Chương 12
Three miles past the Newport turnoff, the red taillights of distant traffic appeared through the humid mist rising off the marsh canals.
A flatbed lumber truck in the right lane. A dark sedan passing it on the left. And half a mile ahead of them, a tall, boxy silhouette throwing dull halogen beams onto the wet macadam.
A white Ford Econoline with no side windows.
I eased the F-250 into the left lane, letting the speed build to eighty-five. The wind screamed through the weather stripping around the driver's side door. The heavy iron bumper of my truck, welded out of four-inch structural steel back when I used it to haul cedar logs out of the Dismal Swamp, sat thirty inches off the ground.
The van was cruising at sixty, hugging the right lane with the mechanical steadiness of a driver who believed his paperwork made him untouchable.
I didn't turn on my high beams. I didn't honk.
I pulled up into their blind spot, matching their speed for three long seconds. Through the tinted passenger window of the van, I could see two men in the front buckets. The driver was a thick-necked kid with a buzz cut and a dark windbreaker; the passenger was older, hunched over a glowing tablet computer, a laminated county access badge swinging from his rearview mirror.
In the back, behind the steel security partition, a faint amber interior light illuminated the silhouette of a stretcher locked into the floor tracks.
Lainey.
I pulled the F-250 forward until my front right quarter-panel was aligned with the van’s rear wheel well.
Then I laid on the horn—one long, deafening blast that shattered the stillness of the Croatan woods.
The driver glanced to his left. His eyes widened behind the glass as he recognized the battered brown hood and the gray-haired woman staring back at him across three feet of empty space. He reached down with his right hand, reaching for something on the floorboard or grabbing a radio handset.
He didn't hit the brakes. He swerved left, deliberately trying to crowd me into the concrete median barrier that divided the highway.
"Wrong answer," I muttered.
I tapped the brakes, dropping back just enough to let his front bumper sweep through the air where my door had been half a second earlier. The moment his momentum carried him across the center line, I hit the throttle and turned hard into his right rear quarter-panel.
It wasn't a blind crash; it was a precision pit maneuver executed at fifty miles an hour.
The steel bumper of the F-250 caught the light sheet metal of the Econoline's rear corner with a shriek of tearing steel and exploding taillight plastic. The van’s rear tires lost their grip on the damp asphalt. The vehicle began to fishtail, its tall center of gravity working against the driver as he overcorrected to the right.
The van spun a full ninety degrees, rubber smoking against the macadam, before sliding sideways off the shoulder and into the shallow, pine-choked ditch that bordered the swamp.
It didn't roll. The ditch was wide, choked with heavy reeds and soft black muck that absorbed the vehicle's momentum with a massive, sucking thump. The Econoline came to a dead stop, tilted at a twenty-degree angle against a stand of young sweetgum trees, steam hissing violently from a punctured radiator hose.
I threw the F-250 into park on the shoulder, pulled the emergency brake, and left the engine running, the high beams pinning the crashed van like a specimen under glass.
I reached behind the bench seat of my cab and pulled out my twenty-four-inch framing pry-bar—a solid piece of forged steel with an angled chisel edge.
My boots hit the gravel with a heavy, crunching rhythm. The smell of hot coolant and scorched rubber hung thick in the cool air, mixed with the sulfurous rot of the swamp muck.
The driver’s side door of the van had been crushed shut against the mud bank. From inside the cab, I heard men shouting, followed by the dull, hollow thud of someone kicking against the passenger side door.
May you like
The passenger door flew open.
The older man tumbled out into the wet sawgrass, coughing, holding a sprained wrist against his ribs. He looked up, squinting into the blinding glare of my headlights, and saw me coming down the incline with the pry-bar held low in my right hand.
