Page 37 of Lone Wolf

Crouching behind the vehicle blockade, a SWAT member shot a nervous glance over at her sergeant. “We got him dead to rights.”

They stared down at the lone Interceptor, smoke rising from its tires. It was hard to make anything out through the tinted windows or the spiderwebbed pane on the driver’s side.

A moment of stillness.

They couldn’t get a clear look at the man inside, but he seemed average of size and build.

The SWAT member worried the cross pendant at her throat with glove-thickened fingers. “Looks like he’s surrendering.”

The man in the Interceptor looked over, a flat gaze rife with intensity. It seemed like he was looking right at them.

“No,” the sergeant said. “He’s not.”

The sedan revved. Loud. Louder. A thing of menace.

The roars echoed harshly off the surrounding concrete slopes. The cops jerked back behind their vehicles, staring intently below, awaiting orders to fire.

“There’s nowhere to go,” the SWAT member said. “He’s got nowhere to go.”

The engine reached a protracted snarl, vibrating on its tires.

And then the brake released, the sedan fishtailing off the dime, laying down tread in its wake.

It rocketed toward the severe slope of the embankment on the far side, the one leading up to the low overpass.

“No,” the sergeant said. “Nuh-uh.”

The fastest cop car on the market. Zero to sixty in 5.5 seconds. It could reach one hundred miles per hour in 13.5.

The Interceptor reached it.

Blasting across the concrete straightaway, throwing up rooster tails of grit.

And then it swooped up the embankment, tilting upward, upward, the angle moving gradually toward the insurmountable.

Ten meters up, twenty, twenty-five, its long arc to the overpass losing steam as the hood neared the buttressed edge of the bridge. Could it possibly make the turn from slope to road?

It peaked shy of the mark.

Just three inches.

But three inches in a car skidding up an incline to dodge a concrete bulwark is a lot of inches.

The left front bumper crashed into the concrete barrier guarding the spot where embankment met overpass.

An earth-shuddering crash, explosion of headlight, crumpling metal. The car pinwheeled up onto the overpass, spinning wildly out of view.

23

As Good Once as He Ever Was

Evan whipped across the lanes of traffic, tapped one way by an incoming Prius and then the other by a MINI Cooper. The lightweight collisions were his first stroke of luck in a long stretch or—if he decided to shine a bit of optimism on things—a continuation of the luck he’d been riding since Dr. Hill’s town house. The smashed Interceptor shuddered to a miraculous halt with cars screeching all around him. His neck hurt and his spine hurt and his hips hurt and his fingers hurt and they all would’ve kept on hurting if he’d let them.

He’d been trapped like a rat down in the basin, at the edge of his operational abilities. There’d been no contingencies to run, no last-minute physics calculations, not even one of Jack’s hoary aphorisms to light the way.

There’d just been a concrete ramp and enough American horsepower to put him within three inches of his goal.

Imperfect, ugly, and painful, but brighter men than him had pointed out that no plan survived first contact with the enemy.