Twisted Prey (Lucas Davenport #28)(2)

“If you ever mention that to him, he’ll find some way to stick something sharp and nasty up your rectum.”

Smalls smiled. “Why, CeeCee . . . you don’t think I’d ever actually mention it to him, do you?”

Whitehead squeezed his knee. “I hope to hell not. No, I don’t think you’d do that. How are you gonna let him know that you know?”

“Kitten will think of something,” Smalls said.

Whitehead smiled into the growing darkness, their headlights ricocheting through the roadside trees. Kitten Carter, Smalls’s chief of staff, would think of something. She and Whitehead talked a couple of times a week, plotting together the greater glory of the U.S.A. in general and Porter Smalls in particular.

Whitehead was a lifelong yoga enthusiast and show horse competitor. She had a strong body, strong legs and arms, and, for a woman, large, strong hands. She wheeled the Escalade up the track faster than most people might have, staining the evening air with dust and gravel. She’d spent much of her life on farms, shoveling horseshit with the best of them, driving trucks and tractors, and knew what she was doing, keeping the twenty-two-inch wheels solidly in the track’s twin ruts.

A half mile down the river, the track crossed a state-maintained gravel road, and with a bare glance to her left, she hooked the truck to the right and leaned on the gas pedal.



* * *



—

A FEW MINUTES LATER, they topped a hill, and in the distance, Whitehead could see a string of lights on a highway that would take them to the interstate that would take them into Washington. The river still unwound below them, below a long slope, the last fifty feet sharpening into a bluff.

A minute later, Whitehead said, “What an asshole. This jerk is all over me.”

“What?” Smalls had almost dozed off. Now he pushed himself up, aware that the SUV was flooded with light. He turned in his seat. A pickup—he thought it was a pickup, given the height of the headlights—wasn’t more than fifteen or twenty feet behind them, as they rolled along the gravel at fifty miles an hour.

He said, “I don’t like this.”

At the crest of the hill, the pickup truck swung out into the left lane and accelerated, and Smalls said, “Hey, hey!”

Whitehead floored the gas pedal, but too late. Too late. The truck swung into them, smashed the side of the Escalade, which went off the road, through roadside brush and trees, across a ditch and down the precipitous hillside. Instead of trying to pull the SUV back up the hillside, which would have caused it to roll sideways, Whitehead turned downhill for a second, then said, her voice sharp, “Hold on, Porter, I’m gonna try to hit a tree. Keep your arms up in case the air bag blows . . .”

Smalls lifted his arms, and the SUV bounced and bucked across the hill, heading sharply down toward the bluff below, as Whitehead pumped the brakes. He didn’t actually think it, but Smalls knew in his gut that they only had a few seconds to live.

They hit a row of saplings, plowed through them, hit a tree that must have been six inches in diameter, breaking it cleanly off. The impact caused the truck to skew sideways while plowing forward, and now Smalls felt Whitehead hit the accelerator. The engine screamed as the oversized tires tried to dig into the hillside, and he realized that she was barking with each impact: “Ay! Ay! Ay! Ay! . . .”

They were still angling downhill, but less steeply now. They hit another small tree, and the vehicle snapped around only to hit a bigger tree. The air bag exploded and hit Smalls in the face, yet he was aware that the truck was beginning to tilt downhill, toward the bluff. And suddenly the driver’s-side window blew in. They’d almost stopped, not thirty feet from the edge of the bluff, but were not quite settled, and they blundered another few lengths backward and smashed into a final tree, which pushed up the passenger side of the truck. The Escalade slowly, majestically, rolled over on its roof and came to a stop.

Smalls, hanging upside down from his seat belt, half blinded by blood rolling down into his eyes, felt no pain—not yet anyway—and cried, “I smell gas. We gotta get out of here. Get out! Get out!”

He looked sideways at Whitehead, who also was hanging upside down from her seat belt. The overhead light had come on when the door came loose, and her eyes were open, but blank, and blood was running from one ear into her hair.

He called, “CeeCee, CeeCee,” but got no response. Blood was still pouring down his face and into his eyes as he freed his seat belt and dropped onto the inside of the roof. He unlocked the door on his side and pushed it open a few inches, where it got stuck on a sapling. He kicked the door a half dozen times until it opened far enough that he could squeeze out.

As soon as he was free, he wiped the blood from his eyes, realized that it actually had been coming from his nose. As he cleared his eyes, he stumbled around to the back of the SUV, popped the lid, found his canvas overnight bag, and took out the chrome .357 Magnum he kept there. He tucked the gun in his belt and looked uphill: no sign of anyone. No headlights, no brake lights, nothing but the gathering dusk, the knee-high weeds and the broken trees, the natural silence pierced by the numerous warning and alarm beeps and buzzes from the Cadillac.

He hurried to the driver’s side of the truck, wedged the door open as far as he could, unhooked Whitehead’s seat belt, and let her drop into his arms. He had to struggle to get her out of the truck, but the odor of gas gave him the strength of desperation. When she was out, he picked her up and carried her fifty feet across the hillside, then lowered her into the weeds, knelt beside her, and listened for a moment. Her scent, the Chanel No. 5 and the well water from the shower, now mixed with the coppery/meaty odor of fresh blood.