Chapter 14 Dues, Son. Dues. #4
His new friend grimaced and put his sunglasses on. “Whelp, Tim’ll probably turn up, but it sounds like I’m needed elsewhere. Be safe out there today—it’s a bit of a mess!”
“Will do,” George said, waving cheerfully as the man pulled a wide U-turn on the hardpan and then headed onto the highway and turned west himself.
He drove away, and George walked casually back to the front of the cashier stand and sagged against the spiderwebbed Plexiglas.
“Why’d he leave?” Ernie asked, and George remembered the squawking of the man’s radio.
“’Cause shit’s going down,” he said, almost too drained to be worried.
“Well, let’s finish up with the cruiser here,” Ernie said, “then I’ll drive it into the desert and you and Dimitri can go back to fixing flats.”
It was really all they could do. But that didn’t mean George didn’t wonder fiercely what was going on with “that fuckin’ Forester” and all the ruckus on the good deputy’s CB until he got Jai’s call.
“WHAT THE…?” Brady muttered, not sure if the helmet could pick up what he was saying or not. It didn’t matter. The sight of Arlen Cuthbert swinging his avocado-pit-on-toothpicks body out of his cruiser was too bizarre to worry about talking to oneself.
“What the actual fuck?” Burton breathed.
It was straight out of a Clint Eastwood movie.
“You can call your friend off!” Arlen shouted, his voice almost too raspy to be heard, although all the units facing them had killed their sirens, probably at his request.
“The fuck are you talking about?” Burton demanded, and Arlen took a startled step back.
He didn’t look… well, Brady thought critically. His face—normally an alcoholic red—seemed to be pasty under the coarse skin, and he had, if anything, less lank hair than he had two weeks ago.
“The one raising all the hell,” Arlen replied, gesturing behind them to where Ace—with another dozen vehicles on his tail—was bearing down at speed. “We gotcha dead to rights. You ain’t gonna save that fugitive.”
“Sir,” Burton said politely, “I actually belong to a law enforcement organization. That and the fact that you just said ‘save’ tells me you’re not tracking a man down to bring him to justice, you’re tracking him down to kill him, and my superiors will be very interested in that.”
Arlen Cuthbert gaped at them, mouth open, and Brady peeked over his shoulder, tempted to wave.
“Well, that depends on if you survive or not!” Cuthbert said after a moment, and Brady was absolutely done hiding behind his friends.
“Arlen,” he shouted, “it’s you who need to give it up.
Your phone is about to hit every news outlet on the internet—including the independent outlets who won’t bury the story because you’ve got people in your pockets.
If you shoot me here, in front of all these people, you will have committed murder to cover up a crime—that’s a life sentence right there.
And this time I’m not the only witness.”
Arlen’s pallor went absolutely gray. “You can’t do that,” he muttered. “I hired you, you faggot puke—you don’t got those skills.”
Brady scowled at him, but when he moved to swing his leg off the bike, Burton put a restraining hand on his thigh.
“Keep talking to him,” he murmured. “When Ace gets here, he’s gonna clear a path.”
Brady didn’t want to think about how he was going to do that, but sure.
“You’ve got two police departments riding down my scrawny ass,” he shouted back. “How is it you think I don’t have any friends to help me?”
Arlen took a menacing step forward, and with the smoothness of a grooming tiger, Burton pulled a pistol from a slot on his saddlebag, something long and deadly with a suppressor on the end.
“Whoa, now, son,” Cuthbert said, hands up as though noticing Burton for the first time. “You don’t want to start something you can’t finish.”
“You think he can’t finish you?” Brady asked.
“You think I can’t finish you? You’re finished, Cuthbert.
Your list of friends just went out on broadband.
If you’re on that phone, diddling little kids, we’ve got your full moon rising.
Whatever your connection to the Kuntz brothers, we’ve got it, and now so does the press, the FBI, and the Center for Lost and Exploited Children.
” Brady had to use all his strength of will not to dart his eyes to where Eric sat, bleeding, working frantically to make everything Brady was saying the truth.
“You pull out your gun and shoot us all in cold blood, that’s fine.
The whole damned world is going to know why! ”
Cuthbert’s face went from gray to an unhealthy shade of red. “I ain’t on that phone diddling no kids!” he shouted. “You can’t say I did that!”
“But you didn’t bring the people who are on that phone to justice!” Brady screamed back. “That was your job! You’re as guilty as they are, you pox-ridden asswart!”
