The Highway Kind(17)

Letts didn’t respond. I turned slightly to my left to face him. I slowly closed the laptop and moved my right foot toward the door so I could brace it.

“You were the architect of this,” I said. “I remember everything now. You hit her and then you just kept driving while she bled to death in the crosswalk. How was I supposed to sell that to the jury?”

“I didn’t just keep going,” Letts protested. “I got out. I checked on her. I had no phone. I had to get to a phone and get her help. I made the call, goddamn it!”

“Yeah, well, there was no record of it.”

“It was because of him. The captain. He pulled the records because he knew it would make me look bad. And you let him get away with it. You never even fucking called him to the stand.”

“I couldn’t call him. There was no evidence he did anything. I’m going to put the victim’s husband on the stand and go after him with nothing? You should have taken the deal. You would have been out in four and you would still have your life. But don’t you fucking dare blame me. You want to shoot somebody, put that gun in your own mouth.”

Letts gritted his teeth angrily, pulling back his lips in disgust. I saw the muscles of his neck and shoulders tense. The grip on his gun tightened. He then turned away again, as if finding his bearings before firing the gun at me.

I made my move. Raising the laptop up as a shield, I lunged across the seat and into him; I slammed the laptop into his face just as he turned back toward me. Then I grabbed the top of the gun barrel with one hand, put my other hand over his, and forced the weapon toward the floor. And I yelled as loud as I could, “Cisco, pull over! Get back here!”

I braced my foot against the door and pushed my body into Letts’s. He was stronger than I thought, and control of the gun until Cisco could help was the immediate challenge. He tried to pull the weapon’s muzzle up and I fought to hold it down. I tried to jam a thumb behind the trigger but Letts cleared the trigger guard and started firing the weapon, two quick shots into the floorboard that made Cisco swerve the car back and forth. The force of the double move threw me off Letts and then right back onto him. He managed to bring the gun up and fired into the seat in front of him.

Cisco was hurled forward into the steering column, and the car went into a clockwise spin. I took one hand off the gun and reached for Letts’s door.

“Cisco, the lock!”

Somehow Cisco knew what I meant and managed to hit the electronic lock button. Even with the squealing of sliding tires, I heard the pop of the locks coming up. I grabbed the door handle and yanked it up. Centrifugal force did the rest. The door flew open and Letts was jerked out of the car as if by two unseen hands. I was about to follow him but the car slammed into the guardrail at the side of the freeway. It came to a jolting stop that threw me in the other direction.

I looked over the seat at Cisco. He was leaning forward, one arm up and under his leather coat.

“Cisco, you hit?”

“Fucker got me in the shoulder. Where is he?”

Good question. I turned and looked out the back window of the Lincoln. I recognized that we were in the Cahuenga Pass, where the freeway cuts through the Santa Monica Mountains and enters the San Fernando Valley. We were hard against the railing in the freeway’s breakdown lane. There was no sign of Letts at first and then I saw cars in the slow lane swerving to avoid something in the road.

It was him. An opening between cars gave me a glimpse of Letts on the asphalt, crawling and then struggling to his feet. His clothes were ripped and he had a bloody abrasion on the side of his face. He still held the gun, the knuckles on his hand torn open from the skid on the asphalt. Just as he got to his feet, a car coming up behind him swerved out of the lane and crashed into a panel van already occupying the next lane over. The impact propelled the car right back into its original lane and it hit Letts from behind, flipping him up over the car and into the air. He came down in front of another car and was dragged under it as it skidded to a stop and was promptly rear-ended by an SUV.

I scrabbled across the seat to the door behind Cisco and climbed out. Then I went to the front door and opened it. I reached in for my driver.

“You okay?”

“I will be. Where is he?”

“He’s down. We don’t have to worry about him. It’s over.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Yeah.”

“He came up to the window with a train ticket. Wanted to know how to find Union Station. I tried to tell him and then he pulled the gun.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Told me to unlock the back door.”

“Well, it’s over.”

“What about what he said about making the call?”

“What call?”

“That night he said he called for help. You think the sheriff’s captain pulled the 911 recording?”

“That was before you worked with me. Saul was my investigator back then. He looked into it, couldn’t find anything. Letts said he made the call from a gas station where he borrowed somebody’s cell. We never found anybody to back it up. Believe me, we tried. That was the case right there.”

“Too bad—if he was telling the truth.”

Cisco struggled out of the car and leaned against the side, keeping his hand on his left shoulder.

“Yeah, too bad.”