“Fuck,” Dryden whispered.
It happened so smoothly, nobody in the restaurant noticed. The kid stepped outside, and the blond man tapped him on the shoulder. One of the guy’s hands went to his rear waistband and retrieved the gun, though Dryden never caught sight of it. The blond man kept it low, mostly hidden by the newspaper, though visible to the kid.
The guy said something. It took about three seconds. It ended with now.
The kid nodded and continued to the Tahoe. He got in on the driver’s side, and the blond man got in on the passenger side.
Just like that.
The Tahoe started and rolled out of the lot, the Taurus pulling out ahead of it and taking the lead.
For the second time, Dryden fell into place behind them.
*
The two vehicles stayed tight together. They turned inland on a two-lane that led out of town toward the low, parched foothills of the mountains.
Seeking a quiet place to stop and tie the kid up properly, Dryden was sure—or simply kill him. Holding a victim at gunpoint and making him drive was not a good strategy in the long term. It was good for a few minutes, maybe. Not even then, if the victim was clever enough or desperate enough.
If the kid was who Dryden guessed he was—he was far from sure—then the clever part might be covered. Maybe the desperate part, too.
Dryden took the turn and hung back two hundred yards. The traffic wasn’t sparse enough yet to give him away, if he kept some distance.
He had no real plan for when it did get sparse. There was nothing to build a plan around. If they spotted him, they would react, one way or another, and he would improvise.
A mile inland from town, the Taurus put on its blinker and turned right onto a gravel lane that led upward into the hill country. An old logging road from a hundred years back, maintained now for hikers and the fire department. The Tahoe followed.
Dryden took the turn and saw the two vehicles ahead of him, passing through the outlying trees of the forest that covered the higher slopes.
Just beyond the first curve among the trees, the Taurus passed a white pine on the right side of the road, as thick as a telephone pole.
The Tahoe didn’t.
It jerked to the right and slammed into the tree trunk at 40 miles per hour, taking the impact on the passenger side.
Even from far behind, Dryden could see the windows on that side of the vehicle burst and spray pebbles of glass from buckled frames.
The SUV’s back end kicked around to the left, like a toy vehicle struck by a hammer. It swung out into the narrow road, kicking up a dust cloud off the gravel and coming to rest with just enough room to get past its back corner.
Dryden floored the Explorer, pushing it to 60. The wrecked SUV and the dust cloud obscured his view of everything beyond the crash site—but he already knew what he would see there: the Taurus, stopped, the dark-haired man shoving his door open, pistol already in hand.
Dryden steered past the Tahoe’s back bumper, burst through the dust cloud, and saw those things exactly.
The dark-haired man was ten feet from the Taurus’s open door, gun low at his side, running toward the wreck.
At the sight of the oncoming Explorer, the man froze. His brain was trying to process the new arrival, what it meant, and what he might do about it. He was a quarter second into that endeavor when Dryden hit him, still doing 60. The Explorer’s grille caught him low in the chest, punching him backward off his feet. His neck snapped downward and his face hit the vehicle’s hood with a heavy thud. An instant later the body was airborne, flung out ahead in a long, low arc, like the path of a thrown horseshoe.
He landed deep among the trees beside the road, dead beyond any doubt.
Dryden braked, skidded to a halt, dropped the Explorer into park, and shoved open his door. He sprinted for the crashed Tahoe, drawing one of Claire’s Berettas as he ran.
The wreck was spectacular. The passenger side was compressed around the pine trunk as if its hood were made of aluminum foil. The crumple zones in the front three feet of the vehicle had done their job, but all the same, hitting a tree at 40 brought all kinds of unforgiving physics into play.
Dryden reached the driver’s-side door. The window there had burst, too, though the door itself was mostly undamaged.
His eyes went to the details of the vehicle’s interior, logging them in rapid succession.
The blond gunman was dead. He had worn his seat belt, but the passenger air bag had apparently been switched off. Maybe the kid had known that. Maybe he’d even hit the button to disable it, in the instant before jerking the wheel. Either way, the gunman’s head had collided with the metal windshield column, which had bent inward in the crash. The guy’s body hung slack, leaning forward over the footwell with his arms and head draped. There was blood coming out of his head at about half the volume of a faucet tap, pattering the floor with a sound like rain spilling from a downspout. Cerebral hemorrhaging. The guy was long gone.