The Third Hill North of Town by Noah Bly

wasn’t doing a damn thing to cool him down.
    She ignored him and galloped over to his desk. “You need to look at this right now,” she said, thrusting the paper at him.
    Red glowered up at her but took the report. After two sentences he started craving the Budweiser in the trunk of his squad car.
    “What is it?” Samuel demanded, noticing the consternation in Red’s beefy face.
    The teletype report was from the Maine State Police, warning to be on the lookout for an Edsel, a white woman, and “a tall, thin, Negro male, approximately eighteen years of age” who was being sought for kidnapping, assault, and theft. The crime had occurred less than twenty miles south of Prescott, Maine, but the suspect was now being hunted all over New England. Red scanned the teletype message again, wordlessly, then held it out to Samuel.
    Samuel’s dark eyes studied Red’s face before he reached for the paper. As he read it his long black fingers began to tremble.
    “No, Red,” Samuel said, furiously shaking his head. “There’s no way in hell that’s my boy.” He read the paper again, desperate for reassurance. “For one thing, Elijah’s only fifteen. This is just a dumb coincidence.”
    Red nodded to make the man feel better, but he felt sick with dread. Coincidence or not, Elijah was missing, and three felonies had been committed that very day in the vicinity of Prescott by a teenaged Negro matching the boy’s description. The age discrepancy didn’t really matter; Elijah had grown a lot recently and from a distance he could easily pass for eighteen. Everything Red knew about the Hunters told him this was some sort of mistake, but his gut was telling him otherwise. It didn’t bode well for the Hunter family, and Red almost couldn’t bear to look at Samuel. Elijah had somehow gotten mixed up in something bad, and that was all there was to it, like it or not.
    Red looked up at Sally, who was staring at him with poorly concealed excitement. She was chomping on a piece of gum as if it were a wad of caffeinated cud.
    “Get me the state police on the phone,” he ordered, feeling tired. He held up a hand to head off Samuel’s protest until she left the office to make the call.
    “You’ve got to be joking,” Samuel snapped as soon as they were alone again.
    “Sorry, Sam. I don’t like this any better than you, but if Elijah’s in trouble—”
    “It’s not Elijah,” Samuel insisted.
    Red talked over him. “If Elijah’s in trouble, then we need to make sure everybody knows he’s just a kid, okay?”
    He didn’t say the rest of what he was thinking: Because if they know how young he is, the cowboys in the state patrol might be less likely to get trigger-happy.
    The idea that somebody might actually shoot Elijah Hunter before the day was done made him want to puke. There were a ton of people Red wouldn’t mind seeing shot, but Samuel Hunter’s boy wasn’t one of them.
    He had no way of knowing he would soon feel much worse. Within an hour, another teletype message would arrive, reporting the attempted murder of a New Hampshire state trooper named Lloyd Eagleton.
     
    Edgar Reilly’s stolen Edsel plowed into the squad car and drove it backward nearly three feet on the shoulder of the road. The open door Lloyd Eagleton was cowering behind was prevented from slamming shut, however, because Lloyd’s stocky body—or more specifically, his ribcage—got in the way. Lloyd’s gun and Smokey Bear hat went flying as five of his ribs snapped and the back of his skull bounced off the side of the car; he passed out an instant later, facedown on the gravel.
    Julianna didn’t even glance in the rearview mirror before throwing the Ranger into drive once more and flooring the accelerator. The Edsel spun out again and lunged forward, detaching itself with a squeal from the demolished front bumper of Lloyd’s cruiser. Within seconds the scene of the collision was well behind them on the highway, but Julianna didn’t ease