PART 2: Beyond the Tinted Window

With painful slowness, Marcus drew his injured arm free of the broken windshield.

He pivoted until he was facing me.

His skin had gone crimson from the heat, sweat streaming past his ears.

Blood ran off his forearm from the glass cuts.

Each breath lifted his chest in hard, ragged pulls.

Yet rage was not what I saw in his stare.

What filled his eyes was absolute terror.

He glanced at my service weapon, then fixed his gaze on mine.

The tire iron remained clenched in his fist.

His hands did not rise in surrender.

Instead, his features crumpled under a kind of unbearable desperation.

“If that’s what you want, officer, shoot me!” he yelled, his voice breaking. “Shoot me!”

For a second, I could not make sense of his plea.

Then he turned away from me again.

He lifted the tire iron.

This time, he was not focused on the Driver.

He moved toward the SUV’s rear passenger-side door.

Toward Maya, crying inside.

My grip cinched tighter around the pistol.

I was a breath away from squeezing the trigger.

The pavement’s heat pressed against everything around us, but ice seemed to flood my veins.

In twelve years with highway patrol, I had pulled my gun only four times.

I had never sent a round into anyone.

Now this wounded biker ignored the weapon trained on his back.

Marcus did not seem to notice me at all.

He seemed beyond consequences.

Every part of him was locked onto that rear door.

“Get away from that vehicle!” I shouted across the humid roadway.

He sprang for the handle.

I did not fire.

Something beneath my training and fear stopped me from shooting him in the back.

I shoved my weapon into its holster and rushed him.

My shoulder drove into his side as his bloody fingers reached the latch.

He was solidly built, but my charge threw both of us sideways.

We slammed down onto asphalt hot enough to sting through my uniform.

The fall emptied my lungs, and my duty belt bit into my hip.

Marcus made no sound of pain.

He bucked and writhed like an animal caught in a snare.

“Get off me! I have to get it open!” he cried, the words collapsing into a sob.

An elbow swung back and clipped my jaw.

My teeth snapped together, and bright whiteness burst across my vision.

I seized his arm and forced it behind him.

I drove my knee between his shoulder blades.

The roadway scorched through the knees of my pants.

His cheek ground against the blacktop, blood streaking over the white lane marking.

“Stay down!” I ordered, reaching for my cuffs.

“You don’t understand!” Marcus screamed, blood and sweat falling from his face. “She’s dying! Look at her!”

He was not trying to attack me.

He was trying to return to the SUV.

I treated his words as frantic nonsense and locked the cuffs over his broad wrists.

The metal ratcheted shut.

Using the chain, I hauled him upright and pulled him away from the SUV.

I shoved him against the concrete barrier.

“Sit down and be quiet,” I said, breathless, wiping the blood from my split lip.

He sagged against the divider, coughing hard.

His eyes stayed fixed on the SUV with frantic intensity.

The vehicles stopped around us had fallen utterly quiet.

People watched through windshields, phones raised to capture what was happening.

I drew one slow breath and tried to settle my racing pulse.

Then I turned toward the Driver.

He remained behind the wheel in his neat blue polo.

He had not shifted from the driver’s seat.

The windshield was destroyed, leaving a jagged opening across the front of the SUV.

Shattered safety glass covered the dash and his lap.

After a moment, the driver’s door unlocked with a click.

He pushed it outward.

Then he stepped onto the highway.

Fear did not show on his face.

Neither did anger.

His calmness felt deeply wrong.

“Thank God you got here, officer,” he said.

His tone was smooth and even, absurdly composed for the violence around him.

“Are you hurt?” I asked, holding my position between him and Marcus.

“No, I’m all right,” the Driver said with a weary shake of his head. “That lunatic came at me from nowhere.”

My eyes went from him to the ruined windshield.

“Did he strike you?” I asked.

“He only smashed the window,” the Driver answered. “I think he’s high. Just another road-rage case.”

“Liar!” Marcus shouted from the barrier, and I stayed between the two men.