Deadly Dozen: 12 Mysteries/Thrillers (268 page)

Lisa hesitated, then jammed the accelerator to the floor, praying that she could shoot across the street in front of the semi; it was her only option. For a second, it appeared that it might even work. Maybe on a dry road it would have.

But the road wasn’t dry, and her tires spun, and the drive wheels stuttered for purchase. Lisa watched through the side window in utter helpless horror as the massive truck smashed her Toyota broadside.

CHAPTER FOUR

The occupant of the nondescript blue sedan that had been tailing Lisa Jensen’s car since leaving Washington—known in the United States as Tony Andretti, although that was not his real name—watched in amazement as the eighteen-wheeled behemoth lost traction on the wet road, sliding out of control and running over the Toyota, the mass of the truck virtually enveloping the much smaller car. Tony could not believe his good fortune. This unexpected but welcome development would make his job even simpler than it already was.

The force of the violent impact drove the young woman’s car – splattered all over the truck’s grille like a bug – across the road, straight through the deserted oncoming traffic lane, and directly into a huge maple tree.

Fire erupted from somewhere underneath the car, which was instantly mangled beyond recognition and buried under several tons of beer-laden tractor-trailer. Moments later the truck’s driver, apparently injured but only superficially so, tumbled out of the cab and limped to the front of the vehicle, obviously hoping to be able to pull the other driver out of the wreckage. Tony sat in the blue sedan and watched closely through narrowed eyes as the man skidded to a halt next to the tree and shook his head. For all intents and purposes, the car had vanished, compacted to a fraction of its original size.

Tony eased his vehicle behind the beer truck and flicked on his emergency blinkers. It would be the worst sort of cosmic irony to have his car rear-ended by some damned fool motorist driving along in the middle of the night not paying attention to what he was doing.

He put on a light jacket and stepped into the heavy rain. The deluge instantly plastered his clothing to his skin, but he didn’t care. He walked alongside the jackknifed trailer toward the cab in time to see the weeping driver of the beer truck flop down on his hands and knees on the pavement and crawl under his rig. The man still hadn’t noticed him.

Tony sighed deeply and squatted as well, peering under the truck’s frame. Thick black smoke poured out of and around the engine compartment, issuing from where he assumed the car must now be, as flames licked their way around the fenders on both sides of the cab. He could see the beer truck’s driver, outlined by the rapidly expanding fire against the twisted metal now barely recognizable as a car. “Are you okay? Hello? Is anybody there?” the frantic man shouted in the direction of the ruined Toyota.

Tony listened for any sound that might indicate someone was alive in the wreckage. There was nothing. All he could hear was the crackling of the spreading fire, greedy and grasping, consuming everything it could reach and still searching for more. He began to smell the unmistakably sharp odor of gasoline and considered the possibility of explosion. He knew it was unlikely, something that happened a lot more in the movies and on television than at accident scenes in the real world, but he also was well aware that it was not unheard of, especially when the fuel tank of one of the vehicles was nearly empty. The fumes, not the actual gasoline, were the truly explosive component, and a tank with very little gas left in it was by definition filled with potentially deadly fumes.

Tony had been following this car since D.C., and he knew it had been hours since Lisa Jensen had stopped to refuel, meaning it was critical he finish this now before he became part of the tragedy.

He stood and strode along the muddy shoulder to the maple tree. The battered car, now flickering in the eerie glow of the expanding fire, had been crushed up against it. The driving rain slicked his curly black hair flat against his skull, and he gagged from the stench of burning rubber as he clambered up the hood of the Toyota, careful not to slice his skin open on a razor-sharp edge of crumpled sheet metal. It was an easy climb; the entire front section of the car had been compressed down to about a four-foot square.

The impact of the crash had smashed the vehicle’s windshield, and Tony nodded appreciatively. The shatterproof safety glass had come completely dislodged from the frame, allowing easy access to what was left of the cabin, which was not much. Lisa Jensen lay motionless, pushed by the devastating impact mostly into the passenger’s side of her car. Her eyes were closed and she was covered in blood. Tony wondered whether he could possibly be so lucky as to discover she was already dead.

Then she moaned, the sound thin and quavery. Her eyes remained closed, so Tony knew she was unconscious, but there was no longer any question about whether she was alive or dead. Tony shook his head and sighed again. Nothing in life was ever easy.

He had to admit, though, that the car wreck was an incredibly lucky break. It would take the authorities some time to discover that Lisa Jensen had not actually been killed in this horrendous accident; she had been murdered. And by the time they pieced it together, it would no longer matter, at least not to Tony. This unexpected bit of good fortune had saved him from following the Jensen bitch to her home and killing her there, which had been the original plan.

This was better.

