“Starsky?” The young girl was clearly bewildered by the name.
Court said nothing.
“You don’t look like a regular cop.”
“That’s because I’mnota regular cop. I’m anawesomecop. I’m also the kind of cop that doesn’t like a ton of chitchat, so let’s just walk for a few minutes, okay?”
“Okay,” she said, and the teenager adhered to this agreement.
For about twenty seconds.
“Why did all this happen?”
Court sighed. Said, “A simple case of mistaken identity.”
“You mean…like, they had the wrong kid?”
“They mostdefinitelyhad the wrong kid.”
“Are they dead? The guys that took me?”
“They’re not going to bother you anymore.”
She walked in the dark a moment, then looked at him. “Because they’re dead?”
Their feet crunched the snow. “You can just go back to your life like nothing—”
“You can just say they’re dead. I know they are.”
A few more footsteps crunched. “Yeah. They’re all extremely dead,” he said, but he wasn’t sure about that.
Into his earpiece he said, “Night Train. Go for Six?”
—
Zack Hightower’s eyes didn’t really clear up enough to see until he was moving down an icy slope on his back, skidding at high speed, with a man on top of him.
He knew he was fighting Lancer, he knew Lancer had been disarmed, but the man was under at least as much of the effects of the bear spray as Zack himself was. The man coughed as he rained punches down in those brief moments of contact while the two of them slid, rolled, and stumbled down the long and steep driveway.
Zack went airborne a moment, crashed down on his right shoulder, then rolled end over end, striking against Kincaid’s similarly tumbling body right before hitting the ice again on his back. He tried a punch of hisown as the two of them kept careening down, whiffed his swing, and then Kincaid landed an elbow into the side of Zack’s head.
Zack had his knife on his belt, but his hands were too occupied trying to break his fall with each of his contacts with the ground or thwarting the blows from the man falling along with him.
For a moment both he and Kincaid were on their backs, next to each other and sliding as if down an Olympic luge track. He started to take the opportunity to go for his knife, because even though they were by no means at the end of the driveway, he expected this might be his only chance to get a lethal weapon in his hand for a moment.
But then it occurred to him. Lancer would have a blade of his own, and he was probably coming to the same conclusion.
Zack brought both hands up and crossed them into an X, just as Scott Kincaid flipped towards him in the air, a blade shining in the moonlight in his swinging hand.
Zack blocked it with both arms and grabbed the man by the wrists, and just then both struggling fighters’ feet hit a snowbank as the driveway curved to the east.
The momentum slung them into the air. Zack kept his hold on Kincaid’s wrists while they tumbled into trees and snow-covered brush.
Scott Kincaid ended up on top; he leaned onto his knife with all his might, but Zack brought a knee up into the man’s hip, knocking him off balance.
Kincaid went into the air; Zack held on to the man’s arms for dear life, and when the disgraced Navy SEAL slammed his back against a pine tree, the impact forced him to let go of the knife.
The blade fell and hit Zack in the shoulder, cutting him but doing no real damage that he could immediately feel.
