White-Hot Hack (Kate and Ian #2)(80)

The speedometer reading had fallen to seventy-nine miles per hour by then, and the police car directly behind them was almost touching the Porsche’s bumper. Zach had nowhere else to go. But it appeared he had some sort of last-ditch, Hail Mary pass up his sleeve because there was a bridge up ahead, and though his speed continued to fall, Zach aimed the car at one of the concrete pillars that supported it.



In Charlie’s office, he and Ian waited.

“What’s happening?” Ian asked, pointing at the phones Charlie still held in each hand.

“I don’t know. Dispatch hung up on me as soon as the police had her in their sights.” Charlie paused, then asked Chad and Steve, who were still on the line, “Can you see her?” He looked at Ian and shook his head.

It was a blessing, really, because it meant none of them would know about the bridge.



Seventy-eight, seventy-seven, seventy-six.

Zach veered suddenly to the left, bumping the patrol car that had figured out what he was about to do and was trying to box him in.

Seventy, sixty-nine, sixty-eight.

Kate felt the bump when the tires left the pavement and bounced along the grassy area toward the pillar.

She screamed and covered her head with her arms. Still too fast, she thought.

Too fast, too fast, too fast.





CHAPTER FORTY

She felt like she was floating. I must be dreaming, Kate thought. Ian was with her, but when she tried to speak to him, no words would come out. Zach was there too, his expression full of fury, and Kate squeezed her eyes shut and plunged into the safety of the darkness until there was only black. The dreams kept coming. Sometimes she heard voices and people softly saying her name. Sometimes there were shadowy images near her face that seemed familiar.

The next day, when the fog of sedation finally dissipated and she awakened fully, Ian was there beside the bed, holding her hand. There were tears in his eyes.

“Did I lose the baby?” she asked. That had to be the reason he looked so sad.

He stroked her forehead lightly “The baby’s just fine. Heartbeat’s strong.” His hand was resting lightly on her stomach, and it was only then that she felt the strap of the heart rate monitor under his palm and noticed the machine next to the bed recording every beat of their child’s heart. “Are you in pain? Your ankle was badly broken.”

Kate shook her head. They must have her on some pretty powerful medication because she couldn’t feel anything at all, at least not right now. “It was my fault. It was the picture I sent to Helena. That’s how Zach found us.”

“None of this is your fault,” he said.

“I wasn’t fearless. I was scared.”

“I’m so sorry, sweetness.”

She started to cry in earnest then, and he leaned over the bed and put his arms around her until she calmed down, her sobs tapering off and her eyelids growing heavy again.

“Hey, sis,” Chad said appearing at the other side of the bed. He smiled at her and laid his hand on her shoulder. “Dad left to get Mom. She’s freaking out a little. They should be back soon.”

“Chad.” She was so happy to see him, but she struggled to get the word out.

“You go to sleep, okay? We’ll be right here when you wake up.”

She tried to answer him, but the darkness swallowed her again.



Ian watched as the nurses shuffled in and out, checking Kate’s vital signs and assuring him that rest was the best thing for her. The doctor had come in earlier to explain the possible risks to the baby if Kate were to have surgery to set her ankle, but after hearing them, she wouldn’t even consider it. Instead, they put her in a splint while they waited for the swelling to go down and would switch her to a cast in a couple of weeks. In addition to her broken ankle, she had numerous cuts and bruises, including a rather vicious one on her hip. She’d lost consciousness for a brief period of time right after the crash, but the doctors said she’d escaped any measurable head trauma and in time, all her injuries would heal.

She had still been strapped into the passenger seat awaiting the paramedics who would safely extricate her from the vehicle and load her into the ambulance when Steve and Chad reached the scene. They crossed the median and screeched to a halt, parking their car haphazardly in the sea of flashing lights and police cars amid the bits of rubber and pieces of metal scattered in a wide swath under the bridge. Steve rode with Kate in the back of the ambulance to a hospital ten miles down the road, just across the border between West Virginia and Ohio. When the second ambulance arrived at the hospital thirty minutes later, it arrived without lights or sirens and with considerably less urgency. Zach Nielsen had gone through the windshield at the moment of impact, and Chad had watched as they zipped his battered remains into the bag that lay open on the grass.

Unless Kate could shed some light on it, they would never know if he’d hit the bridge pillar because he’d lost control or if his actions had been intentional.



In the days that followed, the cities affected by the blackout gradually came back online. It took almost seventy-two hours to restore power to all the residents, but the repercussions were much less severe than they could have been, and miraculously, there were no lives lost. Spring was only a few weeks away, so they did not have to battle extreme heat or cold, and there were numerous reports of communities coming together to help those in need.