Beach Wedding(70)

It was about five long minutes later into my terrified pondering when there was a sound outside. A crackling sound, tires on gravel.

Was it Courtney coming back? I thought.

When the door flew open a second later, the Texas killer had a roll of already opened duct tape in his muscular hands.

“We have a visitor,” the killer said as he taped me up none too gently around my head and mouth. “You say a word, I’ll kill them. Then I’ll come back here and slit you open from your nuts to your chin. Got it? Then I’ll go find your family and we’ll really have some fun.”

I listened very carefully after he left. I heard the bus door open. Then I heard the approaching car stop right behind the bus. After twenty seconds, there was a knock at the front.

“Open up! Southampton police! Who’s in here?”

Yes! The real cops! I thought.

But wait. Where was the killer? I wondered as the sound of gunfire suddenly ripped out.

There was a cymbal crash explosion of shattered glass as the bus’s front windshield was blown in. When I heard the pocking sounds of bullets punching through the bus’s aluminum, I spasmed in my chair trying to duck, but it was useless.

It wasn’t just any kind of gun either. I wasn’t exactly a gun expert, but outside the bus from somewhere close came what sounded like the long earsplitting snap, crackle, and pop of a machine gun on automatic.

I closed my eyes, waiting to get hit, as some more return shots were fired from the back of the bus. Then all the firing suddenly stopped.

“10-13! Flanders Road! Officer under fire! Under fire!” I heard a cop yell.

Flanders Road was in the Bays near the police precinct, I knew.

“Terry! Terry! Are you in here?” the cop yelled a moment later.

“Bugh hugh bugh hugh!” I yelled.

The cop who burst in was a big pale white guy with a shaved bald head and a uniform name tag that said Kelly.

He undid the hand restraints and started to peel the tape off, then took out a knife and got the blade in between my cheek and the tape and sliced it off instead.

“Where’d he go? The shooter?” was the first thing I said.

“Into the woods.”

“Toward the precinct?”

“Yes,” Officer Kelly said. “I called it in. We’ll catch this son of a bitch. We’ve been looking for you, Terry.”

“How?”

“Oscar Womack, the groundskeeper at the house,” Officer Kelly said as he undid my ankle restraints. “He saw you get on the bus.”

Good old Oscar, I thought as I leapt up and ran.

“Wait up! What the hell are you doing?” Officer Kelly said as I ran off the bus full speed into the woods.



96

I quickly thought about the situation as I ran through the pines.

If the guy was a pro, he’d know the terrain, I thought.

Where would I head if I needed transport out of here?

I immediately changed my direction, and five or six hot and sweaty minutes later, I came out of the tree line into the gravel lot of the nearby Southampton town dump.

Just in time to see a grumbling dump truck crash out through its gate.

“Dammit!” I yelled as I booked across the lot.

A shocked-looking town worker with a beer gut and a goatee stood gaping in the doorway of a trailer by the shattered fence.

“Police! I need a car!” I said.

“That one!” the man said, pointing at a small beat-up town pickup truck to my left. “Just turn the ignition. It doesn’t need a key.”

The dump truck was about a mile and a quarter down old Riverhead Road when I caught up to it. It was hauling, doing about seventy on the narrow curving road. Suburban houses began to appear on the side of the streets as we both went through a stop sign without even a tap on the brakes.

“Shit!” I yelled as I watched the killer clip an old-age home short bus as it made a right through a gas station onto Canoe Place. I screeched in through the lot of the gas station right after it, thanking God he hadn’t driven through one of the pumps.

It was about a quarter mile down Canoe Road when he bailed. There was a puff of dust as he swayed the truck off the road left into the opposite lane and then into the grass of Mariners Cove, a little marina on the bay. Then there was a thunderous explosion of crunching metal as the fishtailing dump truck came down an embankment and took out a whole row of cars in the parking lot.

I was just in time to see the killer jumping out of the smoking truck as I came roaring in behind him. As I screeched to a stop and leapt out, I watched him shove a guy up on the marina’s dock and then jump into a little flat fishing boat.

He’d pushed the boat off the dock and was still pulling at the outboard’s rip cord when I leapt from the dock and landed on top of him hard and we both went into the bay.

As we tangled together under the water, I felt him trying to get an elbow around my neck in a choke hold. But as I spasmed, I slipped his grip and caught him good in his throat with an elbow.

As I pushed away from him, I realized that the water we were in was only about six feet deep. We circled like boxers both staring at each other as we started hopping up and down like we were playing Marco Polo when the water is up to your chin.

The approaching sound of a glorious police siren got louder and louder.

“Hear that?” I said. “You’re toast, asshole. Texas toast.”