Free The Demon Pool by Richard B. Dwyer Page B

on inside the cockpit of the Viper. A
woman looked over at the Corvette. She looked familiar. Maybe someone he had
seen on the South Florida cocktail circuit. She looked right into Briggs’ eyes,
pursed her lips together in a mock kiss, and then gave him the finger.
    “Son of a bitch.”
    The Viper accelerated and so did the Corvette.
Kimberly’s eyes went wide and she grabbed Briggs’ leg. She squeezed hard, dug
her nails in, and one of her fills snapped off. The two high-performance
vehicles screamed down the freeway.
    The more Briggs thought about it, the more
convinced he was that he knew the woman driving the Viper. But from where?
And why is she screwing with me?
    Kimberly’s eyes remained wide and a façade of
fear replaced her feigned calm. She looked as if she were about to lose
control.
    “Slow down, damn it. This is stupid.”
    Briggs glared back at his girlfriend.
    “This is personal. No one gives me the finger.
Especially not some game-playing, rich bitch in a piece-of-shit Dodge.”
    The Corvette and the Viper drove nose to nose as
their speed passed one hundred forty-five miles per hour. Briggs squinted
through the Corvette’s windshield at two tiny red lights on the highway ahead.
By the time he realized that he was seeing the taillights of another vehicle,
it was too late to slow down. The speedometer read one fifty. Briggs swerved to
the right onto the paved shoulder. He missed the back of the construction truck
by inches.
    Kimberly screamed hysterically.
    “You fucking idiot, you almost killed us.”
    ***
    Pedro de la Garza listened to Tejano music on his
truck’s AM radio and sipped hot coffee. The big, lumbering vehicle rumbled down
the highway at its max speed of fifty miles per hour, but at least it handled
better since the company fixed the steering. His crew of two Haitian laborers
dozed beside him in the front seat.
    Pedro saw the dark outline of a tractor-trailer on the
shoulder just ahead. Pedro almost spilled his coffee when the red and black
Dodge Viper went screaming by in the left lane. He did spill his coffee when
the Corvette flew by on the right.
    ***
    On the Corvette’s high-end sound system, Molly Hatchet
belted out, “Flirtin’ with Disaster.”
    Her eyes as big as saucers, Kimberly screamed,
“Oh, shit!”
    Urine flooded the seat under her.
    Molly Hatchet played on, singing about gambling
with time and choosing one’s destiny.
     In the last seconds of his life, Briggs wondered
why life could not be more like his brother’s comic books, where dumb-ass cops
could step out of a moving vehicle at sixty-five miles per hour and live to
tell about it.

chapter eleven
    Traffic was light on the post-holiday interstate and
Jim Demore’s patrol car shot down the freeway doing a hundred. Fourteen seconds
from a dead stop standstill to the century mark on the speedometer.
    The Florida Highway Patrol had purchased a number
of high-performance Dodge Chargers for use on the interstate highways and Jim
had snagged one. Even after becoming an accident investigator, his command
allowed him to keep the Charger. Of course, he also had to spend a fair amount
of time pulling extra shifts after holidays, giving the regular patrol officers
much-needed breaks. And of course, that pissed Linda off. However, the Charger
was a rocket ship with emergency lights. Personal life — crap, work life —
good .
    He arrived at the accident scene ahead of the
other responders. First among firsts.
    According to dispatch, it would be another ten
minutes before the EMS units arrived. 
    Until the current call, it had been an uneventful
evening. With the sparse post-holiday traffic, he had only written a couple of
tickets and had spent much of the night reflecting on his most recent and most
unfortunate encounter with Linda at the hotel pool in Ft. Myers. Nevertheless,
that little bit of X-rated, soap opera drama had not kept him from enjoying a
late afternoon coffee with Kimberly after her shoot ended.
    To