Black Friday (or Black Market) - James Patterson [27]
“We have to take Alvarez. There are no other options.”
Sommers barely glanced at Carroll. His look still said, You’re a New York City cop, this is my backyard, we do things my way down here. Carroll had a vision of Alvarez escaping, and it was an exasperating vision. That was a possibility he had to prevent Sommers didn’t know what was involved here.
Diego Alvarez was awkwardly pulling the fat cook toward a red Cadillac parked outside the garage. The drug dealer had on white flare-bottom trousers. He was almost black in skin tone, as well-muscled as a pro fighter. The cook’s eyes were as wide and round as coffee saucers.
Carroll tried to sort through the chaotic confusion of the moment. If he controlled his breathing, he could usually concentrate better, which was something he’d learned during his combat days.
He had an idea—one solution that came to mind.
Carroll waited for Alvarez to eye-check the FBI agents on the far left. As he did so, Carroll smoothly slid behind a flower-decked wall which concealed him from the drug dealer.
He waited a few seconds to see if he was missed, then continued hustling down behind the flowered wall, back through the side yard between Alvarez’s and the house next door. Sparkling clean garbage cans stood in a neat silver row.
A green watering hose snaked up the walkway to a swimming pool with a floating rubber horse which looked ludicrous to Carroll as he started to run. He stopped when he was back out on the street where the FBI team had parked their cars.
A very disturbing thought entered his mind as he climbed into Sommers’s Grand Prix.
He never would have done this if Nora was still alive.…. Never in a thousand years would he have tried this stunt.
Even as he had the thought, which cut deeply, Arch Carroll eased the FBI sedan to the corner, where he made a sweeping right turn, then a quick left onto South Ocean.
A block ahead, he saw Diego Alvarez backing into the Cadillac. He was still holding the white-haired cook against his bare chest. He was screaming wildly at the FBI men, his words lost now in the sea breeze.
Carroll kicked down hard on the accelerator. The sedan’s engine twitched from first into third gear.
The car licked forward with a screech from the expensive radial tires put on for precisely this kind of breakneck situation.
Suddenly, Carroll’s back arched, and his lungs sucked in a deep burst of air.
Don’t think about this. Get it over with now.
His gun lay on the car seat right beside him.
The speedometer read thirty, forty, fifty.
Then the front wheels struck the concrete curb loudly with a jolting crunch. The car’s front end leaped at least three feet in the air.
All four wheels were off the ground, and the vehicle moved in slow motion because slow is the speed at which a car flies.
Carroll double-pumped the sedan’s brakes at the last possible moment.
“What the hell—” An FBI man yelled and dove to one side of the lawn.
“Holy shit!” He heard another high-pitched policeman’s shout.
Diego Alvarez fired three wildly aimed shots at the careening Pontiac and at Carroll himself inside the car. The sedan’s windshield shattered, spitting glass fragments into Carroll’s face.
The car was back on all four wheels again, bouncing over the lawn, and over a red tiled walkway. Suddenly it was skidding helplessly on the turf.
Carroll’s foot stomped down full force against the gas pedal again. At the last possible instant before contact, he tucked his head down.
He held the steering wheel in a vise grip, held on as tight as his arms and hands possibly could.
The bounding FBI car crashed broadside into Diego Alvarez’s cherry-red Cadillac. The convertible crumpled. It slid sideways like a hockey puck floating on ice and smashed into the side of the garage.
Half a dozen FBI officers were instantly sprinting across the front lawn.
They got there before the two interlocking cars had actually stopped moving.
Revolvers, riot shotguns, M-16 rifles were thrust inside the Cadillac’s open front windows.