A high-pitched whirr filled the room, then the catapult fired with a shrill hydraulic wail.
The car exploded off the catapult, zooming instantly to seventy-five miles per hour with Maloney stuck inside. His pathetic knowing stare on departure, as he left his empty blue gloves in her hands, would haunt Nikki’s nightmares for the rest of her life.
She spared herself watching the impact. His screams followed by the thunderclap of the collision told her all she need to know.
Rook, ass planted on the deck, struggled to his feet. “You can’t have too many of these,” he said, and tossed her the Smith & Wesson .40 that he had stripped off Maloney during his bailout.
Nikki checked the chamber indicator, saw brass, and ran to the control booth. She braced flat to the wall outside the door and called for Backhouse. Then she saw that the Mossberg was gone. A door slam reverberated from the far end of the hangar.
She told Rook to call 911, scooped her Sig Sauer from the floor on her way past, then sprinted to the exit. Instead of stepping out, she kicked the door open. A blast from the shotgun peppered the steel where she would have been standing. She rolled out, prone, ready to fire before he could rack another shell, but all she heard was two feet pounding across asphalt into the night.
The exit Backhouse used was on the opposite side of the hangar from the door they had come in through, so Nikki’s run took her around one corner, then another, before she got to the front of the building. From behind the parked eighteen-wheeler they had used for cover, she heard a car door slam, then saw headlights as Backhouse fired up the Police Interceptor.
Even riding an adrenaline rush, Heat knew her limits. In her weakened state from blood loss and the death struggle with Maloney, her legs had labored just to bring her this far around the building. Nikki calculated the distance to her Taurus and smelled a getaway. So, as the car backed out of its hiding place between the big rig and the wall, she didn’t even try to go after it. She cut the shorter distance across the parking lot to get ahead of it.
If Maloney had been half the cop he thought himself to be, he would have backed into the space for a rapid nose-first exit. But he wasn’t and he hadn’t. Now, forced to inch out of the narrow slot in reverse, Backhouse lost time and Nikki bought precious seconds in her desperate race to head him off.
Once Backhouse got clear of the tractor-trailer, rubber squawked once on the damp blacktop as he slammed the car into drive with too many rpm’s. Then he floored it, fishtailing from his standstill, tearing toward the gate. The V8’s roar broke through the night fog like the cry of some beast from a Gothic horror film.
Lungs rasping, legs leaden, Heat poured on all she had, willing her knees to kick high, putting her oxygen debt out of her mind. She didn’t want to lose speed by turning to look, but she could see from the flare of his headlights in her peripheral vision that Backhouse was gaining on her. Nikki stopped hearing her breath; stopped feeling like quitting; stopped doing anything but becoming a machine herself.
When Heat got to the guardhouse, she was going so fast, she slammed against it. The car was now fifty yards away, and hauling. She drew a gulp of air and stepped out right into the driveway, her Sig Sauer in one hand, the Smith & Wesson in the other. She made out Backhouse, in silhouette from the orange fog illuminating the parking lot behind him. He stopped and tried to bring up the shotgun. But the length of the Mossberg prevented him from clearing the dashboard to point it at her. He dropped the gun, hit his brights, and punched it.