The Third Rail by Michael Harvey

struck. The car hit the divider, jumped it, and plowed into a van headed north. That driver, eighteen-year-old Malcolm Anderson, would never meet his daughter, Janine, because she'd never be born. The only passenger in the van, thirteen-year-old Randall Blake, would have his left leg crushed in the wreckage, undergo four hours of emergency surgery at Northwestern Memorial, and survive. Randall would consider himself one of the lucky ones from that day on the Drive. He'd never know about his four years as an All-American guard at the University of Michigan or the Hall of Fame career he would have enjoyed with his hometown Bulls. Never know about the $113 million he'd have earned, the wife he'd have married and grown old with, or the five girls he'd have watched raise families of their own. Instead, Randall would walk for the rest of his life with a limp and a cane.He'd die alone, at the age of forty-six, from complications due to hepatitis C, the disease of a junkie, which is exactly what Randall would become.
    Three cars behind Mitchell Case's car, Robles' final round creased the roof of a black 2009 Audi and caromed away harmlessly. Inside, the driver took no notice of the metallic ping, not with the horror show unfolding in slow motion around her. Rachel Swenson locked her brakes and heard the crunch as she hit the car in front of her. A half beat later, she felt another car plow into her from behind. At the same time her air bag deployed, knocking her silly and preventing her from being impaled on the steering wheel. Rachel put her hand to her face and slipped the rearview mirror over. There was a cut on her forehead, and she felt a little dizzy, but she was alive and still conscious. A car had jackknifed over the divider and a young black boy was halfway out of a van and moaning. She leaned her shoulder against the driver's-side door and popped it open. Then Rachel was up and out of the car. There was a smell of raw gasoline in the air. A few feet away, a man was screaming that he had called the police. Rachel could already hear the sirens. She walked down the line of wrecked cars. In one she could see a man with most of his head missing and a young woman crouched nearby, vomiting. Rachel hadn't spent time at a lot of crime scenes, but she'd seen enough to know the injury she was looking at was not the result of any car accident. The black boy near the van moaned again. Rachel climbed the divider and picked her way around the wreckage. She'd do what she could. As she walked, she felt her cell phone in her pocket. She pulled it out, dialed, and waited for the other end to pick up. That was when she saw the lone figure, across three lanes of highway, packing up a duffel bag and disappearing into a stand of trees.

CHAPTER 25

    R odriguez hit the intersection of Belmont and Racine at fifty miles an hour and climbing. He had his lights and siren on and was typing into a computer built into a console between us. I had just hung up with Rachel and was scribbling down everything she'd told me. Rodriguez finished with his notes and looked over.
    "What do you got?"
    "She said he was dressed in a dark-colored jacket and maybe jogging pants. Holed up on a little rise of grass, just west of the Drive."
    Rodriguez was at sixty now, moving east on Belmont.
    "And she thinks he's the guy?"
    "She says he was packing a black duffel and running."
    "Hold on."
    Rodriguez typed a few more lines into his computer. Then he came back to me.
    "You all right with this?" he said.
    Rachel told me she was okay. She sounded okay. And she let me talk to one of the people on the road with her who assured me she was more than okay. So I let her tell me about the man on the hill. Let her talk me into going after him.
    "I'm fine. What are we doing?"
    Rodriguez swung a hard right onto Inner Lake Shore Drive. Traffic was at a standstill. Rodriguez cut back west and picked his way south down Sheridan.
    "We're setting up a perimeter from Halsted Street east,