Crash & Burn (Tessa Leoni, #3)(73)

Now the Suburban overcorrected to the right, skidding almost sideways across the road, two wheels crunching into the soft shoulder and making it fishtail wildly.

Wyatt backed off his speed, frowning at the Suburban’s out-of-control maneuvers. Suddenly, he wasn’t feeling so good about things. In fact . . .

A tractor-trailer appeared ahead. Logging truck, just coming around the corner, a little wide with its long, heavy load bearing down upon the Suburban.

“Don’t you dare, don’t you dare!” Wyatt shouted at Thomas Frank.

Who’d just swung his Suburban back into the path of the oncoming semi, as if playing chicken with a tractor-trailer was a good idea. In fact, better than surrendering to the local cops.

Wyatt could think of only one more thing to do. Not a great idea. Not his best idea. But in the spur of the moment . . .

He shoved the accelerator to the floor, fully committing 202 horsepower to his bidding. As he pulled alongside the lumbering Suburban’s dark-tinted passenger window. No view of Thomas. Wild-eyed with desperation, or dead set with determination, Wyatt had no way to know. And no time to find out.

The logging truck hit its brakes, sounding its deep horn. As Wyatt drove his own vehicle into the side of the Suburban. The crunch and grind of metal. A frozen instant of time, when neither vehicle gave way, but remained locked together with the other, a twin-size target for the oncoming semi. Wyatt lifted his foot from the gas, swerved one last time into the side of the Suburban. Then . . .

The Suburban was knocked left. Veered off the road onto the tree-lined shoulder just as the logging truck squealed through the space it used to occupy. Wyatt fought with his own vehicle, steady, steady, snap, back into his own lane, blowing by the logging truck as Kevin roared a few words the Brain rarely said.

Wyatt hit the brakes. His vehicle stopped. The logging truck stopped.

The world stopped.

“Shit,” he muttered.

Kevin got on the radio and called for backup.


* * *



THE SILVER SUBURBAN had done a face-plant into a tree. The hood was a crumpled mess, steam rising, fluids flushing down, as if in its last moments, the vehicle had lost control of its bowels.

Wyatt looped around to the driver’s side door, Kevin assuming cover position. In the distance they could already hear the sound of approaching sirens.

Driver’s side window wasn’t broken, which put Wyatt at a disadvantage. He couldn’t completely see inside, but it appeared the driver was slumped over the wheel. He gestured to Kevin, then did the count with his fingers. On three, Wyatt took one fluid step forward, jerked open the door, then twisted behind it for cover.

As the driver toppled out of the car onto the ground.

“Thomas Frank, you’re under arrest,” Wyatt barked out loudly.

Except when he stepped forward, it wasn’t Thomas Frank who lay before him.


* * *



IT TOOK ANOTHER thirty minutes to work it out. Despite the first officer’s best intentions, Thomas Frank must’ve made him. Rather than run for it, he’d knocked on the door of the room next to his. Introduced himself to Brad Kittle, who, it turned out, had spent most of the morning doping up. When a strange dude offered him the keys to his car, that had seemed the best thing that had ever happened to good old Brad. He’d taken the keys. When the dude suggested he go for a test drive, even better.

Except, of course, then there had been sirens. Things got a little fuzzy for Brad after that. Mostly, he was high, he knew he was high, and, oh yeah, he was driving a car that wasn’t his while having a suspended license. Even his baked brain had understood that could be a problem.

So he’d run for it. Real exciting, like Hollywood, he’d informed them, as the blood had poured from multiple cuts down his face, and yet, thanks to his morning binge, he still wasn’t feeling any pain.

“Didn’t even know a Suburban could drive that f*cking fast,” he’d exclaimed. “I mean, it’s like supercharging a rhino, man. A beast, swerving around this corner, that corner. Dude, I thought I was gonna die. Cool!”

Wyatt and Kevin gave up on the pothead, returned to the motel. The original reporting officer had greeted them in the parking lot, very excited to hear how things had turned out. Wyatt and Kevin didn’t talk. They got Thomas’s room number. They crashed through the door, and they discovered exactly what they expected to find. An empty room, Thomas Frank nowhere in sight.

“Door-to-door,” Wyatt had instructed the uniformed officer. “Get everyone out of their rooms. Thomas didn’t just disappear. He stole a car, copped a ride, something. Get everyone talking until you know exactly how he left this property. Then report back to me immediately. We gotta update the APB.”

A very subdued officer went to do as he was told.

Kevin called for the evidence techs to process the room; then they returned to what they did have: one wrecked Suburban, their lone link to Thomas Frank. They both started searching.

Wyatt took the front seats, Kevin the rear bench seat. Like his wife’s, Thomas’s tastes ran toward the neat and tidy. No food wrappers, crumpled-up receipts or discarded maps.

Glove compartment yielded the normal vehicle operations manual, insurance card and valid registration in the name of Thomas Frank. Wyatt picked up a black baseball cap from the floor, still slightly damp to the touch. From Wednesday night’s storm, maybe wearing it when he followed, pursued, somehow tracked down his wife?