“Daddy, watch out!” Annie yells, but another blast booms between the houses, or maybe even two. Annie screams, but Mia’s scream overrides hers, and then I hear Serenity shouting something that sounds like orders until another blast silences her.
The frantic whine of an overdriven engine cuts through the din, then the screech of brakes punctuates the whine. I’m trying to move, but whatever hit me scrambled my nervous system. I try to tell Annie to get into the house, but nothing comes from my throat. She’s on her knees beside me, looking down into my eyes with utter terror on her face. I want to comfort her, but the pain arcing through my back has paralyzed my vocal cords.
“There she is!” shouts a male voice. “Get her! Grab the kid!”
The predatory eyes of Snake Knox fill my mind, and I pray that voice did not come from his throat.
“Annie, get back in the Yukon!” yells a man who sounds like our driver. “Get inside NOW!”
He’s right, I realize. The Yukon’s armored. It’s the closest safe place—
But it might as well be the moon. Annie has hardly turned toward the vehicle when a man clad in black leather grabs her beneath the arms and snatches her bodily into the air. Filled with rage and terror, I try to roll over, but I can’t do it.
The man carrying my daughter runs toward the open door of a gold minivan parked in the middle of Washington Street. Annie is screaming “Daddy!” at the top of her lungs, but I can’t even get to my knees, much less my feet.
A man in a black business suit suddenly materializes at the rear of the Yukon—our driver. He’s pointing a pistol at the man carrying Annie.
“PUT THE GIRL DOWN!” he yells.
Confident that Annie will serve as a human shield, her kidnapper ignores the order.
Shoot him! I yell silently. Shoot now or she’s lost forever!
Then the familiar pop-pop of a handgun echoes between the houses, and our driver falls facedown in the road, blood pouring from his head.
Like the conclusion of a slow-motion nightmare, the man in black leather pushes Annie through the broad side door of the minivan, her eyes bulging white with panic. Some feeling has returned to my legs, but I still can’t get them under me. Before I can stand, my daughter will be a mile away, disappearing into oblivion. The space between our locked eyes arcs with the pain of knowing we will never see each other again.
Then Mia Burke sprints from the Yukon to the van and grabs hold of Annie like a young mother possessed. The kidnapper slugs the side of Mia’s head, but Mia doesn’t even slack off pulling.
“Get her off me!” yells the guy. “Get her off me! Crazy bitch!”
From nowhere a second man in black motorcycle leathers appears, but as he reaches for Annie, two quick shots erupt from the far side of the Yukon, and he drops like a deer shot through the spine. Then Serenity Butler appears in the space Mia crossed seconds ago—only Tee has a pistol in her hand. My heart leaps, but another blast rattles the windows of the houses, and Serenity spins and falls beside the van. Her open eyes stare blankly at the sky.
“Get that kid in here, damn it!” shouts a voice from inside the van. “We ain’t got all fuckin’ day!”
“Get this hellcat off me, Axel! Somebody shoot her!”
They have guys on the rooftops, I realize. That’s who shot Tim and me. And Joe. And the driver . . . And Tee—
The leather-clad biker finally hammers an elbow into Mia’s ribs, which gives him enough separation to yank Annie through the van’s door. But even as he does, Mia jumps in after her. The biker kicks Mia with his boots, but the van lurches forward, throwing him off balance, and then screeches to a stop again. The boots go back to pounding Mia, kicking hard as she clings to the door frame. Again the tires squeal, and the engine roars as the van accelerates up Washington Street, slowly gathering speed.
A bolt of panic drives me up onto all fours. As I struggle to get my feet under me, I hear Serenity groan in pain. Looking up, I see her on her feet, shaking her right arm as if to get it working again. Then she roars a curse and takes off after the van. Only then do I realize there’s no longer a pistol in her hand.
Nothing can stop that van now.
A horror movie unspools behind my eyes, torture-porn written and directed by Snake Knox: Annie and Mia tormented in front of each other, and for a camera, so that my father and I will have to watch every moment of—
The Yukon, I remember.
But by the time I reach my feet, the minivan is just twenty yards from the end of the block, Serenity trailing far behind it. If they make that turn, Annie will disappear off the face of the earth. As my eyes follow the van, an image beyond my capacity for understanding appears. At the end of the block, a man wearing a white cowboy hat has stepped from behind the Episcopal Church and dropped to one knee. The mysterious cowboy raises a pistol with one hand and takes careful aim at the windshield of the van.
Don’t! I think. Don’t risk it!
But something about the stance of the man in the white hat resonates within me. That’s Walt Garrity. The old Texas Ranger has been with us all along, and now the future has coalesced into a single moment . . .
One shot—
Walt’s muzzle flash reaches me before the sound of the blast, and I know instantly that Walt missed, because the van doesn’t even falter.
Walt fires again.
This time the van bucks like a tripping horse. Then its motor revs wildly, and the vehicle careens over the curb and up onto the sidewalk, plowing over Walt before he can roll away. The grille crashes through a crape myrtle trunk, rams the great concrete steps of the Episcopal Church, and stops dead, steam pouring from its radiator.
Far ahead of me, Serenity swiftly closes the distance to the van and wrenches open the door without hesitation. As she leaps inside, I finally regain enough muscular control to draw my pistol and start staggering toward the church.
There’s a struggle going on in the van, but I can’t tell who’s winning. As I close the distance, I hear screaming that sounds like Annie, which is good, because you have to be alive to scream. Then a door opens on the far side and a man in black leather bolts from the vehicle and sprints down South Commerce, toward Homochitto Street. Though it kills me to do it, in my desperation to reach Annie, I run past Walt’s bloody body to the open door of the van.
The first thing I see is the driver, his skull blown apart by a hollow-point slug. There’s blood on every surface, including the people, but what confuses me is what the people are doing. Serenity is naked above the waist, and she’s frantically rubbing her left breast and arm while Annie and Mia watch with wide eyes.
“What happened?” I shout.
“He threw acid on Tee!” Annie cries. “She was fighting him. And she was winning! He decided to run, but as he got out, he grabbed a plastic thing and hit Tee with it. It was acid!”
“I had the tube Drew gave me in my pocket,” Mia says. “The gluconate stuff. She’s rubbing it on now.”