Chapter 7 - The Crash
The SUV’s rear bumper slammed into the clinic's private security cruisers with an explosive crunch of tearing metal and shattering safety glass.
The impact sent the armed guards diving for cover. Salgado was knocked off his feet by the shockwave, sprawling across the wet concrete, the glass syringe flying from his hand and pulverizing against the dock wall.
The SUV screeched to a halt, the engine steaming, its rear hatch already unlocked.
“Maya!” I yelled, running toward the driver’s side.
The door popped open. Maya tumbled out onto the concrete, bruised and covered in soot, but completely unyielding. She scrambled to her feet and pointed at the loading ramp. “Get her in! More cars are coming down the street!”
Morales and I hoisted Verónica from the gurney. With a burst of adrenaline that made my vision blur, I lifted my wife’s limp, fragile body into the spacious rear cargo area of the SUV, laying her across the folded-down seats. Morales climbed in beside her, immediately attaching a portable pulse oximeter to her finger and hanging a bag of high-dose pyridoxine from the ceiling grab handle.
“Go, Alejandro! Go!” Morales barked.
I grabbed Maya, threw her into the passenger seat, jumped behind the wheel, and slammed the gear into drive.
Salgado scrambled to his knees in the rearview mirror, his white coat covered in grease and dirt, screaming into a walkie-talkie. Rodolfo burst out of the service stairwell onto the loading dock, soaking wet, his face purple with rage. He drew a snub-nosed revolver from his jacket and fired three wild shots toward us.
A bullet blew out the driver-side mirror in a shower of plastic and silvered glass. Another punched through the tailgate.
I floored the gas. The four-wheel drive gripped the wet incline, and the heavy truck rocketed up the ramp, bursting through the perimeter barrier into the rainy morning streets of Santa Fe.
Behind us, the sirens of local police cars began to echo in the distance, but they were converging on the clinic, lured by the triggered fire alarms and the reports of gunfire.
“Where are we going?” Morales yelled over the roar of the engine, his fingers pressed against Verónica’s carotid artery. “Her heart rate is erratic! The metabolic shock of stopping the continuous infusion is triggering peripheral spasms!”
“To the Toluca project site,” I answered, weaving through the morning commuter traffic.
“The dump?” Morales asked, incredulous.
May you like
“Not the dump,” I said, my voice cold as iron. “The underground vault at the old substation. The Cárdenas & Montalvo corporate server hub. It has off-grid backup power, fiber-optic telecom lines, and completely airtight security doors that only my biometric pass can open. And more importantly... that's where Rodolfo keeps his private offshore accounting terminals.”
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