“All this coulda been avoided,” Cuthbert whined, all grievance, “if only you’d died in that bank robbery like you were supposed to! This was my territory. I had a handle on things! And you had to go—”
“Do my fucking job!” Brady snarled, and something in his voice must have given away his plan to start shooting.
Cuthbert reached for his gun, and Brady got ready to start taking out every cop who aimed at him and Burton, when the sudden tension-ridden silence was broken by Eric, shouting from the SUV.
“Yes! It’s out! Eat shit, Arlen Cuthbert, and all your fucking cronies!”
Cuthbert turned around, literally since the SUV was parked behind him on the shoulder, and stared, putting everything Brady had said together with Eric’s outburst, and as if in slow motion, he pulled out his gun, aiming for what he now knew was the real danger.
And the sirens that had been growing louder and louder behind them reached a crescendo, and the sound of a heavy vehicle mounting the flatbed behind them filled the air with stressed metal and the scraping of the oil pan belonging to a Subaru Forester as it grated along the top of the cab.
A smoking shadow darkened the air, and Brady looked up to see the SUV impossibly high above them, rotating as it flew, so he saw the chassis, then the passenger window, Sonny gripping the chicken stick and screaming “Yeeeehawwwww!” as they passed.
And still the car kept twisting, until, just before landing on the top of the nearest police cruiser, the Forester righted itself, bounced off the roof in a crunch of metal and LED light strips, and then continued onto the road, slamming into every car in its way and leaving a trail of dented, maimed vehicles in its path.
For a moment, everything stopped, every officer behind the wheel counting their minor injuries, and greater fortune held its breath as the group of cars careening behind the flatbed truck and streaming around it wreaked its own havoc.
And in the center of this, Arlen Cuthbert, whose days as a petty tyrant of a desert police department were over, finally identified the only foe he could vanquish that day.
The unarmed man in the back of the SUV.
Brady saw him aim his gun and, heedless of the swarming, crashing police units all around him, advance toward the side of the road, aiming with the concentration of somebody who had nothing left to lose.
Brady saw in that moment of chaos and destruction that finally, finally, he had something to lose in this fight, and he would be damned if he watched it die in front of him.
He knew his weapon, fired it regularly, felt it like a dangerous friend in the palm of his hand.
He’d aimed and shot before a single doubt could twitch a whisker, and as if frightened by the noise, not a single doubt ever did.
Cuthbert fell to his knees, driven by several shots to his trunk where the Kevlar protected him from penetration, and by one irrevocable shot to the side of his head.
“Jesus, kid,” Burton said through Bluetooth, “I was going to let him live and suffer through the court system.”
“No,” Brady said, his throat thick. “He was going to shoot Charlie. No.” In the SUV, Eric was staring at him, anguish in his eyes, but Brady wouldn’t let him mourn Brady’s lost innocence.
Not for this, the best thing he’d ever done.
He raised his gun, pointed upward in a salute, and Eric nodded, holding his fist to his heart.
And as the three of them watched, the corpse of Arlen Cuthbert pitched face forward on the dusty tarmac.
Burton said, “Keep your gun out and go get the phone, kid. We can’t let that jump of Ace’s be for nothing.”
Brady did as he was told, and Burton hit the gas, peeling out and fishtailing to where Brady was reaching into the open passenger window, taking the phone from Eric’s bloody fingers.
He clung to that rust-stained hand for a moment, meeting Eric’s eyes.
“You okay, Charlie?” he asked gruffly.
“You killed for me,” Charlie said, not Eric, not now. “You—”
“I’ll never betray you,” Brady said. “Give me the phone, let me get us clear of this. I know where my home is now.”
“I’ll see you on TV, Cowboy,” he said, and it wasn’t Brady’s imagination. There were tears streaming down his face. He thought this was goodbye.
“Don’t worry, Charlie,” Brady whispered. “They’ll never know your name.”
Behind him, Burton pulled up, making an impatient noise, and Brady knew Eric would only believe in him if he finished his duty. “Charlie,” he said sharply, and Eric looked at him. “Don’t lose hope.”
“Okay,” he said, his voice all Boston. “For you, okay.”
And with that, Brady had to go. He shoved the phone into the zipper pocket of his windbreaker before hopping on the back of the bike. Burton peeled out for a few feet until the bike found its speed.
And then it was bob and weave around the cop cars scattered across the road like marbles as the collective police force of the lower half of California got its shit together and tried to decide who to chase.
Brady shot out several radiators and a lot of tires before they were clear of the mess, but not one officer had gone for his gun from the front seat of his unit, and Brady was pretty confident as they screamed down the westbound highway that the only fatality on that road had been the man who had needed to die.