Sacred (Kenzie & Gennaro 3)

Angie bumped the back of the Lexus as the nose of Jay’s car slid to the left and his rear right wheel popped back up on the curb. Mr. Cushing kept the Lexus steady, grinding it into Jay’s car. A silver hubcap snapped off and banged off our grille, disappeared under the wheel. The 3000 GT, small and light, was no match for the Lexus, and any second it would be propelled broadside, and the Lexus would be free to push it straight off the bridge.

I could see Jay’s head as it bobbed back and forth and he fought the wheel as the Lexus ground harder against the driver’s side.

“Keep this steady,” I said to Angie and rolled down my window. I leaned my upper body out into the pelting rain and screaming wind and pointed my gun at the rear windshield of the Lexus. As the rain bit into my eyes, I fired three quick shots. The muzzle flashes exploded into the air like heat lightning, and the rear windshield of the Lexus collapsed all over the trunk. Mr. Cushing tapped his brakes and I jerked myself back inside as Angie rammed the Lexus and Jay’s car shot out ahead of it.

Jay came off the curb too fast, though, and the right wheels of the 3000 GT bounced off the ground and then rose into the air. Angie screamed, and muzzle flashes erupted from inside the Lexus.

The Celica’s windshield imploded.

The rain and wind launched a storm of glass through our hair and off our cheeks and necks. Angie swerved to the right and our tires ate curb again, the hubcaps crunching against the cement. The Toyota seemed to buckle into itself for a moment, then swerved back into the lane.

Ahead of us, Jay’s car flipped.

It bounced on the driver’s side, then rolled over onto its roof and the Lexus accelerated and hit it hard enough to send it spinning through the rain toward the bridge barrier.

“Screw these guys,” I said and rose off my seat and extended my body over the dashboard.

I leaned so far forward my wrists passed through the shattered windshield and rested on the car hood. I steadied my hand as tiny specks of glass bit into my wrists and face and fired another three shots into the interior of the Lexus.

I must have hit someone, because the Lexus jerked away from Jay’s car and swung back across the left lane. It hit the barrier under the last of the yellow fins so hard it bounced sideways and then backward, its heavy gold body jumping trunk first into both lanes ahead of us.

“Get back in,” Angie yelled at me as she swung the Celica to the right, trying to clear the trunk of the Lexus as it jumped across our path.

The gold machine floated through the night toward us. Angie turned the wheel with both hands, and I tried to get back into my seat.

I didn’t make it, and neither did Angie.

When we smashed into the Lexus, my body shot airborne. I cleared the hood of the Celica and landed on the trunk of the Lexus like a porpoise, my chest slashing through the beads of water and pebbled glass without slowing down much. I heard something crash on my right, a cement crashing that was so loud it sounded as if the night sky had been torn in half.

I hit the tarmac with my shoulder and something cracked by my collarbone. And I rolled. And flipped. And rolled some more. I held tight to the gun in my right hand, and it discharged twice as the sky spun and the bridge twirled and dipped.

I skidded to a stop on a bloody, howling hip. My left shoulder felt numb and flabby simultaneously, and my flesh was slick with blood.

But I could flex my right hand around the gun, and even though the hip I’d landed on felt as if it were filled with sharp stones, both legs felt solid. I looked back at the Lexus as the passenger door opened. It was about ten yards back, its trunk attached now to the crumpled hood of the Celica. A stream of hissing water shot from the Celica as I stood unsteadily, a tomato paste combination of rain and blood streaming down my face.

On my right, on the other side of the bridge, a black Jeep had skidded to a stop and the driver was shouting words at me that were lost in the wind and rain.

I ignored him and concentrated on the Lexus.

The Weeble fell to one knee as he climbed out of the Lexus, his white shirt saturated red, a meaty hole gouged across where his right eyebrow used to be. I limped toward him as he used the muzzle of his pistol to push himself off his knee. He gripped the open car door and watched me come, and I could tell by his bobbing Adam’s apple that he was swallowing hard against nausea. He looked down at the gun in his hand uncertainly, then at me.

“Don’t,” I said.

He looked down at his chest, at the blood pumping from somewhere in there, and his fingers tightened around his pistol.

“Don’t,” I said again.

Please don’t, I thought.

But he raised the gun anyway, blinking at me in the downpour, his small body wavering like a drunk’s.

I shot him twice in the center of the chest before his gun hand cleared his hip, and he flopped back against the car, his mouth forming a confused oval, as if he were about to ask me a question. He grabbed for the open door, but his arm slid down between the doorframe and the windshield pillar. His body began a cascade to his right, but his elbow got pinned between the door and the car, and he died there—half-pointed to the ground, vise-gripped to the car, the beginnings of a question lying stillborn in his eyes.

I heard a ratcheting sound, and I looked up over the roof of the car to see Mr. Cushing leveling a shiny shotgun at me. He sighted down the bore, one eye squinting shut, a bony white finger curled around the trigger. He smiled.

Then a puffy red cloud punched through the center of his throat and spit over the collar of his shirt.

He frowned. He reached a hand up toward his throat, but before it got there, he pitched forward and his face hit the car roof. The shotgun slid down the windshield, came to rest on the hood. Mr. Cushing’s tall thin body folded to its right and he disappeared on the other side of the hood, his body making a soft thump as it hit the ground.

Angie appeared in the darkness behind him, her gun still extended, the rain hissing off the hot barrel. Slivers of glass twinkled in her dark hair. Several razor-thin lacerations crisscrossed her forehead and the bridge of her nose, but otherwise she appeared to have survived the crash with a lot less damage than either the Weeble or I had.

I smiled at her, and she gave me a weary one in return.

Then she looked at something over my shoulder. “Jesus Christ, Patrick. Oh, Jesus.”

I turned, and that’s when I saw what had made the loud crashing noise when I was thrown from the Celica.

Jay’s 3000 GT sat upside down fifty feet away. Most of the car had smashed through the barrier, and I was momentarily amazed that it hadn’t dropped off the bridge entirely. The rear third of the car was perched on the bridge. The front two thirds hovered over nothing at all, the car held to the bridge by nothing more than crumbling cement and two mangled steel coils. As we watched, the front of the car dipped slightly into space, and the rear rose off the cement foundation. The steel coils creaked.