Page 35 of I'll Be There
Okay, hehadturned into a soccer dad.
Cars honked, a couple vehicles tried to pull out as if to slow him, but Micah also laid on the horn.
They hit the cross street, and for a long, agonizing second, it looked like they’d lost the shooter.
“Right, go right!” Romeo yelled, and Conner spotted the Honda. Micah jammed up fast behind a truck and again pulled off onto the side, flooring it.
“He’s going to get somebody killed,” Pete said, and Conner just looked at him.
“Sorry,” Pete said. “I just...nothing.”
Micah gunned it up the shoulder. “He’s headed for Highway 61.”
A train yard edged them on one side, a neighborhood on the other. “Let’s hope he doesn’t turn off,” Conner said.
Shooter blew past the traffic, finally broke free, and angled back onto the main road.
Conner glanced once at Micah—the man wore the grim expression he’d seen a thousand times behind enemy lines in Iraq. Or even when they’d had to track down the body of a child or the elderly on a callout when they’d worked with Team Hope.
Determination.
Thank you, God, for Jim Micah.
They cleared traffic, and Micah veered them back onto the road, pedal to the floor. “Pray we don’t pass any cops.”
“We’re not stopping until we get him,” Conner said.
The Honda hit the lights at Highway 61, barely stopped, and took a sharp right.
South.
Toward the border.
Micah glanced at Conner and smiled. “God Bless America.”
Because in America, they had connections. Friends, like the husband of Dani, their K-9 SAR handler—Will Masterson, who worked with the NSA. And maybe Conner could get hold of P.T. Blankenship, tell him that his brother’s case had busted wide open.
They barely braked at the highway and took off south.
Conner registered the alarming—or perhaps providential—lack of patrolmen as they screamed down the highway, over the Kaministiquia River Bridge. They passed fields, a few subdivisions, the correctional facility, then the terrain turned rural.
Farmland. Wide ditches. “Run him down, Micah.”
“I’m trying,” he said, and the truck edged closer, thirty feet, twenty.
Fifteen miles out of town, even the farmland had thinned, the forest climbing around them.
“They won’t let him past the border,” Micah said. “They’ll stop him there, and we can get him.”
Conner nodded. He might have taken a harder hit than he realized. He still wanted to hurl.
They settled in behind the truck, too close to lose Shooter, far enough so that he couldn’t stop suddenly, send them careering into his tailgate.
Around him, the guys had gone quiet. Pensive.
That’s when Conner thought to ask, “Did anyone get Blue’s thumb drive?”
Silence, and he blew out a breath, wanting for the first time in years to swear. “She had a thumb drive my brother gave her—said it had information on it about who killed him.”
