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“Go right, go right, go right!”
The Toyota turned right and took off.
Danny hit the gas. Now he turned on the siren, out there where there was no one to hear it except the driver he was chasing and the dispatcher as he keyed his radio and reported the pursuit. Heaccurately gave the make, model, and tag number of the Toyota but purposely misnamed the road they were on as his patrol car ate up the distance between the two vehicles. Any officer looking to join the chase would be heading to Cypress Canal Road instead of Cypress Island Road.
The night was dark as clouds slipped in front of the moon, and trees and black water swallowed up the land on both sides of the narrow, winding road. Danny ran his car right up behind the Toyota. There was nowhere for him to go, no shoulder, no side roads to turn onto for another mile or more. The Toyota started to skid into a hard left curve.
“Roll, you fucker, roll!” Danny muttered under his breath.
The patrol car swayed coming out of the turn but stayed right on the Toyota. He pressed the gas and pulled to the left, coming up alongside the car’s rear quarter panel. If he timed this right, it would be perfect. He could turn into the Toyota to initiate a pit maneuver just as they hit the next curve. He had learned how to do it at the police academy, longer ago than he cared to think. There had never been any opportunity to put it to practical use inside the city limits of Bayou Breaux, but it wasn’t hard to do. Just find the right point to move his car into the Toyota, just a tap, just enough to throw it into a tailspin.
The Toyota would flip, roll off the road and into the trees. An unfortunate accident. No one would be the wiser. At the speed they were going, there was no way Robbie Fontenot survived.
Danny took a deep breath. His heart was pounding like a drum. The adrenaline felt like rocket fuel coursing through him.
The next curve was coming up fast.
He needed to time this just right.
He started to turn his wheel.
A split second too late.
A foot too far back on the Toyota.
He pulled the wheel just a little too hard.
And it all went wrong.
The Bayou Breaux PD cruiser went off the road doing seventy, sailing into a swamp full of cypress trees.
The Toyota skidded sideways. The left rear wheel came off the pavement for a breath-catching instant, then came back down. The car straightened and ran clear, its taillights glowing red, until the night and the wilderness swallowed it whole.
25
Annie heldup her badgeand navigated past the local news vans and around the SO deputy’s car blocking the way to the crash scene. She pulled over the best she could considering there was no shoulder to speak of on this road and parked behind a white state police patrol car as she got her first good look at the wreck.
Danny Perry’s car had landed on a cypress stump. Its nose was smashed in like a cheap accordion up against the trunk of another full-grown tree. An incongruous sight in this wilderness, to say the least. Mother Nature: 1, police car: 0.
News of Perry’s crash had come before first light, Nick having been alerted because the car Perry had been pursuing matched the description of a vehicle that had been reported stolen—Robbie Fontenot’s vehicle—although the tags came back to another vehicle entirely.
Annie had hurried through her morning routine, grabbing a giant travel mug of coffee and a granola bar on her way out the door, leaving Nick to the parental duties of getting Justin up and ready for school.
She got out of her car now, jammed her hands in the pockets ofher jacket, and hunched her shoulders against the damp chill. The temperature had dropped near freezing in the night. It would be another couple of hours before the sun gathered enough strength to do any good.
This was a place humans had no real business intruding upon. The road had been built on a human-made berm, splitting the swamp in two. On either side of the thin ribbon of asphalt there was nothing but water and trees. The early-morning sun filtered down through the canopy, pale, diluted, lemonade yellow against the shadowed black of the cypress trees.
A great white egret sailed in and landed on a cypress knee near the crashed vehicle, hunching its shoulders and folding its wings, curious about this unnatural metal creature lying broken in its habitat. The bird made its unmelodic, ratchet-likegwok!sound as if to protest. In the branches above, songbirds tried to drown out the noise with prettier tunes, unconcerned by the goings-on of the humans below them.
Annie started toward the state trooper, who was busy checking distances between evidence markers with a measuring wheel on a stick. Farther down the road, two black trucks from the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries sat side by side, blocking any possible traffic coming from the north, the Wildlife agents standing, watching, their breath rising in clouds as they chatted.
“Detective Broussard, Sheriff’s Office,” Annie said. “Good morning, Sergeant.”
“Not for the officer driving this car, I’m afraid,” the trooper said. He was a tall thirtysomething Black man who looked like he might have stepped out of a recruitment poster in his crisp dark blue uniform. The brass name tag on his jacket readgrant. “Have you heard any update on his condition?”
“He’s critical at Lafayette General.”
“I’m surprised he’s alive,” he said, making a notation on his clipboard. “He had to be doing sixty or better to land where he landed. That was some nasty impact. Do you know him?”
