Criss Cross

Chapter 55

I sped up as I snatched my pistol from my shoulder holster and set it on my lap.

The BMW kept coming, headlights on high.

My left hand went to the side-view mirror control; I flipped it to the right and eased off on the gas pedal. The SUV closed the gap as we passed the Minnesota Avenue Metro stop.

He tried to come right up on my bumper, his high beams filling my car. But then I twitched the control on the passenger-side mirror.

Two years before, my older son, Damon, had been backing up in a crowded parking lot and grazed a telephone pole with that mirror. The accident bent the mirror mount slightly, which, we discovered, had a strange usefulness: if someone came up behind you with his headlights blazing, you could tilt the mirror up and in, and the other car’s right headlight beam would be reflected back at the driver.

Which is exactly what happened. When the BMW was about fifteen feet off my bumper, its right high beam reflected off the mirror and shone dead in the driver’s eyes.

He threw a hand up and hit the brakes as I goosed the Mercedes’s accelerator. I opened a gap of sixty yards passing Eastland Gardens.

But I was so shocked at what I’d just seen, I barely noticed.

In the split second before the driver threw up his arm and hit the brakes, I’d gotten a look at him: a man in a dark suit and tie, black gloves, mid-forties, tinted glasses, sandy-blond hair, and the unmistakable nose, cheekbones, and prominent chin of disgraced and deceased former FBI special agent Kyle Craig.

The mental images of Craig throwing up his arm to block the glare were so vivid they almost blinded me to a panel van coming off the ramp from Maryland State Highway 50.

I hit the brakes, and the van swerved, horn honking, just in front of me. We barely missed colliding.

When I was sure we were not going to hit, I looked frantically in the rearview and side-view mirrors, trying to see the BMW. But it wasn’t back there.

Indeed, there were no headlights anywhere close behind me. Impossible.

I clawed at the passenger-side mirror control and this time aimed it wide to the right. I caught flashes of the BMW running dark under the highway lights and coming up alongside me so fast, I got rattled.

I knew I should pull an evasive maneuver, hit the brakes, and let him pass. Instead, I rolled down the passenger-side window and kept glancing over, trying to see Craig through the tinted windows even as I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the man was dead and gone.

The panel van hit the brakes in front of me. I had no choice but to do the same. The BMW shot forward and passed into my headlight glare.

The driver-side window rolled down. I couldn’t see his face, but I sure heard his voice. It seemed to boom back at me.

“M said you’d never learn, Cross!”

Then his gloved hand came out of the window and whipped something sideways and back at me. A blue balloon burst off my windshield, coating it with dark liquid and blocking my view.

I hit the brakes hard and swerved right, praying I could see something of the road in that bent side-view mirror. When I got over on the shoulder, I was gasping, sweating. Whatever liquid was in the balloon was now smeared across my windshield, and my headlights looked like they had a copper tint.

I almost pressed the spray button on my wiper control, but something stopped me. From the glove box, I retrieved my Maglite, then I got out on the passenger side to avoid being run over by passing cars.

The BMW and the panel van were nowhere to be seen as I stepped up next to the front quarter panel and shone the flashlight on my windshield. The liquid was a deep, dark red and already setting up into a tacky gel in the cooling breeze.

I touched some, rubbed it between my fingers, and then sniffed enough of a copper odor to know the blood was not fake.