.

D’marco groaned. He was exhausted, injured, and now in police custody.

Anna ran over to where Jack was gathering himself up off the sidewalk. She held out her hands to help him up, but he waved her off. He stood up—slowly, but on his own.

“Are you hurt?” she asked.

“Yeah. But it was worth it, right?” He grinned, rubbing his shoulder. “Usually, an exciting day at the office is when the printer jams.”

She laughed. “How did you notice that dirt track?”

“I used to live around here. I must’ve taken that shortcut a hundred times when I was a kid.”

For a moment they just stood there grinning at each other, recognizing the strange position they were in: two lawyers standing on a hot summer sidewalk in the middle of a workday, a couple of
crumpled cars in their wake and a wanted felon getting handcuffed at their feet.

Green continued to recite D’marco’s
Miranda
warning. “You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney—”

“I know my rights,” D’marco interrupted, spitting blood onto the sidewalk. “I want my lawyer. Nick Wagner.”

“Yeah,” Anna replied, meeting D’marco’s narrowed eyes. “We know him.”

17

A
nna had always prided herself on her ability to quickly assess a problem and decide on a solution. Today, however, she stood in front of her closet for ten minutes, unable to decide what to wear. She was torn between wanting to look fabulous and wanting to look like she’d put no particular effort into how she looked. She eyed a periwinkle silk jacket with a Chinese collar. It was a rare bit of color and funk in her otherwise drab prosecutor’s wardrobe, and people always complimented her eyes when she wore it. She touched the sleeve, tempted, then shook her head. She should just wear her usual courthouse uniform—albeit her best version of it. She pulled out her favorite black pantsuit, the one whose sleek cut made her look especially long and lean, and a pink blouse. She would indulge in high-heeled shoes.

Today was D’marco Davis’s detention hearing, which meant Anna would be seeing Nick for the first time since their breakup, ten days earlier. They would be sitting on opposite sides of a courtroom, adversaries in the most high-stakes case of her career. There was nothing wrong with wanting to look her best, she told herself, as she blow-dried her hair for the first time in weeks. She and Nick were done, obviously. But she didn’t want him to think she’d fallen apart since their breakup, she reasoned, as she dug through a drawer to find her long-neglected mascara.

When she was done primping, she headed out of her apartment into the already steamy August morning, joining a stream of young professionals in drab suits flowing toward the Metro. She wondered how many of these clean-cut twentysomethings were lawyers. Probably 80 percent. How many had the biggest case of their career against a lawyer whom, a few weeks ago, they were sleeping with? Surely she was the only one.

She wondered how she should behave when she saw Nick. What would “Ask Amy” say? Anna decided she would be professional but cool. Impeccably polite but detached. As she walked down the steep
escalator into the cavelike recess of the Dupont Circle Metro station, she practiced greeting him. “Good morning, Counselor,” she whispered. Maybe that was too formal? She didn’t want to tip off Jack by being overly stiff. “Hello, Nick,” she tried. Her ex’s name came off her lips a bit too breathlessly; it sounded like she was greeting him as he brought a tray of French toast to her bed. She sighed. This was impossible.

She’d just keep her mouth shut and make herself as unobtrusive as possible.

She kept worrying throughout the subway ride to work, skimming the same article in the
Express
three times without comprehension. What if Nick outed their relationship? She didn’t think he would—he’d be just as embarrassed—but what if he said something inappropriate? What if Jack suspected something? Her secret was uncomfortable, like a prickly tag that kept scratching her neck. She wished she’d just told Jack in the first place. Now, too much time had passed.

When she got to her building, she headed to Jack’s office. He wasn’t at his desk, but his secretary, Vanetta, pointed down the hall to a little conference room, a space Jack was starting to call their “war room.” Anna thanked her.