Page 75 of Manner of Death

I’m sorry to hear that, he texted back, then put his phone on silent. All he wanted at this point was to make it through the end of the night and fall into his bed. Screw going to work tomorrow; he’d tell Nan he was sick and stay at home for one goddamn day.

It took another hour for Boyce to appear, just as Sawyer was beginning to wonder if the pinches to his thigh were going to be enough to keep him going. He perked up when he heard the engine rev, as obnoxiously loud as the man himself. He let the bright red car pull out ahead of him, then headed down the inclined driveway to follow it.

Don’t head straight home, for once. Make it worth my damn while.

Sawyer got his wish…kind of. The car didn’t head in the direction of Boyce’s gated community, which unfortunately Sawyer couldn’t get access to without revealing his badge and the fact that he was looking into a community member. No good; he didn’t want to get reported. This was unofficial surveillance for now, and if he spooked his best guess at the murder suspect into going quiet, he’d never be able to face Bashir. No, he needed information, he needed more data, he needed a fucking conviction. Then he could face Bashir again, with the air finally cleared between them, and…and…fuck.

Fuck, why was Boyce going so goddamn fast?

Sawyer picked up the pace, doing his best to keep the Porsche in sight while trying to keep from appearing as though he was tailing the car. It was easier said than done—this late, the only cars on the road were either being driven by people heading into or off of the nightshift somewhere, or people driving slow enough that they were almost certainly inebriated and trying to keep the police from pulling them over. None of them were speeding except for Boyce, and now Sawyer.

“Damn it,” he muttered, wishing he could turn his lights on. That would make this all so much easier. Pulling the guy over for speeding wasn’t the game plan, though. He followed him down the road that led east from the country club—the same road, come to think of it, that Mr. Upworth’s farm was located on.

Another connection Sawyer hadn’t considered before.

Adrenaline surged through him as the Porsche rounded a corner two hundred feet ahead of him, vanishing from sight. Oh no, he fucking didn’t. Sawyer pushed down the gas pedal, making his reliable little Toyota whine as he forced it to a speed it wasn’t equipped for. He took the corner too fast, nearly losing traction with the tires. The wheel wobbled for a moment under his hands before firming up again, and he exhaled hard.

It was fine. There was Boyce’s car up ahead; he could make out its obnoxious, skinny taillights from here. This particular road was a straight shot all the way to the middle of town, except for a few bridge crossings and an irritating roundabout with turn-offs into two more rural neighborhoods. He’d be easier to follow once they were in town and he had lights and other cars to help slow this fucker down. Speaking of, Boyce was about to hit the roundabout. Sawyer watched with a sense of satisfaction as the lights swerved around the right side of the circular menace. Then—

Shit. Where were the lights?

Had Boyce cut his headlights in the middle of a turn?

His headache pounding in time with his pulse, Sawyer fought the urge to speed up and instead approached the roundabout at a speed that wouldn’t send him flying off the road. He craned his neck left and right as he went around it, looking for any sign of the car.

Nothing. Fuck. Fuck, Boyce was either drunk or he knew he was being followed. It was the first time Sawyer had ever held out hope for a DUI.

He had a choice to make. He could either go straight, or he could turn into one of the neighborhoods and see if Boyce had parked somewhere in an effort to hide. Which way would he go, though? Which way made the most sense for him?

None of them did, if Sawyer was honest. They all led away from his house, not toward it, and he’d be stuck downtown, likely on camera, if he kept going straight. Boyce didn’t seem the sort to like being on camera if he could help it.

Fine, so he was in one of the neighborhoods. But which one? Sawyer, for all that he’d lived here for a while now, hadn’t learned this part of town very well. There were only a few suburban sections out here—the rest of it was still farmland, although the neighborhood on the east side butted up against the country club’s golf course.

Huh. Boyce was a golfer. He’d probably had a chance to eye this neighborhood from the course before. That would increase his familiarity with it, and that meant a higher comfort level.

Eh, what the hell. It was worth a try. Sawyer turned into the east neighborhood and slowed to fifteen miles per hour as he drove down the central street, where a few nondescript cars were parked with no lights on. The street had three turn-offs, each one leading into a short road ending in a cul-de-sac. Honey Circle. Honey Lane. Honey Court. God, this place must be hell on GPS.

And no red Porsche. Fuck. Fuck, he’d gone one of the other ways. Sawyer had almost certainly lost him now, but at least he could try the other neighborhood before giving it up as lost.

He turned back onto Beehive Drive—wow, who had done the naming out here?—and went thirty feet before slamming on his brakes. Because there it was, just ahead of him on the other side of the road. The red Porsche. All the lights were off, and when he rolled his window down, all he heard was the sound of his own engine, nothing from the Porsche.

What the hell was going on? Had Boyce abandoned it for some reason? Why, though? He could have gotten away clean—there was no way Sawyer had missed this car on the drive down. All he’d seen here before was the beat-up old pickup and the hulking black SUV that—

Had moved. It was farther down the road than it had been before. Someone had moved it.

All the hairs on the back of Sawyer’s forearms stood at attention. Screw this, he needed backup. He reached for his phone, bending slightly to grab it off the seat next to him.

Then he punched his foot down on the gas, making his car—and his phone—leap forward as he narrowly avoided getting the rear of his car smashed by that fucking SUV. It had raced forward from a standstill with no lights on, and only a vague sense of motion in Sawyer’s peripheral vision and a healthy dose of paranoia had been enough to keep it from taking out his car.

His phone was on the floor now, too far away to grab. Sawyer had never wished so hard for Bluetooth in his life. He ignored it and kept his foot down, racing back toward the country road that would take him to town. He needed to get some space, but that wasn’t happening—the SUV was already in pursuit, and it was moving a lot faster than he was. Sawyer turned as fast and tight at the roundabout as he could, then shifted into high gear once he was back on the straightaway. He needed to get space between them. There was no shoulder on this road, no good place for him to turn off. All he could do was run.

And running wasn’t working. The SUV was catching up, fast. Sawyer tried to swerve back and forth, make himself harder to hit, but the driver just surged ahead and rammed the right side of his rear bumper. Sawyer heard the bumper crunch—ouch—but he was still moving. It wasn’t fatal yet. He raced over a bridge that spanned an irrigation ditch from the nearby river, then took another hit to his car again, hard enough to knock his bumper clean off this time, if the awful noise and brief spray of sparks was anything to go by. Damn it, all right, one more bridge crossing coming up fast, this one over a pretty substantial river, and then he’d be in sight of downtown and—

BAM. BAM. BAM.

Each hit snapped Sawyer’s neck forward, and the wheel began to wobble again as one of the back tires became unstable. Shit, he wasn’t going to make it to town. He wasn’t going to make it anywhere. He was going to get run off the road by a murderer and left as a grisly corpse for Bashir to have to examine, and—

No. Fuck that. Sawyer wasn’t going to die tonight, and even if he was, he was not going to be turned into a serial killer’s calling card. There was still a bridge coming up.