“That’s because you drive like you’re a hundred years old.”
Logan ejected a guttural, animalistic sound that silenced them both. “You two take lead. Full sirens until we’re close enough that the bastard might hear us, then cut them,” he instructed. “Tyler, Sinead, you’re with me. Hamza, keep working on that helicopter. I want it here on standby if we need to get the girl to hospital.”
Hamza gave a thumbs up and pointed to the phone earpiece to indicate that he was listening to someone on the other end.
Logan clapped his hands and ushered the Uniforms out of the room, then practically shoved Sinead and Tyler out after them.
“Be careful, Jack,” Ben urged. “Keep us posted, best you can.”
Logan acknowledged the DI’s concern with a nod, then pulled on his coat and went striding across the car park after the others.
Tyler was up front in the passenger seat of the BMW, with Sinead sitting directly behind him. When Logan climbed in and shut the door, Taggart let out an excited woof from the back.
“How the…？” Logan asked, turning to look over his shoulder. “How did the bloody dog get in?”
“Don’t know, sir. He just sort of appeared.”
Logan muttered something, then fired up the engine. Across the car park, the polis 4x4 roared into life, its sirens breaking into a piercing scream.
“Are you going to throw up on this road?” Logan asked, turning to the DC sitting beside him.
“Hopefully not, boss,” Tyler replied.
Logan glowered. “Let’s try that again, son. Are you going to throw up on this road?”
“Eh… no, boss. I’m not.”
“That’s more like it,” Logan said, then he gave a blast of his horn to encourage the other vehicle to move.
As soon as it had, he floored the accelerator, and the BMW went tearing out of the car park in a cloud of fumes and gravel.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
It was fifty minutes later, and Tyler had been true to his word. But only just. Every hump in the road, every sudden twist and bend, had elicited a noise, or a flinch, or a gasped, “Fuck!”
They had gone tearing up the road far faster than Logan and Sinead had done it a couple of days before, the sirens of their escort forcing any oncoming traffic to divert into laybys in order to let them past.
The speed, while helping them get there sooner, was doing Tyler’s stomach no favours, at all. Or, for that matter, anyone else’s.
“Why did they do this?!” Tyler wailed, after a particularly twisted chicane that had forced him to swallow down something that had been pretty damn adamant about coming up. “Why would anyone build a road like this on purp—？”
The rest of the sentence was cut off by a hwurk, a, “Jesus Christ!” and a clamped hand across his mouth.
The other detectives had offered words of support for the first twenty minutes of the journey, albeit in their own very different styles. Now, though, they were both so focused on not throwing up themselves that they frankly didn’t have time for Tyler’s shit, so nobody offered a response.
“How far now?” Logan asked, stealing a glance in his rearview mirror at a decidedly green-looking Sinead in the back.
Her side window was open, and Taggart sat in her lap, letting the fast-moving air ruffle his ears and flap his tongue around. He, unlike every other bugger in the car, was having a thoroughly lovely time.
“Not sure,” Sinead said. It was safer to speak in short, staccato sentences, she and the DCI had both found. It limited the opportunity for anything to… escape. “Can’t be far,” she offered, although she knew this was probably just wishful thinking.
The polis car flung itself around a bend up ahead, and was lost out of sight behind a stack of hay bales bound and rolled in purple plastic. Tyler hissed and braced himself for the turn, then let out a cry of fright when they took the corner to find the 4x4 stopped in the road just ahead of them.
“Brakes, brakes, brakes!” he howled, despite the fact that the BMW’s tyres were already screeching, leaving four slug trails of melted rubber on the road behind them.
There was a thump from the back, and quite an annoyed sounding yelp from Taggart.
“He’s fine!” Sinead announced, as the car jerked to a halt just inches from the vehicle in front.
It was only then, once the initial panic of the emergency stop was over, that they realised the reason they had been forced to stop.
Sheep. Scores of them. Hundreds, maybe. They flocked across the road and onto the embankments on either side, penned in by the fences of the fields.