The Thirteenth Skull (Alfred Kropp #3)(4)

“There, there, there!” I yelled, pointing down a narrow side street. “Turn, turn!”

He yanked the wheel hard to the right. The back wheels locked and the car slung around. The two cars behind us slammed on their brakes and barely missed us as we accelerated through the turn. The truck made another hard right and I didn’t have to tell the young cop this time; he matched the truck’s arc, getting us so close the bumpers almost touched.

I rolled down my window.

“Keep us as close as you can!” I shouted over the sirens, the radio chatter and the icy wind blowing in my face. “I’m going for the tires!”

“That only works in the movies!” he shouted back.

I heaved myself through the open window, grabbed hold of the mounting bracket for the lights with my left hand, and opened fire. The truck had led us into a narrow cobblestone alley barely wider than the width of the truck. The brick walls of the buildings beside me passed in a red and black blur, about two inches from my cheek. I was concentrating on my shots, so I didn’t see the big metal bins used for construction debris up ahead.

But Delivery Dude did.

The brake lights flashed. The significance of that was lost on me as I frantically yanked on the trigger, coming nowhere near to hitting a tire—maybe it does only work in the movies. An instant later the cop hit his brakes too and we went into a skid.

We hit the truck, the force hurling me from the car. I landed on a plastic mountain of garbage sacks stacked against the side of the building.

Delivery Dude threw the truck into reverse and pushed the cop car straight back as its wheels howled in protest. I scrambled to my feet and ran to the passenger door of the truck. I jumped onto the running board and grabbed the metal bar that held the side mirror. At that moment, the truck leaped forward.

Its nose swung hard to the left to get around the construction bin. I had to press my body against the door to avoid hitting the bins and, as I did, the window shattered. I could see the gun in his hand in the side mirror. Well, of course he would have a gun inside the cab—I know I would have. I ducked down as he kept firing out the busted window, and my feet kept slipping off the step while I hung on to the mirror for dear life.

We flew through an intersection at the end of the alley and the truck went airborne about two feet. The force of our landing broke my grip and I swung crazily back and forth holding on with just my right hand, my cheek and shoulder ramming into the door as he slung the truck hard to the left in an attempt to dislodge me.

He floored the gas. My fingers had gone numb from the cold—I wouldn’t be able to hold on much longer. If I let go now, I might be sucked under the carriage and the back wheels would finish me. If I tried to climb into the cab through the broken window, he’d blow my brains out. And if I tried to jump, I’d hit the pavement at sixty or seventy miles per hour.

The mirror above my hand shattered as he fired at the only part of my body visible to him.

That helped me decide. I grabbed the door handle with my left hand and let go with my right. My body swung around, and I dangled like this for a few seconds before I managed to gain a foothold again and get both hands around the door handle.

I saw them coming up fast behind us: three cop cars, lights flashing, sirens blaring. Looking ahead, I saw three more cop cars parked bumper to bumper, spanning both lanes, about four blocks away. They had him trapped.

Brakes, Delivery Dude, I thought. Now would be a good time for the brakes . . .

I thought they had him and the cops probably thought they had him.

They didn’t have him.

He hit the gas and, as he picked up speed, barreling straight for the barricade, the cops opened fire.

Maybe they saw me hanging there by the door handle. I doubted it, though. They were more concerned with the two-thousand-pound truck coming straight at them.

Then he swerved, slamming on the brakes as he swung the nose of the truck hard to the left. The rear wheels locked and the truck went into a slide: I guessed the idea was to crush me against the cop cars.

Nowhere to go now but up.

I swung my right foot onto the window ledge, using it as a stepping stool to heave myself onto the roof. At that second, as I threw my body across the top of the truck, Delivery Dude hit the barricade of police cars.

The impact hurled me across the span of the roof and off the opposite side, right over the driver’s window. I tumbled into empty space.

Lucky for me, one of the cop cars chasing us had rushed forward to box in the truck. I belly flopped onto the car’s hood, my forward motion hurling me straight at the windshield. I flipped off the hood at the instant the front bumper struck the side of the truck. I landed on my butt, sending a searing knifelike pain up my spine.

I looked up to see Delivery Dude looking right at me, wearing this strange, enigmatic smile. He was holding something in his hand as the cops swarmed the truck, guns drawn, all of them shouting for him to come out with his hands up.

Delivery Dude was holding a small black device in the middle of which, blinking red, was a button and, over which, his thumb hovered. And he was smiling at me.

He gave me a little nod as if to say, Touché, Kropp.

I screamed for them to get down, but nobody heard me. I took cover behind the cop car as his thumb came down.

The truck exploded in a blossom of boiling red fire. The shock wave knocked me backward and the heat from the blast sucked the last molecule of oxygen from my lungs.