Chapter 7 - Eight Hundred Horsepower Through the Fire
Invisible blue-white methanol flames erupted instantly around the tires and lower aluminum walls of the forty-foot command trailer, sending a wave of blistering heat radiating through the diamond-plate floor beneath my bare feet.
Outside in the subterranean loading bay, gunfire echoed off the concrete ceiling as Matteo and Luca fought fiercely to push past Kovacs’s three mercenaries toward the burning trailer while thick black tire smoke billowed toward the ventilation shafts.
Inside the sealed trailer, the air conditioning vents sucked the acrid black smoke straight into the server room, turning the narrow compartment into a suffocating oven within fifteen seconds.
Chase had padlocked both the side door and the rear ramp from the outside before running toward a getaway SUV, convinced that within two minutes the methanol fire would reach the pressurized nitrous-oxide tanks in the nose cone and blow both me and the 2024 Indianapolis crash data into ash.
Coughing hard against the back of my arm, I grabbed the steel memory drive containing Eli’s black-box file along with my laptop satchel and backed out of the burning server cabin into the thirty-foot main cargo bay of the trailer.
Sitting strapped down on the steel floor tracks in the center of the cargo bay was Car Eighty-Eight—Chase’s prized, eight-hundred-and-fifty-horsepower Daytona prototype stock car, built with a reinforced tubular steel roll cage designed to survive two-hundred-mile-per-hour impacts into solid concrete.
Holding my breath against the blinding black smoke, I pulled the pneumatic quick-release lever on the wall winch and kicked the four steel axle ratchets open with the heel of my foot until the heavy race car bounced free on its suspension.
I dove headfirst through the open driver’s window net of Car Eighty-Eight, dropped into the carbon-fiber racing seat, and snapped the five-point safety harness tight across my crimson silk gown.
For two years while Chase was recovering from his brain injury, I had been the one who sat in this exact cockpit during cold-start dyno tests to calibrate the electronic ignition curves.
My left hand flipped the three red aircraft toggle switches on the overhead panel—Master Battery, Fuel Pump, and Ignition—and my right thumb slammed the starter button.
The custom seven-liter engine roared to life inside the confined aluminum trailer with a thunderous bark that shook the walls and drowned out the gunfire outside.
Without waiting a single second for the oil pressure to rise, I stomped the heavy clutch to the floor, yanked the gearbox lever straight back into reverse, pressed the dashboard button that released the hydraulic pins on the rear ramp door, and floored the throttle to seven thousand revolutions per minute.
Spinning its massive rear slick tires in a cloud of white rubber smoke on the metal floor, the three-thousand-pound stock car rocketed backward down the length of the burning trailer at forty miles per hour and smashed straight through the padlocked aluminum rear doors in a shower of sheared bolts and flaming metal.
The reinforced steel rear bumper of my race car flew down the collapsing ramp and T-boned the passenger side of the black Cadillac Escalade that Kovacs’s mercenaries were using for cover, flipping the five-ton vehicle onto its side across the concrete bay and pinning two gunmen beneath the crushed frame.
Before the third mercenary could even recover from the shockwave of seeing Chase’s prized race car burst out of a wall of fire, Matteo stepped around the pillar and dropped him with two shots to the shoulder, while Luca tore open the doors of the white medical van and confirmed that my brother Noah and his nurse were completely unharmed inside.
Ten seconds after I spun the smoking race car to a halt fifty yards clear of the burning trailer, the flames reached the nose cone and detonated the spare fuel drums in a muffled orange fireball that triggered the overhead deluge sprinklers.
Matteo wrenched open the driver’s window net of Car Eighty-Eight, unbuckled my harness with steady hands, and pulled me straight out through the window frame into his arms as cold sprinkler water rained down on both of us.
For three long seconds, the most feared man in Chicago held me crushed against his chest in the middle of the flooded bay, his chin resting on my wet hair and his heart hammering against my ribs.
"I told you that your husband didn’t know how to drive that car without you," Matteo whispered fiercely against my temple.
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Chase had slipped out the service stairwell in the smoke right before the trailer blew, but when Luca brought over the crocodile-skin briefcase dropped by Kovacs’s lead mercenary, the relief in the bay vanished instantly.
Inside the briefcase sat a notarized Illinois property transfer and a private eviction writ showing that two hours earlier, Chase and Brielle’s uncle had used an old marital power of attorney to secretly sell the entire Lakeview Specialty Clinic building in Evanston to Kovacs’s demolition shell company to clear Chase’s eight-million-dollar gambling debt—and Kovacs’s liquidation crew was already at the Evanston clinic right now shutting off the backup medical generators to force twenty-four ventilator patients onto the street before midnight.
