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Josie hits the roadway, fishtailing slightly. Parker wobbles on the back of the bike but he stays on.
“Areyouokay?” Carlos asks me. “You look like hell.”
“I’ll live,” I say, then add, “I lost my gun.”
“Take mine,” he says, gripping the steering wheel tightly and shifting his hip in my direction. I pluck his Colt from its holster.
Josie and Parker are about fifty yards ahead of us, but the road is rough, and with Parker perched precariously on the back, the motorcycle is slowly losing ground.
I lean out my window, but then I hesitate. I don’t want to shoot them in the back. And if I hit a tire, there’s a good chance they’ll crash.
“I don’t want to kill them,” I say, coming back inside the cab.
“I can’t keep up with them forever,” Carlos says.
The curvy road is straightening out, and the motorcycle is beginning to pull away. We’re running between the train tracks and the river now, only a couple hundred yards from the canyon but half a mile or so from the railway. To our right, the train is chugging along, but we’re outpacing it, gaining ground.
“I’m going to call for backup,” I say, reaching for Carlos’s police radio.
“Wait a second,” he says. “Look at that.”
It takes me a moment to realize what he’s talking about. Up ahead, the road splits into a T. Josie leans into the turn and takes the right fork—heading perpendicular to the train tracks now. In the distance, the road crosses the tracks, and Josie guns it, trying to make it before the train does.
Carlos takes the turn, but he’s far behind now.
We can only watch.
The motorcycle flies toward the junction. The conductor must see them because the locomotive’s horn sounds in a long, panicked blast. The train and its line of cars look enormous compared to the insect of a motorcycle trying to outrace it.
“They’re not going to make it,” Carlos mutters.
I stare in horror as Josie’s bike and the train converge on the same point. I close my eyes at the last second, but the explosive sound of the metal-against-metal collision followed by the long squeal of the train’s brakes tells me all I need to know.
EPILOGUE
ONE
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS LATER, I’m standing in front of the door of my house.
I’m a mess.
My legs are covered in painful scabs, the rest of my body full of bruises and welts and scrapes. But it’s my mental state that’s truly in tatters. Despite what Parker and Josie became—despite the crimes they committed—they were people I cared about. I feel like I’m doubly grieving. I’m grieving their deaths, but I’m also grieving the loss of the friends I thought I knew—mourning the fact that two people I had highly respected turned out to be people I never really knew at all.
Seeing what was left of them—the pieces scattered on both sides of the railroad track, the stain of gore on the front of the locomotive—was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I kept my emotions together while we were on the scene, dealing with the local authorities and bringing the Rangers up to speed on what happened. And I maintained my professionalism as we found Parker and Josie’s kids—hiding out in a hotel in El Paso with Josie’s mom—and broke the news to them that their parents were dead.
Now I’m ready to let the dam burst on my emotions. But when I open the front door, my phone buzzes.
Ty Abrams.
Reluctantly, I answer.
“Wanted to check in and see how you’re doing,” he says.
“I’ve been better.”
He tells me that they’ve located a stack of files Parker kept with Josie’s mom. She thought they were documents for use in case of emergency: insurance policies and the deed to the house and so forth. But the records showed Parker’s advance investigative work to the jobs they pulled.
“As far as we can tell,” Abrams says, “he wasn’t working in cahoots with anyone in law enforcement. It was just good old-fashioned police work that helped him identify his targets.”
