Chapter 24 #3
He swerved onto 61st and felt the truck lean hard into the turn, tires screaming, suspension working against the weight of the thing. A sedan ahead of him veered onto the sidewalk. He watched it happen without feeling much about it. He was already past.
The speedometer climbed past ninety. Then ninety-five.
He tilted the rearview mirror to look at his own eyes. Bloodshot and wide. He looked like a man he would have pulled over on a Tuesday and felt nothing for.
He knew the island. Causeway meant spike strips before the bridge. Seawall meant he'd eventually run out of road. Neither of those facts changed anything. The destination had never been the point.
What surfaced then wasn't grief or fear.
It was smaller and more embarrassing than either.
He wished there were cameras. He wanted the guys back at the precinct in Corpus to see this.
So they would remember him not as the man who owed money to people who collected in blood, and not the cop who'd burned a protected witness to buy himself another month.
He wanted someone who knew him to see him at a hundred miles an hour with five units behind him and think: there he is.
He understood, in the same breath, how pathetic that was. He let it pass.
The first Seawall signs appeared ahead. Beyond them, at the end of everything, the Gulf sat dark and flat and indifferent.
He kept his foot on the floor.
The end didn't come with a bang. It came with a rhythmic, sickening thwack-thwack-thwack that traveled up through the steering column and into his palms.
He'd hit the strips just past the 45th Street intersection.
He never saw who threw them, just a flicker of movement in the shadow of a parked SUV, and then the truck was no longer entirely his.
The front passenger tire shredded itself in long, violent ribbons.
The Ram pulled hard right, the rim biting asphalt, and a rooster-tail of sparks lit up the salt air as five thousand pounds of moving steel made its own decisions.
Trent fought the wheel until the physics stopped him. The truck skidded sideways across the empty Seawall lanes, clipped a concrete planter with a crunch he felt in his back teeth, and the airbags came out in a twin explosion of white dust and chemical heat.
Then nothing. Just the hiss of the engine and the dust settling and, beyond the spider-webbed windshield, the sea—black and flat and enormous.
He sat pinned, the deflating airbag pressing against his chest. His ears were ringing. He stared at the water for a moment and thought: that's a lot of dark.
The sirens changed tone as the cruisers fanned out behind him—the yelps cutting to silence, the headlights dying, the spotlights coming on one by one until the cab was filled with a white, surgical glare that left no shadows anywhere.
He couldn't see the men in it. He could only hear them. Doors. Shotgun racks. Boots on pavement, measured and heavy.
“Driver. Show us your hands.”
The megaphone voice didn't sound like a colleague. It didn't even sound like anything human. Trent raised a hand to shield his eyes and looked at the windshield instead of the light.
He touched his face. His fingers came back wet.
The rearview mirror had been knocked sideways by the airbag. He couldn't find his own reflection. He was just a shape in a wrecked truck, backlit by a thousand watts. Just the shape. Just the wrecked truck.
“Driver. Turn off the engine and step out of the vehicle with your hands visible.”
The engine had already quit. He could see steam rising from the crumpled hood.
He thought about stepping out with his hands up.
Facedown on the asphalt, cuffed, the rest of it playing out in grey rooms and grey hallways and a grey file with his name on it.
The GPS pings. The protected witness. The man dead on the dock.
It would all come out in the order it happened, and there would be nothing to argue with because all of it was true.
He reached into his jacket and found his badge wallet. The leather was warm from being against his chest. He looked at the badge through the windshield light. The silver was catching it, throwing it back.
“Driver. Final warning. Exit the vehicle now.”
Trent took a breath. He gripped the door handle with a shaking hand, then threw the door open and stepped into the light.
He didn't raise his hands or drop to his knees. He turned toward the wall of spotlights and he snapped the badge wallet out from his side the way he'd drawn his weapon thousands of times in eleven years, and he pointed the silver flash of the shield directly into the light.
There was no time for identification. There was only a silhouette, and a hand coming up fast, and a shape that looked like what it was trained to look like.
The first shot broke the spell. The rest followed.
Trent didn't feel the impacts. The world went light, not dark, light, which surprised him. And then the asphalt was coming up to meet him and he went down without fighting it.
His hand was still outstretched when he landed. The badge wallet skidded across the pavement, spinning in the glow of the spotlights, and the silver shield caught the light one last time before it tumbled into the gutter and lay still.