Don't Know Jack by Capri Diane

Author:Capri, Diane [Capri, Diane]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: August Books
Published: 2012-01-26T06:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

The high pressure blast wave hurled the Leach brother and the coroner and the two GHP officers across the weedy grass like boneless scarecrows, dead before they hit the ground, and then a monstrous orange fireball filled the sky. White flames swallowed the Chevy in a blinding hot flash. Black smoke plumed up, then out, erasing normal daylight.

Kim closed her eyes, covered her ears and ducked her head. Smaller shock waves bounced Roscoe’s Town Car on the grassy shoulder and squeezed Kim’s breath from her chest. Pain seared as if her lungs had collapsed.

Muffled sound far away.

Kim squeezed her eyes tighter and curled as far into the foot-well as the shoulder harness would let her. Her chest hurt. She gulped shallow breaths.

Another explosion, smaller, followed quickly by a third.

Unnatural silence.

Kim waited, struggled to breathe, finally felt her lungs working again. She gulped air, hungry for it.

How much time had passed?

She opened her eyes again. Saw Roscoe still belted in her seat, conscious. OK. Kim struggled upright in her own seat. Took her hands off her ears.

There were fires outside the Town Car. There were muffled noises. There were pieces, chunks, slabs of things scattered everywhere. There were burning vehicles. There was smoke too thick to see through.

The Chevy was still burning.

Kim’s brain was processing data like slow-falling dominoes, one thing leading to the next. Both tow trucks were covered in flames. Tow trucks usually carried extra gasoline. Hence the second and third explosions? Two GHP cruisers also burning. One rested on its roof, the other in the ditch, lying on its side. Thrown there by the initial pressure wave?

Several uniformed personnel were down, injured, but likely alive. Gawkers might be hurt, too, inside vehicles closer to the Chevy than Roscoe’s Town Car.

On site rescue workers mobbed the scene. Firefighters rushed to put out the flames. Helicopter blades fought to disperse the blackness. The noise must have been outrageous, but everything remained muted by the Town Car’s body and the cotton that filled Kim’s head.

Behind the wheel, Roscoe seemed dazed, too, but conscious and not bleeding.

“Gaspar?” Kim asked. But how loud was her voice? She couldn’t tell. And she heard no answer. “ Gaspar?” she called, louder. No response.

She unhooked her seatbelt. She took stock of her body, which seemed to be unhurt and functioning. She turned in her seat but couldn’t see him over the high seatback.

“Gaspar?” she said again. She raised up as far as she could without kneeling, craned her neck and looked down into the deep foot well.

She saw him, face down, prone.

She remembered he’d been lying on the bench seat, not wearing his seatbelt. Had he been thrown to the floor when the car bounced? Was he hurt?

Kim scrambled out of the sedan and pulled open the back door.

“Are you OK?” she screamed, reaching in to him.

He didn’t scream back. Instead, he nodded, lifted himself onto his hands and knees, and crawled backward out of the floor well onto the grassy red ground. He leaned against the door to steady himself upright.

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