Instead, Mandalay accelerated smoothly into traffic and joined the ebb and flow with less urgency than would be attributed to a trip to the local shopping mall.
“No big hurry,” she said over her shoulder. “We’ll be there in fifteen or twenty minutes.”
“What do you mean no big hurry?” I repeated the comment back to her, certain that I had misunderstood. “Did I miss something here?”
“It’s all part of the ‘game’, Rowan,” she explained. “The longer they drag this out, the better position they will be in to negotiate.”
“Porter isn’t playing by their rule book,” I insisted, trying to keep my emotions from assuming control and forcing me to escalate as they had done before. “I think they might want to consider a different strategy.”
“They know what they’re doin’, white man,” Ben offered with a diagonal glance back at me. “It’s their job.”
I sat back in the seat and grumbled. “I’m telling you that they are wrong. This isn’t the same.”
“I know it’s hard,” Constance spoke again. “But you really need to relax, Rowan. Hostage scenarios don’t typically resolve in a matter of minutes. You are usually looking at several hours. Sometimes even days.”
“Not this one.”
“If the situation changes, someone will contact us,” Ben told me. “Unless that happens, there’s no reason for a Code Three response. So just sit back and enjoy the ride. You’re gonna be wishin’ for a little solitude once they start grilling you. Trust me.”
I crossed my arms and shut my mouth. I appeared to be locked into a no-win situation with everyone this evening, so I decided not to press any harder. It would only serve to get me riled up.
I hadn’t heard a peep out of Felicity, so I looked over at her and saw that she was fidgeting with the memory card on a professional-series digital camera. She never went anywhere without at least some type of photographic device at her disposal even if it was just the high-end point-and-shoot she always kept in her purse.
I continued to watch as she stared intently at the display on the back of the piece of equipment while expertly stabbing at the controls with her thumbs.
She had once told me that looking at the world from behind a lens made her feel safe. She could remain detached while still seeing everything. Sometimes, by becoming one with that intensity of focus, she would transition beyond the frame. The camera would become a microscope for her third eye, bringing into view things unseen in the physical realm.
As she switched the camera off and stuffed it back into her equipment bag, I made a mental note to stay out of the way if I noticed her looking through it anytime in the near future.
Fifteen minutes into the trip, we were moving along in what passed for the center lane of the highway. We had actually been making good time considering the icy condition of the roads and obscured dividing lines. Fortunately, traffic had been light due to the weather and time of night.
That bit of luck seemed to be expended, however. Up ahead of us, brake lights were suddenly beginning to announce themselves in dusky pairs, and the congestion was rapidly increasing.
I was pressed back into the seat, my face tilted upward and my eyes inspecting the dark headliner for lack of anything better to do. I felt the vehicle beginning to slow and canted my head forward.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Sshhh,” Mandalay admonished as she reached over and turned up the volume on the radio.
“…And we have a report of a multi-vehicle accident with injuries on eastbound Interstate Forty-Four at Jefferson,” an announcer’s voice issued from the speakers. “All lanes are shut down, so you might want to avoid that area for the time being. Also, there are reports of black ice on…”
“Friggin’ wonderful,” Ben proclaimed. “Guess we better go ahead and exit pretty quick, or we’ll get caught up in that mess.”
“That would probably be best,” Constance agreed. “If we take the next exit, we could cut over and take Market down to Memorial.”
“Yeah, sounds like a plan,” he replied.
Mandalay’s cell phone had begun to sing its tune as Ben was answering her. She reached for it as she glanced over her shoulder to make a quick visual check before changing lanes. She canted the wheel and eased the sedan over to the right and then flipped the device open and put it against her ear.
“This is Mandalay,” she said.
The swath of bright headlights that suddenly illuminated the cabin of the vehicle seemed horribly out of place to me. I squinted to block them out. I was still trying to wrap my brain around why such intense light was coming at me from the driver’s side of the car when the world as we knew it fell apart.
CHAPTER 31:
The mournful shriek of metal against metal filled my ears directly behind the explosive crunch of the other car slamming into ours. I was tossed hard to the side, my arms flailing in front of me as I reached for something to hold on to but found only handfuls of air.
I heard Felicity screaming on my right as the inertia was transferred to the rear end of our vehicle, causing it to whip wildly around on an off-centered axis. The safety belt bit into my shoulder and constricted around my waist as I strained against it.
“Holy shit!” Ben’s voice boomed from the front seat.
I caught a quick glimpse of Mandalay expertly throwing hand over hand to veer the sedan into the direction of the skid in an attempt to bring it back under control.
I threw my right arm up and across the seatback, stretching it behind Felicity as we continued to pitch to the right. Out of reflex, I hugged her tight and pulled my forearm up around her head just as the other vehicle made a three-quarter spin to clip us once again with its rear end.
The additional force of the second hit propelled us again to the right, threading me straight out of my safety harness as my wife and I hammered into the passenger side door. My reflex had come just in time as my forearm took the brunt of the strike instead of Felicity’s head.
A third crash sounded immediately on the heels of the second, and I felt the car lift upward on its side as sheet metal folded and groaned in protest.
Over the din, I heard Constance scream, “Goddammit!”
I knew it couldn’t be good if she was using expletives. I threw my other arm over my wife, covering her face as Mandalay’s unsecured cell phone flew over the back of the seat and ricocheted from my forehead. The tires were slipping across the icy pavement, making the vehicle jump and jerk as their surfaces would randomly achieve some modicum of traction, only to lose it in almost the same instant. I was expecting to roll at any moment and braced myself as best I could.
The unmistakable sound of glass shattering ripped through the air, but I couldn’t identify where it was coming from. I stayed low in the seat and held tight to Felicity as the sedan thudded back down onto all four wheels, jolting us hard when it bounced.
Momentum carried us along, and I could feel that we were still languidly spinning. As we came upon the halfway point, we found ourselves sliding backward down the highway, headlamps from now oncoming vehicles casting harsh shadows within the cabin.
A new crash sounded in the near distance, and I pushed my head up to peer out the window just in time to see a newly involved vehicle fishtail into the passenger side of our car then bounce away into another.
We were thrown to the other side of the car, and my hip impacted heavily against the door handle. Felicity’s body crushed against mine, and the air forced its way out of my lungs in a guttural huff.
The insane screech of metal on metal continued to underscore every other noise as horns blared into the cold night. I felt another thud, lighter this time, but still enough to propel me back into the seat and toss me upward. My arm was ripped away from Felicity, and her body followed mine as we both returned to sitting positions.
