Gone

CHAPTER 22

“Shit! Shit! Shit!” Vida cried as she watched the cops advance and the world end.

When she turned back toward the loading dock, she watched as the Triumph Dragons piled into the already-moving Audi. The sports car squealed past the SUV, almost hitting it as it headed east.

They were running. Good idea, Vida thought. Jorge wasn’t completely in the car when she slammed the SUV into drive and the accelerator into the floor.

She almost collided head-on with the first cop car as she roared out of the lot, heading west. In her rearview, she could see one of the unmarked cars fishtail and hammer after her, its blue light bubbling. It must have been some kind of souped-up copmobile, she thought, because after a minute, it really started gaining on them.

I can’t have that, Vida thought, instantly taking a left in the middle of the house-lined block.

The SUV lurched and almost tipped as it skidded sideways over a grassless lawn. Its big, screeching wheels caught a driveway, and then the front air bags went off in two loud, white puffs as the grille smashed through a chain-link fence into a backyard.

Wood crunched as they blurred through a play set and another wooden fence. Then they swerved alongside another stucco shitbox, veered onto another driveway, and were bouncing over the curb onto the street opposite the first.

Vida checked her mirrors. The following cop car was nowhere, at least for the moment. Wheels smoking, the big-block, four-hundred-horsepower engine howling, she hooked a right at the next corner, back toward the expressway.

Less than half a minute later, they’d made it. They turned another corner, and the on-ramp to the westbound San Bernardino was right there. In a minute, they would be on it and gone.

Instead of gunning it, though, Vida, biting her lip in concentration, pulled over on the shoulder under the expressway overpass beside the on-ramp and put the SUV into park.

“What are you waiting for?” Jorge said, banging on the dashboard. “Are you out of your mind? The cops are coming! I don’t want to go to jail. We need to get the hell out of here. Let’s go!”

Vida shook her head as she lifted her phone.

“Calm down. I won’t tell you twice,” she said. “You let me handle the cops. We can still get this done.”