Storm Front

phone call from Awad, and maybe Bauer, probably two miles and probably three or four minutes from the Perkins, if he put his foot on the floor, which he did.
    He had flashers, and he turned them on as he bolted away from the curb, onto Mulberry, across the bridge, onto the 169 ramp, and up the highway.
    As he rolled, Virgil shouted, “Keep talking to me . . . keep talking.”
    Shrake called to Jenkins, “You better get down here, something’s happening.”
    —
    M A PULLED into the Perkins parking lot, again with the feeling that something was about to happen. She didn’t trust Bauer, but then, she didn’t have to trust him. Just getting him here was part of her function. She pulled in, waited; another minute, and another pickup pulled in, went past her, parked, and a large man got out and walked into the restaurant. Through the lighted windows, she saw him talking to the cashier, and then follow her back to a booth, and take a menu.
    Fat raindrops began splattering off the tarmac, and off the windshield, drops the size of marbles, bringing with it the fresh-air smell of an incoming storm. She’d seen it on the television radar, earlier, and it wasn’t much, but it would rain hard for a while.
    Another minute, and Bauer pulled in, and up next to her driver’s side.
    Bauer got out of the far side of the Range Rover, holding a folded newspaper over his head to fend off the rain, and walked around, and she dropped her window and he asked, “You got it?”
    “I do,” she said. “Come on around to the other side.”
    “Let’s get it out where I can see it.”
    “It’ll be pouring in a minute—why don’t you get your camera, and we’ll just get in, and we’ll—” She saw movement in the Range Rover, through the glass on the passenger-side window. “Who’s that with you?”
    Bauer said, “Nobody.”
    Ma noticed that the window was down an inch or so, so that a person inside the Range Rover could hear their conversation.
    She said, “What’s this?” and reached for the keys, but as she started the engine, the passenger door on the Range Rover popped open and a woman jumped out and she had a gun in her hand and she pointed it at Ma’s face and the woman screamed, “The stone! Give us the stone!”
    Ma, suddenly over her head, shifted into reverse, but that wouldn’t work, and Bauer said, “The stone, the stone,” and to the woman, “Don’t point the gun! Don’t point the gun—”
    The woman screamed again and Ma shouted back, “Okay, okay, okay . . .”
    She reached into the foot well on the passenger seat and came up with the bowling bag. As she passed it out the window to the woman, the woman screamed at Bauer, “Drive! Drive!” Bauer hurried around the back of the Range Rover and climbed inside, and the woman got in, taking the gun with her.
    Ma said, “Bullshit,” and hit the gas, backing the truck around in a circle until it was directly behind the Range Rover. Out her driver’s-side window, she saw the big man who’d arrived in the pickup burst out of the restaurant, and at the same moment, a cop-looking car, like an old-model highway patrol car, bumped one wheel over a curb and banged into the parking lot, coming fast.
    Virgil,
she thought.
    —
    B AUER SAW THE CAR COMING , and Ma’s truck now parked behind him, Zahavi shouting, “Go! Go!” and Bauer said, “That fuckin’ Flowers.”
    His Range Rover was facing a highway ditch just past a flagpole, and with Ma where she was, he couldn’t go anywhere but forward. He did that, flooring it, and the truck lurched forward, plowed across the ditch, and swerved onto the highway. Six seconds later he was accelerating through sixty miles an hour. In his rearview mirror, he saw Ma buck onto the highway—she’d taken the same shortcut as he had—and then a car swerve out after them. They were a quarter mile behind, though, and he was still gaining.
    “Get out in the country and I’ll find a road that’ll trash them,” he said to Zahavi. “Look for a turnoff.”
    She said, “Police.”
    The rain was coming hard now, in sheets, the lightning almost constant, thunder banging on the roof of the car like a bass drum. Bauer saw emergency flashers, closing fast. Much closer, a road cut off to the right. “Hang on,” he said. They took the turn, accelerated again, down a street with houses on one side, commercial buildings on the other. Bauer checked the nav system and could see that he was coming to a T