Double Cross

Chapter 70

BREE’S VOICE WAS BACK in my earphone. “Keep all exits secure. Repeat. Keep all exits secure!” She was obviously in control. I wished I could say the same. “Alex? Alex? Can you hear me? Alex?”

“Bree! I’m here!”

“What’s going on? Talk to me. Where is here? Are you okay?”

The coupe took exactly the turn I thought it would and paralleled the thruway toward I-95. We were only a block from the hotel now, our starting point. This whole trip had been another game, hadn’t it? Was that right?

“Whoever it is, they’re going for the highway! The Miata’s headed to I-95! I still might take her.”

“Where, Alex? Which entrance?”

“Right by the damn hotel!”

I gripped the wheel, ready to take the ramp, but then the coupe flew right by it! A second later, so did I.

Now what?

Almost at the same time, the coupe’s brake lights showed. I heard the skid and saw the car do nearly a one eighty.

Even as I slammed my brakes, the Miata accelerated back in my direction. It swerved to miss me, and before I could even get turned around, the coupe was up the ramp, still accelerating. And gone in a cloud of dust.

“North on 95!” I yelled for Bree. “I’m still on her tail! For the moment.”

I sped up to the highway and maxed out the taxi at close to a hundred for a couple of exits. Eventually, I took my foot off the accelerator and slammed my fist into the passenger seat.

I turned around at the next exit.

Back at the hotel, Bree and Sampson were waiting out front, along with half a dozen Baltimore cruisers, their roof lights flashing in the darkness. Most of the Unhinged crowd was outside too, loving every second of this chaos and madness.

A three-hundred-pound biker with a white beard came charging up to me in the parking lot. “Hey, man, what the hell happened out there?”

“Get away,” I said without stopping. The biker cut me off again. He had on about a hundred-year-old Grateful Dead T.

“Just tell me -”

I was in his face now, and I wanted to pop someone. I might have if Sampson hadn’t grabbed me from behind. “Hey, hey, hey!” he was shouting-at me.

Then Bree came running up to us. “Jesus, are you okay?” she asked. “Alex?”

“I’m fine,” I said, trying to slow my breathing. “Listen, that might have been DCAK I was chasing. Another of his -”

“It wasn’t him,” Bree said, and shook her head. “And we’ve got to go right now.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked as she pushed me away from the crowd and all their eerie questions.

“I just got a call from Davies. Somebody was murdered at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. Stabbed to death in front of a crowd of people. He punked us, Alex. He got us real good this time. This whole thing was planned.”