Somewhere, I thought I smelled gasoline.
I looked ahead, and Gary was on the move, closing in at two o’clock. I moved the shift lever back into drive, steered right, and went for him. He dove farther right but I kept on going, smashing through the door and frosted window glass of Laura’s office. Shards flew across the crumpled hood and slid over the dashboard.
Carter, no longer screaming, was hanging off my door like a rag doll.
The rear window on the passenger side suddenly exploded. It had been shot out. I didn’t have time to see where Gary was. I backed out of Laura’s office at high speed, went barreling halfway across the showroom, and smashed into the other end of the Element, threw the van back in drive and hurtled forward, this time taking out the office next to Laura’s. The leasing manager’s. He would not be pleased.
More shots rang out. Gary was running around to the far perimeter of the showroom, using the smashed cars as cover. I was leaning over as far as I could while driving, using the van’s doors and the dashboard for my own cover.
Car alarms continued to whoop.
Again, I put the van into reverse and my foot to the floor. The only thing I didn’t want to hit was Andy’s body, and I was worried the van was heading in that direction, so I pulled left on the wheel, glanced back, broadsided the Element again, and before I’d even turned to look forward I’d put the car in drive and given it gas.
I swung my head around, looked ahead, and there was Gary.
He was between the van and the Accord. He was holding the gun in both hands, arms outstretched, taking a bead on me.
He shifted slightly to the left. I turned left and kept on going.
The gun fired, but it went off just as the van connected with Gary, so the bullet angled up toward the ceiling. There was, maybe, a hundredth of a second when all Gary was feeling was the front of the van barreling into him. By the time that hundredth of a second had passed, he was feeling the Accord at his back.
If he made a sound when the life was crushed out of him, it couldn’t be heard for the tearing and wrenching of sheet metal. At the moment of impact, the gun flew out of his hand and sailed over the van, landing somewhere on the showroom floor behind me.
Gary’s mouth was frozen into a grotesque grin, his face smeared with blood.
I sat there a moment, letting the engine idle. I looked out my window. Carter appeared to be as dead as Gary. It must have been when his lower body hit the Civic and was dragged across it. Maybe the impact severed his spine. I powered the window down an inch, freeing Carter’s wrist and allowing him to slide to the floor.
The engine was still running, the alarms were still blaring, but a moment of calm washed over me.
“Don’t move, motherfucker!”
I glanced up in my rearview mirror. It was Owen, holding the gun that had flown out of Gary’s hands.
I don’t know quite how to explain this. I’d been terrified through everything that had happened so far, but now… now I was just annoyed.
I put the car into reverse and gave it everything I had.
The tires squealed again and the van powered its way past the Pilot, kept on going, took out my desk, and then there was a huge crash as the tail end went through the massive plate-glass window.
The ass end of the van dropped two feet to the ground, the front end went skyward. The front wheels, suspended in midair, spun at high speed.
I looked down between the seat and the door, knowing Carter’s gun was there someplace.
Now there was a new noise added to the mix. My going through the showroom glass had activated the building’s security alarm.
The van was so out of kilter I couldn’t get a look at the showroom, didn’t know where Owen was. I twisted in my seat, shoved my right arm down in the narrow space between the door and the seat.
I found the gun. I slipped my fingers around something cold and slender, what had to be the barrel. I fished it up between the seat and the door, thought I had it, but as I tried to clear the gun butt past the seatback adjustment lever, it slipped from my hand and dropped back down, farther out of reach than it had been before.
Beneath the sirens, I thought I could hear someone walking across broken glass. Owen was working his way around the van.
“You’re not going anyplace now!” he shouted.
Through the open windshield, there was the flickering of light. It took a second for me to realize it was from flames.
I jammed my hand down into the space again, hunted around for the gun. It was caught under the edge of a floor mat. I got my fingers around the barrel again, pulled the gun back up, turned it around so that my hand wrapped around the butt, the finger around the trigger.
Suddenly my door was yanked open. The crash must have somehow released the lock.
Owen said, “Hey, asshole, I’m going to—”