“Hands behind your back!” he screamed, holstering his weapon and ripping a pair of handcuffs from his belt. Sloan didn’t fight him physically. She let him wrench her arms behind her back, feeling the cold steel bite painfully into her wrists as the cuffs ratcheted tight.
“Travis, this is a mistake.” Davies pleaded, rushing forward now. The young rookie looked terrified, staring at the gold shield sitting on the hood of the car. He reached out and picked it up, tilting it, watching the holographic watermark shift across the surface of the identification card. “Travis, this is real. Look at the watermark. It’s a real Bureau ID.”
“Shut up, Davies.” Haynes panted, shoving Sloan hard against the car to make sure the cuffs were tight. He leaned in close to her ear, his breath hot and reeking of stale coffee. “You’re going to prison. You hear me? Impersonating a federal officer. I’m going to ruin your life.”
Sloan turned her head, resting her cheek against the scorching roof of her car. She looked directly at Haynes, her expression utterly without fear. The trap had already been sprung. Haynes simply didn’t realize yet that he was the one standing inside it.
“Officer Haynes,” Sloan said, her voice carrying steadily over the wind. “Look down the highway.” Haynes scoffed, but his eyes instinctively drifted toward the horizon. About three miles down the flat, straight stretch of Route 66, the heat haze was shimmering violently.
Bursting through that shimmer like a swarm of angry hornets came the flashing strobe lights of six black unmarked SUVs screaming toward them at well over one hundred miles an hour. The low rumbling growl of high-performance engines arrived before the vehicles themselves, a vibration that traveled up through the asphalt and into the soles of Haynes’s boots.
He squinted against the blinding Arizona sun, his hand still gripping the back of Sloan’s shirt. The haze broke apart. Six matte black SUVs tore down the two-lane highway in a tight synchronized formation, grills eating up the distance at a terrifying speed. Hidden LED strobes pulsed behind their windshields with blinding red and blue intensity.
The piercing wail of federal sirens ripped through the quiet desert, a sound so loud and aggressive it seemed to rattle the teeth in Haynes’s skull. “What the hell?” Haynes muttered, his grip on Sloan loosening just a fraction. “Davies, did you call dispatch? Who is that?”
“I didn’t touch the radio, Travis.” Rookie Officer Liam Davies yelled back, his voice cracking with panic. He was backing away from the car, his hands rising instinctively toward his chest. He looked from the incoming convoy to the gold FBI shield still resting on the hood of Sloan’s sedan, and the full dreadful reality of the situation finally slammed into him.
“Travis, let her go. Let her go right now.” “Shut up.” Haynes shouted, but the bravado was already bleeding out of his voice, replaced by a creeping cold dread that spread through his chest like ice water. The convoy did not slow down for a polite stop.