The Gambit (21 page)

“We are gonna run out of gas! Where do I go? Tell me where to go!”

“Calm down! Go as fast as you can like you are! We wait till the road ends.”

I heard the back windshield shatter. Rachel let out a piercing scream.

“Faster!” I yelled.

“I’m going as fast as I can!”

I saw a bypass road on the right. Highway 341.

“Take that right!”

She turned and the rear end fishtailed before it straightened back up. I didn’t see the cops. I prayed their route wouldn’t intersect ours.

“You got this Rachel! Go! Go! Go!”

“I’m going, I’m going!” she yelled as the engine growled in the background. I saw a turn approaching and before I could say anything she braked, then gunned it as she made the corner. Water was to my right. The bay. We were close to the ocean. I saw a bridge in the distance.

“Owen! Owen, the road ends!”

I turned to see a T in the road a quarter-mile away. We had to make a left or a right.

“Lay on your horn and turn right!”

The traffic that passed was minimal.
Please, let us not get hit. Please
.

She slammed the brake, whipped the wheel, and floored it as she turned. We drifted and cars behind us honked. I glanced in the rearview. The cops were a half mile behind us.

“Floor it!” I shouted.

“I am!”

We accelerated to over 110 miles per hour. The other cars looked blurry. What I did notice though, was our surroundings were
flat
. Barren marshlands in every direction, with no place to hide. The bridge was coming up, and when I checked the mirror again I saw we had gained more distance.

The low-gas chime sounded a third time.

I tried to press the button near the cabin lights to open the convertible. Nothing happened.

“What are you doing? We are going too fast, it won’t open!”

“It has to open. We are going to run out of gas any moment.”

“I have to slow down to 30 miles per hour!”

“Do it! Do it now, and quick, before they catch up!”

She braked until it was below thirty. I held the button down and it began opening.

“Owen….Owen! Hurry! They’re coming!”

“Just a few more seconds!”

“We don’t
have
a few more seconds!”

I used my strength to push against the electric motor that opened the convertible.

“Gun it!” I screamed.

The tires screeched and we were now on the bridge. It was a long, smooth incline. I realized how high above water we were. A fall from the apex of the bridge would kill us. It looked to be close to two-hundred feet.

“Rachel, when we reach the lowest part of the bridge, I want you to slam into the guardrail as hard as you can.”

“What? We can’t! Not my car!” she yelled hysterically.

“We don’t have a choice! Say goodbye to your phone, say goodbye to your car! We have to get off this bridge!”

“We could die!”

“If we don’t, we are already
dead!
”

We were descending the bridge.

“The guardrail is weak, do it now, and keep your feet straight down towards the water!”

We readied ourselves on the edge of our seats and she glanced over to make sure our right lane was clear. My backpack was on both shoulders securely.

“Now!” I screamed at the top of my lungs.

She whipped right and we hit the guardrail. Metal crushing metal hurt my ears. We were catapulted off the bridge. I put my hands up and feet together, trying to do a pencil dive. Rachel copied me, and the murky water raced up to meet us. I sliced through it. The pressure of the water slamming against my ears as I displaced it was excruciating. The temperature was unbearably chilly. My backpack was filled with air, and I could feel myself floating up towards the surface.

There were no sounds. For a blissful moment, I let go of the worries that lay above me. No sirens, no horns, no bullets…just
silence
. My throat flexed from wanting to breathe. I broke the surface and gasped to catch my breath. I immediately whipped around to find Rachel. I didn’t see her.

“Rachel!” I shouted in panic.

I used my hands to turn around in circles and didn’t see her. Fear entered my being.

I heard her gasp for air behind me and I turned around to see her a few feet away.

“Rachel!” I yelled, and swam to her.

“O—Owen—it’s so cold,” she said, shivering violently.

“I know. I know it is,” I panted.

I glanced at both sides of the bay, and we were moving fast.
Very
fast. We had already slid underneath the bridge. Once every few seconds, a bullet would miss us and hit the water. The tide was going out. We were being taken out to sea. I leaned back to see the bridge. Some of the cops were backing out to try and find a different route to us.

Rachel and I faced each other. Our bodies were inches apart, and we bobbed up and down in the tidal current that pulled us out to sea. She kept pushing her wet hair out of her face and breathed erratically. She was shaken up.

“How are we going to get out of this?” she asked, and choked as she let out a cry. “We are fucked. It’s over. We’re going to get caught.”

I held her by her shoulders, unsure of what to say. Then I saw something promising. It was a boat.

“Rachel, I’m going to need you to do me a favor.”

“We’ve found him,” a voice behind me announced.

“Where? Pull up what we’ve got,” I said.

My voice sounded crazed. I was frustrated and on edge.

“He went through one of our roadblocks off of 95 and was in the passenger seat with a female driver in a black BMW.”

“Where are they now?”

“They just crashed the car into the Sidney Lanier Bridge in Brunswick, Georgia.”

“Come on, I told you to pull up
anything!
Do we have any cameras?” I yelled.

The screens displayed a video-feed. It was a security camera on the bridge. There was the BMW, barely recognizable and mangled. Smoke rose up from the engine and there were dozens of cop cars behind it.

“What do you have on the girl?” I asked.

The keyboard clicks from the agent were followed by the sound of the data populating the screens.

“The car is registered to Rachel Flores. She is twenty-three years old, born in Brooklyn, New York, and now lives in Garner, North Carolina. She is a journalist for the Raleigh News and Observer.”

“A journalist,” I murmured. “Tell me more.”

“Puerto Rican descent, moved to Miami from New York when she was seven. Her father was Emilio Flores.”

“Why does that name sound familiar to me?”

“He was one of the lead reporters in the field for CBS News in the late nineties. He was killed by rebels in Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War.”

I remembered him.

“Why Florida? What is there for them?”

There was a pause. I pressed my lips together, impatient for an answer.

“Ma’am, from as far as we can tell, it is her mother. She lives in a house in Melbourne Beach.”

“Get some undercover officers in the surrounding area, stat. We don’t want her to know she is being watched, though. Get on the line with the Coast Guard, we need them mobilized immediately to apprehend Owen and Rachel. They can’t get too far in the ocean.”

“I’m on it,” the man said.

A journalist
…I stared at Rachel’s brown eyes on her driver’s license displayed on the massive screen in front of me. Her smile was beaming and symmetrical. The bitch looked so damn happy I figured she thought she was in a photo-shoot and not the DMV.

They were up to something, and whatever it was—I would
stop
it. She was in for a wake-up call. She had put her allegiance in the wrong place. When I took Owen down, she was going down with him.

“Help, help!” Rachel screamed, waving her hands around wildly to the boat that approached us. She purposely let herself sink in the water and coughed when it went into her mouth. “Help me, help, please! I can’t swim!”

She was a great actress. I was impressed. I also bobbed up and down behind her, but I didn’t struggle. I wanted
her
to be the center of attention for a reason.

I could hear the boat motor begin to idle.
Yes
.

It was a standard fishing boat, good for deep sea fishing, about twenty or so feet long. I scanned it as it stopped beside us. The guy driving it was alone. He had a scraggly brown beard and a Georgia Bulldogs cap atop his head.

“Here, grab onto this!” he called out as he left the wheel and dropped the ladder on the backside of the boat. The boat lurched up and down with the receding tide. Rachel went toward it first.

“Be careful! Watch out for the propeller!” he yelled over the sputtering gurgle of the motor.

She flinched as he said that and latched onto the ladder. She slipped and lost her footing. The man grasped her by her forearms and pulled her into the boat. I heard her make a choking noise, like if she had swallowed water. She continued choking and coughing violently.

Perfect
.