logged many hours of radio time. “He’s been driving erratically. May have made me as a cop.
“You wanna make the stop now?”
“Negative. Command Six is en route; not sure of his ten-twenty,” Steadman cautioned, noting for the tape that recorded all radio traffic that he was ready to do his job even when his boss was nowhere to be found.
“Command Six, Baker Fifteen.” The speaker rattled with the gravelly tones of Sergeant Watts, the watch commander.
Steadman smiled. Gotcha, he didn’t say. “Baker Fifteen?’
“I’m at Halsey Road and Route One Sixty-Eight,” his boss explained. “What’s your ten-twenty from that location?”
Steadman’s smile turned into a disappointed frown. Old fart was a lot closer than he’d given credit. “That’d be about a mile and a half, Command Six.”
“All right,” Watts decided, “we’ll make our stand here. I’ll set up a roadblock. Treat this as a felony stop.”
“Baker Fifteen’s okay,” Steadman acknowledged.
“Charlie Seven’s affirm?’
Steadman lived for felony stops. It was the closest they ever came in Pitcairn County to being like the police officers on Cops. As they approached the site of the roadblock, Steadman and Schmidtt would hit their lights and sirens and wedge the Honda into a triangle of vehicles from which there would be no escape. From behind the cover of their doors, and armed with shotguns, the three officers would demand that their prisoner get out of his car and sprawl on the ground, from which position he would be taken into custody. If things went well, no one would get hurt. But if the little bastard did anything funny—especially with his hands—he’d be no shit forever dead.
Nathan’s heart dropped when he saw the second set of headlights in his mirror. That was no child molester in the car behind him. That was a cop. As the second car approached from behind, its lights highlighted the red and blue lightbar on the roof.
Keep cool, boy, Nathan coached himself silently. They haven’t stopped you yet. Maybe they don’t know. Maybe they’re on their way someplace else. He knew the thought was ridiculous, but his brush with suicide had shaken him into a forced optimism. As long as there was hope…
His mind raced for a way out. As long as they were all just driving along together and he was in the front, then everything was okay. But soon they would make a move, and he wanted to be prepared. They had to catch him before they could put him back in a cage. Just be ready for anything.
He wasn’t.
Up ahead, the woods on either side of him started to give way to darkened homes and businesses. A yellow reflective sign warned him of an approaching intersection with a school crossing, and instructed him to slow down to twenty-five. Under the circumstances, Nathan didn’t think that would be a very good idea. His foot got heavier. Whatever they were going to do, he sensed it would happen soon.
There it was. A roadblock. About a hundred yards ahead, a cop car was crossways in the street, its blue and red lights sweeping the buildings around it. In his rearview mirror, two more sets of lights jumped to life, and he was startled by the electronic yelp of a siren.
“Oh, shit!” he spat, not even hearing the words as they escaped. For just the slightest instant, he took his foot off the gas, but then he realized that to keep hope alive, he had to keep moving. “Just you and me, God,” he said.
Jamming the gas pedal to the floor, the rubber pad became just a tiny wedge between his sneaker and the thin-napped carpet.
Steadman couldn’t believe what he was seeing. After having to hit his brakes when the kid slowed down, the distance between them grew dramatically. Over the wail of his siren, he could hear the whiny roar of the Honda’s engine as it dopplered away from him.
“Son of a bitch is running!” he shouted into his mike.
But there was no place to go. Watts’s cruiser had completely blocked the roadway, leaving only a foot between his back bumper and the four-inch curb. Nothing could get through that space.
Steadman thumbed his mike again. “Christ, Sarge, he’s gonna ram you!”
Even as he approached the cop car blocking his path, Nathan didn’t know where he was going to go, except that somehow he was going to get past it. The distance closed with frightening speed as the Honda’s speedometer passed fifty.
More by instinct than by conscious thought, with less than a dozen yards to go before impact with the police cruiser, Nathan gallumphed the Honda over the curb, the transmission making a horrendous crashing sound as it dragged itself along the concrete. The car went airborne for just an instant, and then crashed back down onto the grass on all four wheels. He struggled to control the vehicle as it spun on the dew-soaked sod.
He didn’t even see the shotgun before it discharged.
“Jesus Christ!” Steadman shouted aloud as he saw Watts discharge his riot gun at point-blank range into the Honda. The muzzle flash was three feet long in the darkness. “Fucker’s dead now,” he declared, surprised by the satisfaction in his voice.
The explosion to his left deafened Nathan instantly, though he shrieked aloud as nine thirty-two-caliber pellets mauled the rear window and post, shredded the passenger seat and headrest, and then went on to blast out the windshield, leaving him a near-opaque spiderweb of shattered glass to see through. It had to be a shotgun, he knew. The dickheads were still trying to kill him!
He had no time to regain his bearings before he was back out on the flat street, with the roadblock getting smaller behind him. As he watched in the rearview mirror, he saw a muzzle flash like a yellow camera strobe, and just an instant later, the mirror, along with the rest of the windshield, was gone in a white puff of erupting glass. He yelled again and pressed the gas pedal even harder.
The car did not respond.
“Oh, God, no! Not now! Please, God, not now!” For the first time since he had seen the cars in the mirror, he was gripped with terror. The Honda was slowing! He tried to downshift, but the gears responded only with a teeth-rattling groan. The gearbox had been destroyed by the impact with the curb.
As Nathan pleaded for help from the Almighty, the speedometer crossed twenty-five on its way down to zero.
“FUCK!” he shouted. It was the worst word he knew.
He jammed the brake and the Honda jolted to a stop in the middle of the road. I’ll do it on foot if I have to, he declared silently.
But Steadman was on him before he could reach for the door handle.
“Let me see your hands!” an adult voice shrieked from behind him. “Show me your hands or I’ll blow your fucking head offl.”
Nathan sat still for a moment, coming to grips with the end of his journey. Somewhere in this mess there was hope, he supposed, but it was awfully well camouflaged. He slowly raised his hands into the air, surrendering not only to the police, but to his own fate.
His ears still rang from the gunshot, but he could hear the sound of running feet as they approached from behind. Out of nowhere, a gun barrel propelled itself through what was left of his side window and bored painfully into his ear.
“Get out of the car!” someone yelled. “Get out of the fucking car!”
“I can’t!” Nathan protested. The gun barrel was pushing him in exactly the opposite direction, making it impossible for him to obey. “I said get the fuck out!”
“Gun!” a second voice shouted. “There’s a gun on the seat! Watch his hands!”
Two sets of hands descended on him, grabbing fistfuls of his T-shirt and his hair. Using these as handles, they dragged him out of the car through the shattered side window. “Ow!” Nathan yelled. “You’re hurting me! I’ll do whatever you want!” He felt the rounded shards of glass embedding themselves into the flesh of his arms and his legs and his belly.
When he was free of the window, they slammed him to the pavement, driving the breath from his lungs, and making purple spots explode behind his eyes. They continued to shout conflicting orders to him, but he could no longer hear what they were saying. A booted foot on his jaw pressed his face into the pavement, while a knee
