“Roger…Central to Seven, be advised, subject is probably armed and dangerous.”
“If he’s armed, ofcourse he’s dangerous,” the driver said and lost his sunglasses when the car caught air after a run-in with a massive bump. The two officers could hardly see the road ahead; the Worldwide truck was churning up dust like a sandstorm.
“Central to Seven, we’ve got all available units en route.”
“Roger that.”
Backup was a good idea. The rumors were that Daniel Pell, the crazed cult leader, this era’s Charles Manson, had gunned down a dozen people at the courthouse, had set fire to a bus filled with schoolchildren, had slashed his way through a crowd of prospective jurors, killing four. Or two. Or eight.
Whatever the truth, the officers wanted as much help as they could get.
The jarhead muttered, “Where’s he going? There’s nothing up here.”
The road was used mostly for farm equipment and buses transporting migrant workers to and from the fields. It led to no major highways. There was no picking going on today but the road’s purpose, and the fact it probably led to no major highways, could be deduced from its decrepit condition and from the drinking water tanks and the portable toilets on trailers by the roadside.
But Daniel Pell might not know that and would assume this was a road like any other. Rather than one that ended, as this did, abruptly in the middle of an artichoke field. Ahead of them, thirty yards or so, Pell braked fast in panic and the truck began to skid. But there was no way to stop in time. The truck’s front wheels dropped hard into a shallow irrigation ditch, and the rear end lifted off the ground, then slammed back with a huge crash.
The squad car braked to a stop nearby. “This is Seven,” the Latino cop called in. “Pell’s off the road.”
“Roger, is he—”
The officers leapt out of the car with their pistols drawn.
“He’s going to bail, he’s going to bail!”
But nobody exited the truck.
They approached it. The back door had flown open in the crash and they could see nothing but dozens of packages and envelopes littering the floor.
“There he is, look.”
Pell lay stunned, facedown, on the floor of the vehicle.
“Maybe he’s hurt.”
“Who gives a shit?”
The officers ran forward and cuffed and dragged him out of the space where he was wedged They dropped him on to his back on the ground. “Nice try, buddy, but—”
“Fuck. It’s not him.”
“What?” asked his partner.
“Excuse me, doesthat look like a forty-three-year-old white guy?”
The jarhead bent down to the groggy teenager, a gang teardrop tat on his cheek, and snapped “Who’re you?” in Spanish, a language that every law enforcer in and around Salinas could speak.
The kid avoided their eyes, muttering in English, “I no saying nothing. You can go fuck youself.”
“Oh, man.” The Latino cop glanced into the cab, where the keys were dangling from the dash. He understood: Pell had left the truck on a city street with the engine on, knowing it’d be stolen—oh, in about sixty seconds—so the police would follow it and give Pell a chance to escape in a different direction.
Another thought. Not a good one. He turned to Jarhead. “You don’t think, when we said we had Pell and they called all availables for backup…I mean, you don’t think they pulled ’em off the roadblocks, do you?”
“No, they wouldn’t do that. That’d be fucking stupid.”
The men looked at each other.
“Christ.” The Latino officer raced to the squad car and grabbed the microphone.
Chapter 7
“A Honda Civic,” TJ reported, hanging up from a call with DMV. “Five years old. Red. I’ve got the tags.” They knew Pell was now in the Worldwide Express driver’s personal car, which was missing from the company’s lot in Salinas.
TJ added, “I’ll let the roadblocks know.”
“Whenthey get back on site,” Dance muttered.
To the dismay of the agents and O’Neil, some local dispatcher had ordered the nearby roadblocks abandoned for the pursuit of the Worldwide Express truck. His placid face registering what for O’Neil was disgust—a tightening of the lips—he’d sent the cars back on site immediately.
They were in a meeting room up the hall from Sandoval’s office. Now that Pell was clearly not near the courthouse, Dance wanted to return to CBI headquarters, but Charles Overby had told them to remain at the courthouse until he arrived.
“Think he wants to make sure no press conferences escape either,” TJ said, to which Dance and O’Neil gave sour laughs. “Speaking of which,” came TJ’s whisper. “Incoming!…Hit the decks.”
A figure strode confidently through the door. Charles Overby, a fifty-five-year-old career law enforcer.
Without any greetings, he asked Dance, “He wasn’t in the truck?”
“No. Local gangbanger. Pell left the truck running. He knew somebody’d snatch it, and we’d focus on that. He took off in the delivery driver’s own car.”
“The driver?”
“No sign.”
“Ouch.” Brown-haired, sunburned Charles Overby was athletic in a pear-shaped way, a tennis and golf player. He was the newly appointed head of the CBI’s west-central office. The agent in charge he replaced, Stan Fishburne, had taken early retirement on a medical, much to the CBI staff’s collective dismay (because of the severe heart attack on Fishburne’s account—and because of who had succeeded him on theirs).
O’Neil took a call and Dance updated Overby, adding the details of Pell’s new wheels and their concern that the partner was still nearby.
“You think he’s really planted another device?”
“Unlikely. But the accomplice staying around makes sense.”
O’Neil hung up. “The roadblocks’re all back in place.”
“Who took them down?” Overby asked.
“We don’t know.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t us or you, Michael, right?” Overby asked uneasily.
An awkward silence. Then O’Neil said, “No, Charles.”
“Who was it?”