I saw them coming up fast behind us: three cop cars, lights flashing, sirens blaring. Looking ahead, I saw three more cop cars parked bumper to bumper, spanning both lanes, about four blocks away. They had him trapped.
Brakes, Delivery Dude, I thought. Now would be a good time for the brakes . . .
I thought they had him and the cops probably thought they had him.
They didn’t have him.
He hit the gas and, as he picked up speed, barreling straight for the barricade, the cops opened fire.
Maybe they saw me hanging there by the door handle. I doubted it, though. They were more concerned with the two-thousand-pound truck coming straight at them.
Then he swerved, slamming on the brakes as he swung the nose of the truck hard to the left. The rear wheels locked and the truck went into a slide: I guessed the idea was to crush me against the cop cars.
Nowhere to go now but up.
I swung my right foot onto the window ledge, using it as a stepping stool to heave myself onto the roof. At that second, as I threw my body across the top of the truck, Delivery Dude hit the barricade of police cars.
The impact hurled me across the span of the roof and off the opposite side, right over t
he driver’s window. I tumbled into empty space.
Lucky for me, one of the cop cars chasing us had rushed forward to box in the truck. I belly flopped onto the car’s hood, my forward motion hurling me straight at the windshield. I flipped off the hood at the instant the front bumper struck the side of the truck. I landed on my butt, sending a searing knifelike pain up my spine.
I looked up to see Delivery Dude looking right at me, wearing this strange, enigmatic smile. He was holding something in his hand as the cops swarmed the truck, guns drawn, all of them shouting for him to come out with his hands up.
Delivery Dude was holding a small black device in the middle of which, blinking red, was a button and, over which, his thumb hovered. And he was smiling at me.
He gave me a little nod as if to say, Touché, Kropp.
I screamed for them to get down, but nobody heard me. I took cover behind the cop car as his thumb came down.
The truck exploded in a blossom of boiling red fire. The shock wave knocked me backward and the heat from the blast sucked the last molecule of oxygen from my lungs.
13:19:21:48
They took me to the emergency room first. Multiple lacerations and contusions. A broken nose. Twenty-five stitches on my forearm where he sliced me with the dagger. Bullet removed from my shoulder. And an X-ray of my butt to see if my coccyx was cracked.
After the doctors were done with my body, a couple of cops came by and took it to the police station. I asked for my phone call. I called the attorney for my father’s estate, Alphonso Needlemier. He told me not to talk to anybody until he got there.
I was alone in one of the interrogation rooms. There was a mirror along one wall. It had to be one of those two-way setups.
I wondered who Delivery Dude was, who had sent him, and why. I had my suspicions. At the hospital, I took the Ring of Solomon from my finger and slipped it into my pocket.
At least thirty minutes passed. Nothing happened. No one came in. The big clock hanging on the wall behind me clicked. My nose itched under the bandages. My butt was sore and I couldn’t find a comfortable sitting position. I had a very bad feeling about it—not about my butt, but the situation in general. Where were the cops? Why had they dumped me in this room? Where was Mr. Needlemier? Who was Delivery Dude, why was he after me, was Sam okay, and why had they arrested me? I was the victim here.
Finally the door opened and two people came in, a man and a woman. He was older, with a huge bald head and a fat red nose; he might look like Santa Claus if he grew a beard. She was young-looking, with dark hair and even darker eyes.
She introduced herself as Detective Meredith Black. His name came out as a grunt, but it sounded like Kennard.
“Why did you arrest me?” I asked.
“How about reckless endangerment, kidnapping, willful destruction of property, assault and battery, and attempted murder?” rumbled the big-bellied Kennard in a voice about as far from Santa Claus’s as you could get.
“That’s a lot,” I said.
“You a smart guy?” he barked at me.
“Not by any standard I can think of,” I said.