Page 20 of Off the Grid
The cab slowed.
“No, I mean stop this time!”
The brakes screeched. Leo held his forearm up to protect his head as he careened forward again.I really should use a seat belt in situations like this.He tossed the door open and jumped out.
“Hey, my phone!” the cabbie yelled.
“I’ll get it back to you,” Leo shouted over his shoulder. There was no time to explain. He had to get back to that intersection before the traffic started moving again. He took off at a sprint as the light changed, flashing a yellow glow over the asphalt. He stepped onto the crosswalk and grabbed the handlebars of the motorcycle as it turned green.
“What the hell, asshole?” the man yelled. “Let go.”
He was dressed in a charcoal suit, and a gleaming Rolex decorated his left wrist. Two recently shined leather shoes rested on the foot pegs. If Leo had to guess, he’d say the guy was a Wall Street banker headed back to his fancy uptown apartment, someone who was used to getting his way.
“I need your bike,” he said, lifting his badge with one hand and holding on with the other.
“Fuck off, man. Do you know what this is?”
Leo did, in fact, know what it was. A Ducati 1299 Superleggera, one of the fastest street-legal motorcycles on the market, worth a whopping eighty-nine-thousand dollars—and he’d been itching to ride one.
“Do you know what this is?” He moved the badge closer to the guy’s face.
The man sneered.
Horns blared as traffic built from the holdup. Down the street, Leo knew the black van holding McKenzie raced farther and farther away. If he didn’t act now, he might lose her. So he did the one thing he knew, as an officer of the law, he probably shouldn’t do, but the one thing he deep down found extremely satisfying—he grabbed the guy by the collar, tossed him from the seat, and hopped onto the bike.
“I’m going to sue!”
Leo rolled his eyes and hit the gas.
Damn, this thingisfast.
He sped around the corner and back onto the street where he’d last seen the van. It was nowhere in sight.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
He revved the engine, blazed through the next light, and weaved through the traffic. Up ahead, he caught sight of a black van at the other end of the street turning the corner. He pursued, cutting through the gridlock in the intersection. He turned, realizing they’d reached the West Side Highway, and took off. Leo didn’t slow the motorcycle down until the van was comfortably in sight. Then he hung back, careful not to get so close they might notice they had a tail. He followed as they took the exit for the on-ramp to the George Washington Bridge, and reached for the phone in his pocket.
“Parker, we’re taking the bridge.”
There was no response.
Leo spared a moment to glance around, searching the dark sky for floodlights and scouring his rearview mirrors for any red or blue flashes. “Do you have backup coming? Choppers? Police vehicles? A blockade? Anything?”
Silence was his only answer.
“Parker, are you there?” Leo shouted into the receiver, worried the combination of the wind on the bridge and the speed of his bike were drowning out his words. “Do you copy?”
Nothing.
What the—?
Leo pulled the phone away from his ear and stared at it. The screen was black. He rubbed his finger over the glass, but the darkness remained. He pressed theonbutton. The screen flashed with a low-battery symbol and turned back off.
Dammit!
He had no idea how long ago the call had dropped, how long ago he’d lost contact with his partner, and the bureau, and the only chance of backup he had.
Leo stuffed the phone back into his pocket and gripped the handlebars tighter. A white flash caught his peripheral vision and he glanced back. An NYPD chopper cruised along the edge of the river, beaming a spotlight over the cars on the West Side Highway. Leo turned forward again. The van was almost at the end of the bridge, and Leo was three-quarters of the way across it. The chopper would never find them before they crossed over state lines and into New Jersey, which was probably what the Russians were counting on—switch jurisdictions as much as possible to royally screw the police. Well, there was one agent they hadn’t lost yet, and he planned to keep it that way.
