Abuse of Power - Michael Savage [2]
“I said out! Do it now or you’re a dead man!”
The Arab popped the lock and opened the door. He seemed resigned to losing his car. Jamal stepped back to let him out. Cars were beginning to pile up behind them. Jamal turned slightly so they wouldn’t have a good look at his face.
“Don’t shoot!” the Arab pleaded. “Take the car but don’t kill me!”
“Shut up!” Jamal snarled as he drew back his arm and pistol-whipped the Arab.
The man fell to the asphalt, his arms fluttering like bird wings, his white button-down shirt a coat of feathers. The Arab wasn’t so tough now, Jamal thought, however much money he might have. The young man sighted the gun on the man’s forehead, above his big, frightened eyes.
Jamal heard more horns as well as people shouting. He should have just shot him—no talk, no knock-down, no thinking. Now, too many people were watching. He heard a siren in the distance. Maybe it wasn’t for him, or maybe someone had already called the cops—
Jamal looked up the road, saw the Camry had pulled into an empty space curbside. It was too far to run. And he didn’t want to leave empty-handed.
Okay, you didn’t kill the guy but you can bounce with the car. He could still score points by leading the cops to the Embarcadero and putting the Rover in the bay, or maybe driving it into the hot new lounge of the Phoenix Hotel—
Shoving the gun back in his waistband, Jamal jumped into the Rover, slammed the door, and stomped on the gas. He shot through the intersection, unaware that the light had changed back, clipping a Prius and spinning it ninety degrees. Jamal caromed off into a double-parked yellow panel job with the words WONDER BREAD painted across the side. He saw the R and the B grow large and then the world got very loud as the sound of the impact, the screech of twisting metal, and Jamal’s own scream blended into a single roar. He felt himself flying against the windshield as the rear end of the Rover went airborne and the thing flipped.
Jamal threw his hands out, felt his arms go through the suddenly liquid glass, felt countless pinpricks as the shards raked his hands and face and scalp. It seemed to take forever for the Rover to crash to the ground and everything to go still. In the cottony quiet that followed, all Jamal could hear was his own strained, wheezing breath and the throbbing blood in his ears. He was lying on his back, half out of the Rover, his head resting on the blacktop. He was looking back toward the front seat, which was upside down. Peripherally, he could see people ducking, shifting, reaching into the tangled metal that shielded him from the outside world. He couldn’t move his head, couldn’t feel his body, so he continued to stare ahead.
There was blood in his right eye. It swirled the driver’s side in a ruddy haze, but his left eye was clear. That was how he saw the strange object that had been upended and was resting on the roof. It consisted of four … five … six two-liter bottles full of liquid and tied to one another with duct tape. They were anchored to a pair of propane tanks with more tape. Wires were strung from one of the tanks to a cell phone taped to its side.
A bomb. It was a bomb.
2
“You feel it?” Drabinsky asked. “The rush?”
Freelance TV producer Jack Hatfield barely heard the man. As they blasted toward the crime scene, the former firebrand talk show host—defrocked by a fearful, powerful few—found himself thinking about those long-ago days in Baghdad, days that were little more than a distant wash of sounds and images. All he really had left of the place was the shrapnel in his right thigh and an instinctive reaction, a gut-tensing alertness, to any sign or image that had Arabic or Kurdish writing.
“I feel it,” Jack said in a dry monotone. It reeked of insincerity but Drabinsky didn’t seem to notice. He was in the moment, psyched and impatient. Jack understood; these were the times they’d trained for. For Drabinsky, it was a chance to test