I dove across the detective to shield him from a second shot, but it never came. All I heard was the screaming of Pedelini’s girls.
“Call 911!” I yelled at Tessa, who’d come to the screen door.
I didn’t wait to see if she complied, just turned to her father, whose eyes had rolled up in his head. He was breathing, though. And his pulse was strong.
I didn’t want to move him, but I turned his head slightly to look at the wound. The bullet had dug a nasty groove through the scalp and along the surface of his skull, like a wood-carving tool had worked it. But I couldn’t see anywhere the bullet had penetrated his cranium.
I heard a car start, wheels squealing. I stood, peered across the cove, and spotted the taillights of a car racing away on the shore road. The car swerved, and I saw an old couple dive out of the way.
The car lost control, hit something hard with a tremendous crash. The brake lights never came on.
I started to run. That was my shooter.
“Wait!” Tessa screamed after me.
“Your dad’s going to be all right!” I yelled, jumping off the porch and sprinting to the rental car.
I threw it in reverse, spit gravel onto the road, and jammed it in gear. I almost lost control going around the hairpin at the back of the cove and slowed at the curve near the spot from where the shooter must have fired. When my headlights came around, I could see an older couple standing, shaken, by the road. But there was no car beyond them.
I roared up to them and they looked frightened.
“I’m a police officer,” I said. “Where did that car go?”
The elderly man’s hand was trembling. “Up the road. A white Impala. Almost hit us.”
A white Impala. I drove away slow, trying not to spin up rocks that might hit the couple, my attention darting off the road to a stripped and gouged stump with bits of steel embedded in it. I figured he’d hit it hard head-on, which meant the radiator might have been damaged, or the front end.
In any case, I couldn’t see the car being able to maintain its pace down the winding mountain road from the lake back toward town. The moment I turned off the shore road onto the main route, I sped up again.
Halfway down the mountain, I spotted brake lights ahead of me, and then they were gone around a curve. I caught up on the next bend, my high beams finding the rear of the Impala. Judging from the silhouettes showing through the back window, there were only two inside.
The passenger twisted around as if to look back at me, raised a pistol. I mashed the pedal and rammed the rear bumper before he could shoot. The impact flung the Impala at a steep angle up the road and away from me. My headlights caught the driver clawing at the wheel.
Finn Davis managed to regain control of the car and picked up speed through the next turn. When I came around the curve, a guy was hanging out the passenger window and aiming a shotgun at me left-handed.