Free Sample
Preview from chapter one
Chapter 1. Flee.
I like women like my cars: expensive and dangerous. But the brunette hammering on the inside of the trunk lid of my 2015 Mustang GT was in a different class on both counts. Seemed like she was trying to outgun the pistons that raged a few feet ahead of me as I swerved around a beaten-up Nissan and cut back in front, tires squealing, wipers on overdrive.
Collateral is such an ugly term, and I felt terrible to the pit of my stomach, but it had been unavoidable. An impulse. She was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time as I fled the building. And now? Red and blue strobes bounced off the car’s interior as downtown raced by in a blur of streetlights and darkened buildings. Cops in the rearview. Cops zigzagging in and out of the wing mirrors. I didn’t need reminding that Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.
As I avoided a Chevy, the car slewed and I steered into the slide, hauling left at the intersection through a stop sign. A minor felony on any other day, but my pursuers would be only too happy to label it ‘dangerous driving’ if they ever caught me. They certainly wouldn’t take the word of the best stunt driver in the state that nobody was in any danger whatsoever. Especially when that driver had also racked up robbery, resisting arrest, and kidnapping in the last twenty minutes. Slam dunk case: do not pass Go, do not collect $200.
I mashed the pedal and spun the alloys with exactly the right amount of torque to put some distance between the sirens and me. They could run the plates and chase their tails all the way to the inevitable dead end, but it didn’t change the fact the lead was temporary. Soon the fuckers would try to cut me off. I needed to clear my head and think. Think. The thumping from the trunk wasn’t helping, a percussive reminder of what I’d become. How far I’d fallen.
The road crested and the Mustang was airborne for a second, suspension crunching as thirty-five hundred pounds of automobile landed on the asphalt and accelerated into the night. The car was made for manual shift. So much control, especially in bad weather. I opened her up, revs red lining in each gear, and was in sixth before my pursuers even became visible. Left them for dead on the straight, darting between slower moving cars amid blasts of angry horns. With the needle into triple figures, my body was pressed into the reassuring hug of the Recaros; an expensive luxury, but worth every cent I hadn’t paid for them.