Page 78 of Backtrack

A cloud of dust settled around Duvall’s pickup.

“Run him down!” Pink said.

Far from staggered by the impact of the accident, the deputy put a round through the passenger window. The bullet shattered the glass and passed inches in front of Duvall’s face before thwacking into the opposite door post.

Duvall cut the steering wheel hard left and stepped on the gas.

“What?” Pink snapped. “I thought you were—”

“He’s behind a tree, dumbass,” Duvall said. “I can’t run him down. Besides, the bastard appears to be a good shot. He’s liable to hit what he’s aiming at if we get any closer.”

Pink pulled the pistol from his waistband and pointed it out the shattered window. He didn’t expect to hit anything, but this cop had pissed him off. He had to do something. Even with the window broken, the gunshot inside the confined space of the pickup’s cab felt like an axe blow to the head.

“Knock that shit off!” Duvall barked over the ringing in Pink’s ears.

“Oh, I’m the dumbass,” Pink said. He pointed to the end of the lake with the barrel of his gun. “Why’d you go this way? There’s no way out.”

“You’re welcome,” Duvall said. “That cop would have killed one of us for sure. We’ll drop the truck and go get the Ford stashed at the cabin. Slip away and lay low for a while, figure out the diamonds later—”

Twisted in his seat to keep an eye on the deputy, Pink heard Duvall curse under his breath and turned, slamming his fist against the dashboard.

Dead ahead, a sedan came straight for them. Some two hundred yards away and closing, it was impossible to tell much about it, except for the flashing red and blue lights.

Pink pounded on the dash again. “Cut to the left!”

“There’s nothing up there but damned picnic tables! We can make it to the trees!”

Ahead, smoke poured from the oncoming patrol car’s tires.

Smoke?

Pink braced for impact. It took him a moment to realize what was happening.

Cutter stood on the brakes. He wasn’t about to let these outlaws get away, but a head-on collision was tantamount to certain death—or worse, a broken neck. He was far too occupied to do the math in his head, but he’d practiced tactical driving ad nauseum in Special Forces. The oncoming truck was traveling around fifty miles anhour, though it likely seemed faster to its occupants on the narrow lake road with their windows shot out. Cutter had hit sixty when he saw the black pickup ahead but bled the speed to thirty miles an hour by the time they were roughly two hundred yards apart. At those speeds, they would have collided in a hair over five seconds.

Cutter was able to skid his patrol car to a stop in a little over three, giving him two precious seconds to throw it into reverse and back out of the way as the black pickup flew past. He executed a textbook J-turn, bringing the Caprice’s front end around in a quick one-eighty, then threw the transmission into Drive. He accelerated smoothly to fall in behind the black dually.

He clenched his jaw, chuckling. There was nowhere for them to go—

A baby-faced giant leaned out the dually’s passenger window.

Ricky Pink.

A half a breath later, a bullet slapped the Caprice’s hood, gouging a long gash before it careened away. Firing from a moving vehicle at another moving vehicle was a crapshoot—but Cutter didn’t like even long odds when it came to taking a bullet.

He needed to end this.

Blossoms of fire flashed from Pink’s gun as Cutter closed the distance. None of the shots connected. Yet. Cutter caught the pickup fifty yards before the pavement gave way to grassy field. Still gaining, he nudged the steering wheel to the left, bringing the Caprice up on the side of the fleeing pickup. There was no need to think about what he did next. Cutter knew exactly what would happen.

This wasn’t the first time he’d been here.

CHAPTER 32

Drag racers when Cutter was in high school had called it nerfing, gently—or not so gently—bumping the fender of an opposing car during a race to nudge it out of the way. In 1947, when Wayne Cutter was sixteen years old, his father had nearly knocked his head off when he found the mangled front fender on the family’s Ford Super Deluxe. The old man, a racer himself—hence the speedy choice of a family car—had cooled quickly once young Cutter told him he won the race. A lot of water under the bridge since then, and a hell of a lot of nerfing. Cutter’s primary mission with the US Special Forces in West Berlin was to become a pain in the ass to Eastern Bloc forces should the Cold War turn hot. Aggressive driving would come in particularly handy.

The big dually weighed almost twice as much as the patrol car. But size wasn’t the deciding factor. Advancing quickly, Cutter aligned the front fender of his Caprice with the back fender of the pickup, just behind the wheels—and steered into it. The rear wheels lost traction and started to swing around, trying to swap ends with the front. Duvall overcorrected and the pickup left the pavement completely. It hit the grass shoulder sideways, rolling twice and coming to rest passenger window up in a cloud of dust and debris.

Cutter took his foot off the gas, bleeding speed before cutting the wheel. Facing his threat before the dust settled, he threw open his door and bailed out, using the post and engine block as cover while he scanned the scene from thirty feet away. The smell of engineoil and burning brakes filled the scorched air. Grasshoppers snapped and clicked as they fled the scene.