Chapter 32 - THE MAN ON THE STRETCHER
The silence that clamped down over the riverbank was colder than the mountain water below.
Hayes stood motionless, the receiver frozen against his ear. Beside him, Daniel’s face was an unreadable mask of chalk and stone. Mia dropped her paper cup; it hit the wet gravel, spilling dark coffee across the white dust.
"Say that again, Sector 4," Hayes rasped into the mic, his knuckles white around the black plastic casing. "Identify the survivor."
*"Subject is conscious, Detective,"* the trooper’s voice crackled through static, punctuated by the mechanical whine of a winch. *"Fingerprints were run through the interstate database three minutes ago. Automated match: Leo Miller, missing since the winter of 2008. He keeps repeating the same words: 'The man beside the girl is not Daniel.'"*
I spun around to look at the man sitting on the ambulance bumper.
The man who had bled for us. The man who had driven the pursuit car through the gorge, whose ribs were bruised purple, whose hands were covered in road rash. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t jump up. He simply looked down at the tactical bandage wrapped around his forearm, his chest rising and falling in slow, deliberate measures.
"Daniel?" Mia’s voice was barely a breath, trembling like dry grass in an autumn wind. "Daniel, what are they talking about?"
He didn't look at her. Slowly, methodically, he reached out and peeled away the gauze tape from his arm. Beneath the white pad, there was no gunshot graze. There was only a jagged, perfectly healed surgical incision—the mark of a deep, subcutaneous transmitter that had already been removed.
"Step away from the vehicle, sir," Hayes said quietly, his hand drifting instinctively toward his service holster. "Keep your hands where I can see them."
"You shouldn't have thrown the cylinder into the river, Clara," Daniel said. His voice was no longer the warm, weary baritone of a protective father. It was flat, synthetic, stripped of every ounce of human exhaustion. "That was our only clean leverage against the board."
Before Hayes could draw, Daniel kicked the ambulance door shut with explosive force. The heavy steel panel slammed into Hayes’s shoulder, sending the detective sprawling across the gravel. In the same terrifying fraction of a second, Daniel surged forward, grabbed Mia by the collar of her jacket, and hoisted her bodily into the front passenger seat of Hayes’s running squad car.
"Mia!" I screamed, lunging across the hood.
May you like
The cruiser’s engine roared to maximum RPM. The tires spun furiously, spitting sharp stones into my face, and the vehicle lunged backward into a wide, violent J-turn, barreling straight toward the highway tunnel before the backup units even knew an ambush had occurred.
***