He fumbled in the pocket of his Windbreaker—it was woefully inadequate against this weather—for his switchblade, finally wrapping his fingers around it and yanking it out. He was beginning to shiver heavily but tried to ignore the chill. This would be over soon, and then he would climb back into the toasty warmth of his idling car, where he would have hours to dry off while driving back to D.C.

The switchblade snapped open with a snick. Tony reached into the passenger compartment, moving carefully, supporting himself with his right hand on the crushed windshield frame. With a practiced flick of his wrist, Tony deftly sliced Lisa Jensen’s throat, opening a gash that ran from the right side of her jawbone to the left.

Blood spurted. It was not the cleanest kill Tony had ever made, but under the circumstances he was satisfied with the result. Dead was dead, after all. Following the initial burst of bright crimson arterial spray that added more of Lisa Jensen’s blood to the interior of a car already soaked with it, the volume rapidly slowed, then ended entirely.

Within ninety seconds Lisa Jensen was dead, and Tony no longer had to worry about this particular loose end—he had tied it up into a very nice, neat bow.

CHAPTER FIVE

The driver of the beer truck was named Bud Willingham—a never-ending source of amusement to his fellow drivers, who thought it the funniest thing in the world that a guy named Bud was driving a truck filled with Bud—and he was crying hard now. He crawled out from under the wreckage of the car he had rammed and struggled back to the cab of his truck. He was soaking wet and freezing and certain he was about to lose his job.

Oh yeah, and he had probably just killed someone.

Looking at the scene from the inside of his truck, lit by the flickering yellow glow of the fire, Bud thought you would never know there had just been a horrible car accident were it not for the smells of burning cloth and rubber. The amount of damage his rig had sustained was minimal and the Toyota was mostly invisible from this vantage point.

Bud grabbed his cell phone from where he kept it clipped to his sun visor and punched in 911, giving his location to the emergency dispatcher. The operator asked him to stay on the line until the emergency responders arrived, but he disconnected the call. Then he removed the portable fire extinguisher from the back wall of the cab and leapt back down to the wet road. He landed in a puddle and didn’t notice. He began spraying the base of the fire in wide arcs around the carcass of the smashed car.

He sprayed the fire-retardant foam until the canister was empty and then threw it to the pavement in frustration where it bounced once and skittered to the side of the road. He had made virtually no dent in the still expanding blaze. Helpless to do anything now but wait, Bud trudged to the side of the deserted road and waited for the emergency vehicles to arrive, something he fervently hoped would happen soon. He blinked in surprise when he noticed a dark sedan drive slowly away from the scene toward the interstate’s southbound ramp.

Bud had assumed he was alone except for the poor victim trapped inside the car, but it was obvious from the position of the departing sedan that it had been parked right behind his truck. How long the sedan had been there and what its driver had seen Bud had no idea, but the occupant was a witness to a major automobile accident. Bud knew the driver of the other car should not be leaving and yet there he went, motoring into the darkness, swallowed up by the rain.

He shook his head, spraying water in all directions, trying to comprehend what could possibly have compelled the anonymous witness to stop at the scene of a car wreck and then drive away without offering any help.

Then he forgot all about this strange occurrence until much later as his attention was drawn to a string of emergency vehicles speeding toward the accident site from the direction of Merrimack proper. Within seconds they began screeching to a halt, their strobes jaggedly slicing the 3:00 a.m. darkness in brilliant flashes of red, white and blue.

CHAPTER SIX

Lady Bird Johnson Memorial Park was unseasonably warm for mid-May as bright sunlight flooded the Washington, D.C. area following the massive overnight storm. Now, with the rainfall just a memory, people crowded into the park, eager to enjoy the early taste of summer.

Young mothers pushed baby strollers along walking paths, stopping and chatting and admiring each other’s infants. Joggers of all ages pounded the paths, weaving around old folks leaning on canes and walkers as they shared the same routes. College students tossed Frisbees back and forth, running and leaping and shouting.

Tucked into the southeast corner of the park, backed snugly against a row of neatly trimmed ficus bushes, was a wrought-iron bench. On this bench sat Nelson W. Michaels, middle-aged, balding, dressed in a rumpled blue suit—not expensive but not cheap—with a maroon rep tie loosened to enable him to unfasten the top button of his off-white dress shirt. A briefcase rested on the ground next to his nervously tapping left foot. He was a good thirty pounds overweight, the extra baggage making him appear at least a decade older than his thirty-eight years. He was sweating heavily.

Nelson hoped he looked just like any other anonymous government bureaucrat passing the time on his lunch hour by ogling the throngs of sexy young women in the park. He pretended to read the newspaper, which he had opened randomly to the sports section. The Washington Nationals, widely considered the worst team in baseball, had just won their seventh consecutive game, leading fans to begin hoping the team might actually be competitive after all.