words the emotions that had been battering around. Because I'm scared, whispered the answer, and that answer pissed him off.
Gibb stalked to his police cruiser, checked the computer for messages, then pulled into traffic. In no time at all, he had the engine pushing 5000 rpm as he surged through the night at 110 mph.
Because I'm scared had been the wrong answer.
Gibb despised fear and all the knee trembling, heart palpitating and wringing of the hands that went with it. He was a cop and cops weren't afraid. He'd been to a hundred seminars where the first message out of the speaker's mouth was Fear can kill!
Fear wasn't something that he was supposed to feel. If he was truly afraid, then he needed to deal with it. Here was a chance for Gibb to deal with something that he'd set in motion seventeen years ago. All that was standing between him and closure were the words of the Long Cool Woman.
He was determined to get answers. He caught up to the convoy at mile marker 92. But before he could pull them over, the radio blasted a call for all cars. There was a huge accident in Plomosa Pass, which was just east of Quartzite and north of Black Mesa. He glared accusingly at the radio for a moment, then sighed. He checked the westbound traffic, waited for a break, then slowed enough to tear across the median and head the other way.
There were deaths at the scene and he needed to get there. His problems could wait. Twenty minutes of screaming down the highway later, he reached the accident site. Traffic was backed up and the last eight miles he had to crawl along the emergency lane, careful of pedestrians and motorcycles.
When he got there it was as bad as he’d anticipated. A U–Haul carrying illegals had been crunched by a semitrailer. Another car, an older Oldsmobile station wagon, lay twisted and on its side down an embankment.
He was the fifth patrolman on the scene. They needed him to control traffic. He tossed on his yellow emergency vest, grabbed his flashlights and set to work. Cars crawled by at five miles an hour. Faces of children, wide-eyed and fearful, pressed against the windows. Mothers sat in passenger seats aghast at the scene, but with a hint of mad glee that it hadn’t happened to them and theirs. Fathers, more often than not, refused to look, their own guilt at driving fast, past events of shameful road rage, and their own feelings of vehicular-propped masculinity all mixing to create a chain of guilt that they refused to acknowledge by refusing to look. No better than children, if they didn’t see it, it didn’t happen, their ignorance mollifying their egos.
Behind him, Gibb could hear the emergency medical technicians working on the living. Occasionally, the shrill whistle of a flatline would pierce the canopy of noise surrounding the accident. Everyone would silence themselves as they prayed for the sound to modulate and return to the beating of a living heart. All but once they were rewarded, and that last was a mother of three who’d been in the passenger seat of the station wagon.
By the time the U–Haul and the station wagon were loaded onto flatbeds and taken away and the traffic had resumed a two-lane flow, Gibb had learned what had happened. The U–Haul had been on the side of the road, when for whatever reason it had pulled out in front of the eighteen-wheeled semi truck. The driver of the semi had tried to avoid the accident by swerving to the left, but unbeknownst to him, the station wagon was coming on at high speed in the left hand lane preparing to pass. Suddenly finding the semi blocking his way, the station wagon swerved off the interstate on the left, found traction, then shot back across the road where it went airborne, twisting and turning like a car should never do. The driver of the U–Haul seemed oblivious to it all. The semi had no choice but to plow through the back of it, crunching the tin box container which held seventeen illegals like a beer can.
The results were seven dead illegals, a mother and two children dead from the station wagon and lives irrevocably shattered.
The driver of the station wagon was in critical condition along with the lone surviving child.
The driver of the U–Haul had miraculously survived and had disappeared into the desert. A helicopter scoured Black Mesa in