I blasted past the gate, where you picked up your parking ticket when entering the grounds. The university streets were nearly deserted, hardly any cars parked along the lanes, no students walking around.
The Annihilator came in after me, barreling like a locomotive.
Angie raised her head enough to see where we were.
“Get back down,” Trevor said.
“Wait,” Angie said, looking around. “Dad, I’ve got an idea.”
“Me too,” I said, my hands wet with sweat as I gripped the wheel.
It was going to be tricky, that was for sure. But for all the car’s faults, its steering was tight and precise.
I slowed a bit, let the Annihilator gain on us. It only took a second. The SUV’s massive grill loomed over our trunk, its lights like fire, its engine roaring as if it were about to devour us.
Morpheus barked incessantly.
I sped through the grounds, looking for Galloway Hall. There it was, up ahead. And there, around the building’s far side, Angie’s shortcut. The pedestrian pathway.
I waited until the last possible second, then cranked the wheel hard to the right, gripping it with both hands, and aimed the car for the center of the opening, this low-ceilinged pathway that Angie used to sneak out of Mackenzie without paying for her parking.
The Annihilator was no more than a couple of feet behind us.
We’d only been in the tunnel a thousandth of a second when we heard it. An ear-splitting noise. Metal meeting brick. Glass shattering. Sheet metal tearing.
I’d have looked back, but I had to keep my eyes straight ahead to make sure neither fender caught the brick walls. But I was able to catch a glimpse of the fireball in the rearview mirror. I didn’t slow down. I didn’t know how much of the Annihilator might be left to follow us in.
As it turned out, what was left of the truck only went about thirty or forty feet, but I couldn’t bring myself to let up on the gas until we were out the other end. Only then did I stop the car, a couple of feet shy of the chain that kept us from driving out onto Edwards Street.
I unbuckled and, along with Angie and Trevor and Morpheus, got out of the Virtue and looked back.
The brick archway had caught the Annihilator at the base of the windshield. Bullock and Blondie would have been thrown forward from the force of the collision, but only in the instant before the brick archway sliced the entire top of the vehicle, and in all likelihood their heads, clean off.
38
THERE WAS A LOT of explaining to be done.
Before the cops began with their onslaught of questions, I told them, standing by the Virtue and holding a shaken Angie in my arms, that there were a few things they needed to know about immediately. There was the matter of a tied-up woman in a house out in the suburbs. And the fact that her husband had taken a header off a balcony at the airport Ramada, and that the odds were she didn’t know a thing about it yet.
Also, there was a guy with a bullet in his leg in a house on Wyndham Lane. Assuming he was still there, and hadn’t already hobbled his way down to the closest emergency room.
It was pretty likely they were going to find, in the back of that disintegrated Annihilator, a dead police detective. And further investigation by their forensic folks would show that he hadn’t died in the accident.
And last, but far from least, there was my daughter Angie. She seemed okay, but as I explained to one of the officers, she’d been drugged with something earlier in the evening and should be checked out at a hospital immediately. There were already ambulances at the scene, waiting for the folks from the fire department to see who or what they could recover from the wreckage of the SUV, so a couple of paramedics rushed over to see how she was.
“I’m going to have to answer a whole lot of questions,” I said as they loaded her into the back of the ambulance, an anxious Trevor moving from one foot to another as he cautioned the paramedics to be careful with her. “I’ll give your mother a call, send her to the hospital to wait with you. After they’ve checked you out, made sure you’re okay, the cops are going to have a lot of questions for you, too.”
Angie nodded tiredly and slipped her arms around my neck. “You look nice in your new clothes, Daddy,” she said.
“Thanks, honey.”
“Promise me you’ll have them check that bump on the side of your head?”
I smiled. “I think it’s fine. It might even have knocked some sense into me.”
She was puzzled by that, but let it go. “You were something,” she said. “You were really something.” And then her mouth dropped open, as though she’d suddenly remembered something.
“What?” I said.
“Shit,” she said. “I’ve got an essay due in the morning.”
I smiled. “I think being kidnapped and narrowly escaping death is an even better excuse than having your dog eat your homework. I’m sure the paramedics will write you a note. Which course is it?”
“My psych course. I had all the research done. All I had to do was write it up, which I was gonna do last night.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Your professor will understand. What was it about, anyway?”
She smiled. “Man and masochism,” she said. “Trying to figure out why some guys get turned on by pain.”
My eyebrows went up. “This is what they’re teaching you in school?”
“College, Dad.”
Tumblers started falling into place. “So, what kind of research did you have to do for a paper like that?”
“I read all kinds of stuff, and I even talked to Trixie.”
“Oh yeah,” I said, like I was trying to remember. “Our old neighbor.”
“She’s hardly old. She’s pretty dynamite looking, actually.”
“You know what I meant.”
“Yeah. Like, it’s no secret anymore what she does for a living, so I gave her a call, she gave me all kinds of great quotes. I made her promise not to tell you, ’cause I knew you and Mom would freak if you knew I was going out to see her.”
“No,” I said defensively, “we’d have understood.”
“She’s actually a very nice person,” Angie said.
“Yeah, for sure. She is.”
“It’s not the sort of thing I’d like to do for a living, though, you know?”
I nodded. “Well, I don’t like to judge.”
Angie smiled. “I hope you’re not pissed.”
It was my turn to smile. “I’ll get over it. Listen, you really should get checked out.”
She turned and there was Trevor, trying hard to look nonchalant in his long black coat, but you could see it in his eyes, that he was rattled, that he’d been through a night like no other. Morpheus seemed a bit drained, too, standing at Trevor’s side, leaning into him, his long tongue hanging in front of him.
Angie approached Trevor, smiled. “Thank you,” she said. She leaned in and gave him a light kiss on the cheek. “Thanks for being there. I guess I’ll give you shit later about how you happened to know where we were.”
He said, “Nothing I ever did was meant to hurt you. It was meant to protect you.”
“Yeah, well, I think you got lucky on that one.”
“I wasn’t the only one,” he said, as if to remind her that her good fortune was linked to him in some small way. “I think this is one of those defining moments.”
“What?” Angie said.
“A moment that defines who you and I are, what we mean to each other. We’ve been caught together in a confluence. I don’t see how either one of us can ignore that.”
The attendants were closing the ambulance door, leaving Angie with nothing else to say, but she waved her fingers at me and mouthed, “I love you.” I waved back and watched her face through the window as the ambulance pulled away.
I got out my cell and phoned home. It was going to be hard to explain to Sarah that Angie being at the hospital, in the overall scheme of things, was actually the best news I’d had to share all evening.