I can’t help it and laugh. “I’m still recovering from my last trip, actually.”

  The aethings get dark ahead. No luck that way, but there is to my left. I hit the brakes, and the van slides into a turn. The noise is awful and the van shudders as we crash through a bunch of smaller things. I swear I can hear bones breaking. I feel sick and I have to fight the urge to pull over and scream.

  We hit something else a little more solid, but then we’re through and in the clear.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  Lumpy says, “The church’s got a school. You blew through some pews in the sanctuary and crashed through the doors. We’re in the main hall now.”

  “Oh, man.” Not bones then. Wood.

  The kid misunderstands. “Don’t sweat it. This school sucks. Did my freshman year here. Everybody cheated on everything. Fucking vouchers.”

  “So much for the superiority of private schooling.” I sniff. My nose is running. Squeezing my eyes shut and blinking to help them water, and now I can keep my eyes open for a second. Not that I can see much more than liquid dark shapes.

  Lumpy snorts.

  “They still behind us?”

  “Just one, I think. I can’t see the other two.”

  “How long is this hallway?” I ask.

  “It’s pretty much the whole school,” says Lumpy. “We’re almost to the main entrance now.”

  “Straight ahead?”

  “Yeah, how’d you know? How you doing all this?”

  I turn my head toward him and try to open my eyes.

  What I can make out of his expression is serious. Expectant.

  “I let Jesus take the wheel,” I say. “Duh.”

  He snorts.

  Darkness looms ahead.

  Not aethings.

  Wall!

  Doors. We blast through and back out into Akron’s black early morning.

  “Shit!” says Lumpy. “More stairs!”

  The van bucks as the front tires and then the back ones leave terra firma and then hit one after another. Could’ve been worse. Must’ve been just a few stairs up into the building. I don’t manage my personal landing well at all. I rock too far forward, my foot slamming down on the accelerator. Next, we’re all weightless and falling.

  Another, higher set of stairs.

  I’ve been Pushing this whole time. Now I Push harder.

  A dark blur passes below and before us, trailing a long pale sparking tail. It’s the SUV with the lamppost, moving too fast to block our way. That’s a good thing because we would have plowed right into them and maybe killed everybody in both vehicles. Instead, I’m going to pass behind it. Right where the concrete wrapped base of the streetlight tore out of the ground.

  We land front wheels first, and when the back hits, I feel a solid crash below as the bottom of the van’s heavy frame collides with the asphalt. My bumper slides below the streetlight, scooping it up before we knock it around like one of those baseball-on-a-stick batting trainers.

  Goddamn thing might fly all the way around and hit us in the ass, killing that cackling old lady, so I floor it. Dark movement from my right. The third SUV, coming up fast, forces me to turn left, and we scream around the now stopped SUV full of bad guys, now serving as the fulcrum for the spinning streetlight.

  I can see the large white shape of my motorhome less than a block distant and the flashing lights of police cars as they arrive at the scene. We’ve about come full circle, which is exactly what I wanted.

  In the side mirror, the SUV that followed us through the school catches air as they leap down the same flight of stairs we did. To my horror, the fat end of the streetlight lines up perfectly to punch straight through the driver’s side window with enough force to punch through. There’s a red eruption at the same time the windshield spiderwebs.

  The top of the streetlight got shoved down into the SUV that’d been dragging it around when we hit it. Now, the force from the second one thrusts it through, the short part of the L folding in like a penknife, spitting it like one of those pigs-in-a-blanket hors d’oeuvres, the wrecked end ramming into the asphalt, partially blocking the lane.

  The third batch of pursuing Sidorovs, the last SUV tries to avoid it, hopping the curb onto the sidewalk, but the left front tire hits the pole and gets kicked up into its chassis. The streetlight’s angle increases as the impaled one keeps pushing it on through, its weight leveraging the third up onto its right two tires before flipping it into a vacant storefront’s showcase window with a tremendous crash.

  Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

  Something’s wrong with the van. Our engine sputters and dies. The dash goes dark. We’re still going pretty fast. Enough to drift into the police cordon.

  Cruisers swarm in from every which way, surrounding the SUVs and two move to block us. I’m going to hit the one on the right. I try to turn, but the power steering is gone and the brakes are out. It’s like I’m trying to lift the van out of the way, which just isn’t a winning proposition. It doesn’t go well. We don’t hit them head on, but we do slide down the side of it, accomplishing two things. First and foremost, it slows us down and stops us at a safe speed. Second, the police open fire.

  Because of course they do. They don’t know who we are, and we just hit them with a great big passenger van. But, they can’t know this thing is bulletproof, and, remembering that a ricochet killed one of the bad guys, I do my best to wave my hands and tell everybody else to do the same.

  They stop firing.

  I realize that, at some point, my eyes must’ve cleared up because ahead, from around the side of my motorhome, I watch Agent Calliope “Cal” Tyler step into view. My boss. Six foot, five inches of burly brunette beauty, she doesn’t look pleased, what with her arms crossed like that and the scowling. For a moment, I resent the implication that I’m some kind of misbehaving child, at it again, Bennis the Menace, but then consider what’s gone on in the past little while.

  Yeah, okay. Fair.

  Cal approaches, so it’s best I hit the button to lower the window. That doesn’t work, of course, but I’m really worried about my partner. Cal might know something.

  I open the door and step out. “Monica?”

  Cal doesn’t respond. She’s staring at me. Up and down at me. Which is when I remember I’m naked, covered in blood, soap, and sweat. It’s a bit late, but I cover up. Fuck it.

