Home Invasion - J. A. Johnstone [26]
He sent a return shot toward the man at the truck, then had to duck behind a parked pickup as the man fired shot after shot while backing toward the truck’s cab. He yanked the door open, dived in, and the truck lurched into motion. Another man must have been inside at the wheel, keeping the engine running.
The agents’ SUV screeched to a stop beside Parker. “Hop in!” Ford called. He had gone back to get the vehicle rather than following Ford, a hunch telling him that they might have to give chase.
Ford floored the accelerator even before Parker had closed the door on the passenger side. Momentum swung it shut.
“How’d you know?” Ford asked as he took a corner at high speed. The power company truck was a block ahead. It wasn’t built for speed. The SUV, with its high-powered and specially-modified engine, was.
“I figured somebody might have seen us leaving the hotel with that laptop. Did you bring it with you, by the way?”
“Yeah, I ducked back in the room and got it. Might still be something salvageable on it.”
Parker nodded. “That’s what I was thinking. Anyway, if they saw us with the laptop, they’d have to figure we’d try to find out what’s on it. They followed us out of Corpus to the motel.”
“They didn’t have any way of knowing that we plugged it into the wall.”
“No, not for sure, but it’s a reasonable assumption.”
Ford frowned. “They can put their hands on an electric company truck and cause a power surge to the motel just on the assumption that we might have the computer plugged in?”
“They didn’t have anything to lose if they were wrong,” Parker pointed out.
“Maybe not, but being able to mount an operation like that on almost zero notice means they’ve got a lot of pull, whoever they are. That sounds almost like something—”
Ford stopped short as he realized where his thoughts were going.
“Yeah,” Parker agreed, his face and voice grim. “It sounds almost like something we could do if we had to.”
Ford still had the SUV moving at a high rate of speed, weaving in and out of traffic, blasting through red lights, cutting into their quarry’s lead. The power company truck caromed off several parked vehicles as it took a couple of turns too fast. Then it roared onto the freeway frontage road, past a couple of strip shopping centers, and onto the freeway itself.
“He’s heading back to Corpus,” Ford said as he followed the truck onto Indian Point Bridge, which stretched for more than a mile over the waters of Nueces Bay. “That’s his mistake. He’s got nowhere to go while he’s on the bridge.”
With a screeching of tires and brakes, cars pulled over to get out of the way of the speeding truck and the pursuing SUV. Ford began to pull even with the truck, coming up on the driver’s side so the passenger couldn’t shoot at them.
The truck swerved toward the SUV, banging into an armored fender. Despite the SUV’s built-in protection, the truck had more weight behind it. The collision forced the SUV toward the railing.
Ford fought the wheel and brought the SUV under control again. He dropped back a little and said, “I’m gonna go around them and block the road. Keep the driver busy.”
“Will do,” Parker said as he lifted his gun.
Ford floored the gas pedal again and sent the SUV surging forward through the gap between the truck and the railing. Parker opened fire from his window, peppering the cab with bullets. He saw the driver hunched low in an attempt to avoid the gunfire.
The SUV roared past the truck, rocketing over the bridge now. Ahead, off to the left, loomed the World War II-era aircraft carrier, USS Lexington, now moored permanently at Corpus Christi as a floating museum.
Parker reloaded as Ford opened up a lead on the truck. When he was still a hundred yards or so from the end of the bridge, he slammed on the brakes and spun the wheel, sending the SUV into a sideways skid that brought it to a stop blocking all three lanes of traffic.
The two agents piled out of the vehicle and crouched behind it, guns leveled across the hood at the truck barreling down on them. They opened fire, concentrating