Chapter 7 - Fire in the Pit Lane
Invisible blue-white methanol flames erupted instantly around the tires and lower aluminum skirt of the forty-foot command trailer, sending a wave of blistering heat radiating through the floor panels beneath my bare feet!
Outside in the subterranean loading bay, gunfire echoed off the concrete ceiling as Matteo and Luca engaged Kovacs’s three mercenaries in a fierce firefight across the pit lane, pinned down by automatic weapons fire behind the structural pillars while thick black tire smoke billowed toward the ventilation shafts.
Inside the sealed trailer, the air conditioning system sucked the acrid black smoke straight through the intake vents, turning the narrow server compartment into a scorching oven within fifteen seconds.
Chase had padlocked the heavy rear ramp door and the side personnel door from the outside before sprinting toward a getaway SUV with Kovacs’s men, convinced that within two minutes the methanol fire would reach the pressurized nitrous-oxide tanks stored in the front nose cone of the trailer and blow both me and the 2024 Indianapolis crash data into ash!
I coughed hard against my sleeve, grabbed the steel memory drive containing Eli’s decrypted 2024 black-box file along with my laptop satchel, and backed out of the burning server nose into the main thirty-foot cargo bay of the trailer.
Sitting strapped down on the diamond-plate steel tracks in the center of the cargo bay was Car Eighty-Eight—Chase’s prized, eight-hundred-and-fifty-horsepower Daytona prototype stock car, worth half a million dollars and built with a reinforced tubular chromoly steel roll cage designed to survive two-hundred-mile-per-hour impacts into solid concrete!
The four heavy ratchet straps holding the car’s axles to the trailer floor were still hooked to the winches.
Holding my breath against the blinding smoke, I grabbed the pneumatic quick-release lever on the wall winch and kicked the four steel floor ratchets open with the heel of my foot until the suspension of the massive race car bounced free on its springs!
I dove headfirst through the open driver’s window netting of Car Eighty-Eight, landed squarely in the carbon-fiber racing bucket seat, and snapped the five-point Kevlar safety harness tight across my crimson 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 sequences.
My left hand flipped the three red aircraft toggle switches on the overhead carbon panel—Master Battery, Fuel Pump, and Ignition—and my right thumb slammed the starter button!
The custom seven-liter V8 engine roared to life inside the confined aluminum trailer with a thunderous, deafening bark that shook the walls and drowned out the gunfire outside!
Without waiting a single second for the oil pressure to warm, I stomped the heavy racing clutch to the floor, slammed the sequential gearbox handle straight back into reverse, pressed the dashboard radio button that released the hydraulic pins on the rear trailer ramp door, and floored the throttle to seven thousand RPM!
Spinning its massive slick rear tires in a cloud of white rubber smoke on the diamond-plate 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 rear steel 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 as cover, flipping the five-ton SUV onto its side across the concrete bay and pinning two of the gunmen beneath the crushed door 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 concrete pillar and dropped the gunman with two pinpoint shots to the shoulder, while Luca sprinted to the white Lakeview medical van, tore open the rear doors, 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 front nose cone of the trailer and detonated the spare fuel drums in a muffled orange fireball that triggered the bay’s overhead deluge sprinklers.
Matteo wrenched open the driver’s side window safety net of Car Eighty-Eight, unbuckled my five-point harness with trembling 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 concrete bay, his chin resting on top of my wet hair and his heart hammering wildly 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 before kissing my forehead.
Chase Whitaker had managed to slip out the emergency service stairwell in the smoke thirty seconds before the trailer blew, abandoning his wrecked empire and his cartel partners behind him.
However, as Luca walked over from the overturned Escalade carrying the blood-stained crocodile-skin briefcase belonging to Viktor Kovacs’s lead lieutenant, the relief in the underground bay vanished in an instant.
"Boss, you and Vivian need to look at what was inside the cartel courier’s briefcase right now," Luca said grimly as he laid a notarized Illinois Department of Public Health property transfer and a court-ordered private receivership writ on the hood of the race car.
I wiped the soot and water from my eyes, read the stamped heading on the legal document, and felt my knees buckle beneath me.
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Chase had not kidnapped Noah’s medical van tonight just to threaten us during the gala; Noah had only been in that van because two hours ago, Chase and Brielle’s uncle had used the forged power of attorney from our marriage to secretly sell the entire Lakeview Specialty Clinic building in Evanston to Viktor Kovacs’s demolition shell company to clear Chase’s eight-million-dollar gambling debt!
And according to the timestamp on the eviction order, Kovacs’s private security liquidators were already at the Evanston clinic right now shutting off the backup medical generators and disconnecting the twenty-four ventilator patients in the intensive care wing to empty the building before midnight!
