Gone

CHAPTER 23

Everyone in the suv except Vida turned and looked back as the cop car that was following them screamed past on the perpendicular street behind them. Then they watched as it hit its brakes and swung around.

“They saw us! How about now? Can we go now?” Jorge wanted to know.

Vida shook her head.

“Out, men,” she said calmly. “Lay down suppressing fire.”

“Suppressing fire?!” Jorge yelled.

Vida placed her machine pistol to the young man’s temple.

“That means you, too, Jorge. Time to grow some hair on that chest. Get the fuck out of this truck!”

In the falling dusk, in the middle of the busy city street, the cartel hit team poured out of the vehicle and immediately opened fire on the approaching Crown Victoria. Against the iron-and-concrete tunnel of the overpass, the sudden rattling blast of the half-dozen fully automatic AR-15s and AK-47s going off at once was pants wetting. The oncoming cop car swung sideways and halted in the middle of the street, its perforated hood smoking, its windshield torn to shreds.

Still the cartel soldiers fired, without letup. Their shooting stance was textbook, rifle stocks tucked high in the shoulder as they smoothly squeezed off round after round after round.

Despite the war thundering around her, Vida’s eyes were wide open as she put the SUV into drive.

Seconds later, the Triumph Dragons’ Audi A4 appeared in the cross street in front of her, from the east. It was headed directly toward the on-ramp on her left, like she’d predicted. She stomped the accelerator into the floor.

She timed it perfectly. The Cadillac Escalade plowed directly into the side of the small, speeding Audi in a horrible crunch of metal. The Audi, spinning in a dog squeal of rubber, hit two other cars waiting at the light before it came to a stop.

Amid the automatic gunfire and screaming citizens, Vida exited from the now-smoking Escalade with the machine pistol. The Triumph Dragons in the crumpled Audi were moaning as she walked over the broken glass. She emptied a clip into the wreckage, then reloaded and gave each man another short burst in the head just to be sure.

She dropped the machine pistol and took out her phone. People who had been waiting at the light abandoned their vehicles. Between the pauses in the gunfire behind her, she could hear sirens approaching in the distance. Then the phone was finally answered.

“Where are you?” Vida said. “We are in El Monte, just before the Peck Road on-ramp. We need you here now.”

“Thirty seconds,” a voice told her.

Moments later, she could hear them coming. The dozen-strong motorcycle pack that had passed her earlier suddenly poured off the expressway, their big Ninja and Hayabusa bikes raging and growling like starving grizzlies.

They were the insurance plan, Jorge’s buddies, MS-13 members, their backup in case things went to shit. And, boy, had things gone to shit.

Her soldiers, still under the overpass, dropped their guns and rushed forward and hopped onto the backs of the now-halted bikes. Vida counted heads and waited until Jorge and everyone else was accounted for before she hopped onto the back of one of the Jap bikes herself.

Then they all were accelerating, leaving the wreckage and dead Triumph Dragons and sirens behind as they roared out onto the expressway.

That’s the way it’s done, Vida thought as they zipped down the shoulder, the hundred-mile-an-hour wind ripping at her short hair. Stick and move. Get in, do damage, get out. Manuel wouldn’t have done it any other way.

Vida allowed herself a tiny smile as she snuggled tighter into the driver. He opened it up, and LA warped into long streaks of white lines and yellow light.