It was going to be tricky, that was for sure. But for all the car’s faults, its steering was tight and precise.

I slowed a bit, let the Annihilator gain on us. It only took a second. The SUV’s massive grill loomed over our trunk, its lights like fire, its engine roaring as if it were about to devour us.

Morpheus barked incessantly.

I sped through the grounds, looking for Galloway Hall. There it was, up ahead. And there, around the building’s far side, Angie’s shortcut. The pedestrian pathway.

I waited until the last possible second, then cranked the wheel hard to the right, gripping it with both hands, and aimed the car for the center of the opening, this low-ceilinged pathway that Angie used to sneak out of Mackenzie without paying for her parking.

The Annihilator was no more than a couple of feet behind us.

We’d only been in the tunnel a thousandth of a second when we heard it. An ear-splitting noise. Metal meeting brick. Glass shattering. Sheet metal tearing.

I’d have looked back, but I had to keep my eyes straight ahead to make sure neither fender caught the brick walls. But I was able to catch a glimpse of the fireball in the rearview mirror. I didn’t slow down. I didn’t know how much of the Annihilator might be left to follow us in.

As it turned out, what was left of the truck only went about thirty or forty feet, but I couldn’t bring myself to let up on the gas until we were out the other end. Only then did I stop the car, a couple of feet shy of the chain that kept us from driving out onto Edwards Street.

I unbuckled and, along with Angie and Trevor and Morpheus, got out of the Virtue and looked back.

The brick archway had caught the Annihilator at the base of the windshield. Bullock and Blondie would have been thrown forward from the force of the collision, but only in the instant before the brick archway sliced the entire top of the vehicle, and in all likelihood their heads, clean off.

Chapter 38

38

There was a lot of explaining to be done.

Before the cops began with their onslaught of questions, I told them, standing by the Virtue and holding a shaken Angie in my arms, that there were a few things they needed to know about immediately. There was the matter of a tied-up woman in a house out in the suburbs. And the fact that her husband had taken a header off a balcony at the airport Ramada, and that the odds were she didn’t know a thing about it yet.

Also, there was a guy with a bullet in his leg in a house on Wyndham Lane. Assuming he was still there, and hadn’t already hobbled his way down to the closest emergency room.