  “Monica?” I say again with a sigh. “Did you find her?”

  Cal blinks. “Uh, no. She’s not with you?”

  “No.”

  “Have… you been crying?”

  “Soap. In my eyes.” I wave a hand at my motorhome. “I was showering.”

  Laughter filters through the gathering members of the law enforcement community, and not a few wolf whistles. They’ve all at least heard of me, and I’ve helped or had run-ins with most of the others.

  I reach up to pluck the tooth out of my scalp, and I toss it to Cal, feeling blood pulse out of the wound. “If no one here or in the SUVs has a missing tooth in the right spot, she might be with the guy this belongs to. She must’ve been grabbed before he gave me a headache though.”

  She catches it. “Is this a tooth?”

  “Yep.”

  “Somebody bit your head?”

  I just sigh.

  She grunts, letting it go. People often have to do that around me. “We’ve got eyes in the sky. Nothing’s moving out here besides us at the moment.” She shakes her head. “I was wondering about that towel we found. I should’ve known. How’d you end up down the hill? Weren’t you positioned up there?”

  I shrug. “No idea.”

  She lets that go too. “Who are your friends?”

  I look back at the van. “Sidorov’s victims. One of them is the business manager for something he called the secondary location. I’m sure he’ll explain.”

  She nods.

  “Do you mind if I clean myself off in the crime scene real quick?” I gesture at my home.

  “Please do. Immediately.”

  I nod and hurry toward the motorhome.

  Somebody says, “I didn’t think it was that cold out here!”

  I’m a grower, goddammit. Demure and tasteful, not one of your flashy showers, but I don’t say anything. Best not to, at this point.

  Special Agent Tyler frowns. “Petersen, you are to report to HR this morning by ten o’clock.”

  “Oh, goddammit,” says Petersen. He’s a tall man, blond and lean. The thick rims of his glasses suit his face. He’s a smirker.

  “Seriously, you want to talk shit to a guy who just took out a third of the Sidorov cartel unarmed and naked?” says Cal.

  Petersen smirks harder. “If he’s so badass, where’s Ochoa?”

  It’s a fair question.

  The shame of the whole thing is hot in my face as I slam the side door of my home.

  ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

  Monica needed me, and I was in the fucking shower.

  Yeah, it’s possible that whatever happened to her would’ve happened to me if I hadn’t been scrubbing myself awake. Stakeouts are long and boring. Yeah, and it’s true that part of the shower idea was to get away from her and her silent treatment. Monica Ochoa is not the type to keep quiet if she’s something to say, and her attitude toward me has been downright sepulchral. As in, as quiet and as inaccessible as the buried dead.

  Mad at me or not, she’s a friend and in trouble. That my luck might be to blame only intensifies the shame I’m feeling. My eyes are still burning and my stomach is churning.

  I’m in the shower just long enough to clean off, though I have to run cold water over my scalp wound for longer than I want to in order to get it to stop bleeding. It starts up again, staining my towel as I dry off, and I slap a big square bandage over it. Then I start gathering up my gear.

  Quick as I can, I wrangle myself into a black t-shirt, black cargo pants, and black sneakers. My hand goes through the leather band dangling from my slingshot, and I velcro it down with a strap on the outside of my left forearm, holding it firm. I do the same thing with the remote to my skateboard on my right. Reinforced gloves with metal plates over my knuckles and the back of my hand go on next. My belt has pouches for ammo. A sleeve of throwing knives goes around my right thigh. A bulletproof vest with FBI stenciled in orange letters an inch high goes on over all that. I’m a consultant. Real FBI agents get even bigger letters, all in yellow like in the movies.

  Last, I grab my motorcycle helmet and my new skateboard.

  When I open the side door, Cal stands there with her arms folded. “Before you say a word,” she says. “You know I can’t give you permission to go after Agent Ochoa yourself. You’re supposed to wait along with us for more personnel to arrive so we can organize a grid search of the area. Even then, as someone close to her, you would be relegated to a peripheral role, if you’re allowed even that much. You would not be allowed to actively search for her. You couldn’t use your luck to find her. You could not break down any doors to affect a rescue or make any arrests. That would be against protocol. Do you understand?”

  “Yep.” I surely do, bless her.

  “I see you have all your gear on, including your vest. That would lead some to consider whether you were planning to defy orders.”

  It would be a bad idea to point out that she hadn’t technically ordered me to do anything just yet, which is no accident. “I’m upset, yeah, but you know what? I’ve decided I need to blow off some steam and try out my skateboard. Work out my worries that way. Besides, this isn’t all my gear. Some precautions seem warranted, right? There are bad people around. The vest and helmet are on for safety reasons.”

  “You’re going skateboarding.”

  “Yes.”

  “Now.”

  “Yep.”

  “I see.” She sighs and nods. Doesn’t give me so much as a wink. “That does look like a hell of a skateboard.”

  “Motorized,” I say. “Had it modified by practitioners. It’ll go up to forty-five miles an hour on a straightaway. Suspension system, so I don’t go flying if I hit a crack in the asphalt. Rubberized the whole thing, so—.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” says Cal. “It looks like a mother’s nightmare designed by one of those crazier motorcycle designers.” She slaps me once on the back. “Don’t get killed.”

  I nod, put the helmet on, and step up onto my new deck.

  “When you get back, you’ll need to start on your report,” says Cal.

  I wave and away I go.