windshield instantly spiderwebbed, the bullet hitting in the windshield’s upper right corner. Gary’s foot slipped in the blood leaking from Andy Hertz’s brain. He went sprawling onto the floor just beyond the van’s path.
Still dragging a screaming Carter, I slammed broadside into the Pilot. I must have knocked the back end of it a good two feet across the floor. I knew the airbag in the steering wheel in front of me was bound to deploy at this point, but it was like when you know the flash is going to go off when your picture is being taken. You think you can keep from blinking, but you can’t.
So it was still a shock when the white pillow exploded in front of me, a cloud moving at jet speed. It enveloped my face. Unable to see for the few seconds it took the bag to deflate, I blindly put the car into reverse, turned the wheel a bit to the right, and floored it again.
My head slammed into the headrest a second time. I’d hit the Civic once again, this time more to the front. The gun Carter had been holding slipped from his grasp, bumped my shoulder, and dropped down between the door and the seat.
I didn’t really have a moment to look for it.
I patted down the airbag so I could see what was happening. Carter I didn’t have to worry about, especially since he’d lost his gun. He was just coming along for the ride, wherever I decided to go, at least until his hand came off.
Owen had run to the far corner of the showroom, on the other side of the Pilot, just beyond my desk. Gary, still down on the floor next to Andy’s body, his shirt and pants smeared with blood, took another shot. He didn’t have time to aim and it went wild. A bullet pinged someplace into the sheet metal.
I heard a kind of primal screaming, almost animalistic. It took a moment to realize it was coming from me.
Gary was slipping as he struggled to his feet, preparing to get off another shot. I threw the car back into drive, pulled the wheel, hit the gas, and went straight for him.
He fired and this time his aim was better, hitting the windshield midway, about a foot left of center. The glass shattered into a million tiny pieces. Gary dove to my right, in the direction of a bank of offices, including Laura’s, and the van plowed into the back end of the Element, to the left of the Pilot I’d already pretty much destroyed. Glass shattered and the hood of the van buckled upward to the point where it was starting to obstruct my view.
Carter’s wrist was bleeding. He was still banging on the glass, screaming at the top of his lungs.
I needed to get out of there.
I hit the brakes, put the van in reverse, took a millisecond to plot a way out. I needed to find a wide expanse of glass, an area without any partitions, if I wanted to drive out of here. I was thinking it would be almost better to smash my way out in reverse; otherwise the shards of glass coming through my front window- which no longer had any glass in it-could end up beheading me.
With enough speed, I might be able to blast a hole between the Civic and a metallic blue Accord that had, so far, escaped any damage.
“Please!” Carter screamed. “Put the window down!”
I glanced at him long enough to say, “Fuck you.”
I shoved my foot down on the accelerator. Carter, anticipating the move, tried running alongside, but I’d altered my course a little, heading for the back end of the Accord, squeezing in past the end of the Civic.
The front end of the Civic knocked Carter’s legs out from under him. As I sped past the front of the car, Carter continued to be dragged over it by his wrist.
The Accord moved a few feet, but not enough to clear me a path.
Somewhere, I thought I smelled gasoline.
I looked ahead, and Gary was on the move, closing in at two o’clock. I moved the shift lever back into drive, steered right, and went for him. He dove farther right but I kept on going, smashing through the door and frosted window glass of Laura’s office. Shards flew across the crumpled hood and slid over the dashboard.
Carter, no longer screaming, was hanging off my door like a rag doll.
The rear window on the passenger side suddenly exploded. It had been shot out. I didn’t have time to see where Gary was. I backed out of Laura’s office at high speed, went barreling halfway across the showroom, and smashed into the other end of the Element, threw the van back in drive and hurtled forward, this time taking out the office next to Laura’s. The leasing manager’s. He would not be pleased.
More shots rang out. Gary was running around to the far perimeter of the showroom, using the smashed cars as cover. I was leaning over as far as I could while driving, using the van’s doors and the dashboard for my own cover.
Car alarms continued to whoop.
Again, I put the van into reverse and my foot to the floor. The only thing I didn’t want to hit was Andy’s body, and I was worried the van was heading in that direction, so I pulled left on the wheel, glanced back, broadsided the Element again, and before I’d even turned to look forward I’d put the car in drive and given it gas.
I swung my head around, looked ahead, and there was Gary.
He was between the van and the Accord. He was holding the gun in both hands, arms outstretched, taking a bead on me.
He shifted slightly to the left. I turned left and kept on going.
The gun fired, but it went off just as the van connected with Gary, so the bullet angled up toward the ceiling. There was, maybe, a hundredth of a second when all Gary was feeling was the front of the van barreling into him. By the time that hundredth of a second had passed, he was feeling the Accord at his back.
If he made a sound when the life was crushed out of him, it couldn’t be heard for the tearing and wrenching of sheet metal. At the moment of impact, the gun flew out of his hand and sailed over the van, landing somewhere on the showroom floor behind me.
Gary’s mouth was frozen into a grotesque grin, his face smeared with blood.
I sat there a moment, letting the engine idle. I looked out my window. Carter appeared to be as dead as Gary. It must have been when his lower body hit the Civic and was dragged across it. Maybe the impact severed his spine. I powered the window down an inch, freeing Carter’s wrist and allowing him to slide to the floor.
The engine was still running, the alarms were still blaring, but a moment of calm washed over me.
“Don’t move, motherfucker!”
I glanced up in my rearview mirror. It was Owen, holding the gun that had flown out of Gary’s hands.
I don’t know quite how to explain this. I’d been terrified through everything that had happened so far, but now… now I was just annoyed.
I put the car into reverse and gave it everything I had.
The tires squealed again and the van powered its way past the Pilot, kept on going, took out my desk, and then there was a huge crash as the tail end went through the massive plate-glass window.
The ass end of the van dropped two feet to the ground, the front end went skyward. The front wheels, suspended in midair, spun at high speed.
I looked down between the seat and the door, knowing Carter’s gun was there someplace.
Now there was a new noise added to the mix. My going through the showroom glass had activated the building’s security alarm.
The van was so out of kilter I couldn’t get a look at the showroom, didn’t know where Owen was. I twisted in my seat, shoved my right arm down in the narrow space between the door and the seat.
I found the gun. I slipped my fingers around something cold and slender, what had to be the barrel. I fished it up between the seat and the door, thought I had it, but as I tried to clear the gun butt past the seatback adjustment lever, it slipped from my hand and dropped back down, farther out of reach than it had been
