Gone (Michael Bennett)

completely surrounded!”

CHAPTER 22
     
    “SHIT! SHIT! SHIT!” VIDA cried as she watched the cops advance and the world end.
    When she turned back toward the loading dock, she watched as the Triumph Dragons piled into the already-moving Audi. The sports car squealed past the SUV, almost hitting it as it headed east.
    They were running. Good idea , Vida thought. Jorge wasn’t completely in the car when she slammed the SUV into drive and the accelerator into the floor.
    She almost collided head-on with the first cop car as she roared out of the lot, heading west. In her rearview, she could see one of the unmarked cars fishtail and hammer after her, its blue light bubbling. It must have been some kind of souped-up copmobile, she thought, because after a minute, it really started gaining on them.
    I can’t have that , Vida thought, instantly taking a left in the middle of the house-lined block.
    The SUV lurched and almost tipped as it skidded sideways over a grassless lawn. Its big, screeching wheels caught a driveway, and then the front air bags went off in two loud, white puffs as the grille smashed through a chain-link fence into a backyard.
    Wood crunched as they blurred through a play set and another wooden fence. Then they swerved alongside another stucco shitbox, veered onto another driveway, and were bouncing over the curb onto the street opposite the first.
    Vida checked her mirrors. The following cop car was nowhere, at least for the moment. Wheels smoking, the big-block, four-hundred-horsepower engine howling, she hooked a right at the next corner, back toward the expressway.
    Less than half a minute later, they’d made it. They turned another corner, and the on-ramp to the westbound San Bernardino was right there. In a minute, they would be on it and gone.
    Instead of gunning it, though, Vida, biting her lip in concentration, pulled over on the shoulder under the expressway overpass beside the on-ramp and put the SUV into park.
    “What are you waiting for?” Jorge said, banging on the dashboard. “Are you out of your mind? The cops are coming! I don’t want to go to jail. We need to get the hell out of here. Let’s go!”
    Vida shook her head as she lifted her phone.
    “Calm down. I won’t tell you twice,” she said. “You let me handle the cops. We can still get this done.”

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