"That you would join in the fun. Well, you did put one through the passenger window, maybe killing the hostages back there…"

The cop gaped. "Oh, shit, I didn't now…"

"No, you didn't." A long pause. "But in this case there weren't any, which is your dumb good luck."

Why do I bother? Nash thought; let their sergeant give them the nickel lesson. Cooley was approaching, his head down, the collar of his blue nylon jacket up against the rain.

"You call it in?"

"Yeah." Cooley looked at the corpse and shook his head. "The bastard tried to ram us. I had no choice. He spun the car around and headed right toward us. A big fucking car like that would've gone through that Fury like a ball bat through a cream pie. Christ, the two of us would've both been strained through the fucking radiator grille. Stolen car, too. We saw the little fuck-head in a stolen car, and we pursued. And he tried to kill us."

Nash saw the two uniforms exchange a glance. He could see that they knew who Cooley was and that a subtle transformation was going on in their minds, the little neural charges deposited by memory being overwritten by the story Cooley was spinning now. They were recalling how the fleeing vehicle had spun around and become a deadly missile heading toward the unmarked, until Cooley had shot the life out of its driver, and look, the SUV had come to rest conveniently pointing south, the proper direction. Nash, too, was making the story happen in his mind, rather more self-consciously than were the two young cops, mainly because he had enough experience to understand how vulnerable the story was.

But… but just maybe it had happened that way. There had certainly been a lot of swerving around on the slick black road, and he had been totally consumed with keeping the Fury under control. He would go with it. The car had been stolen, the chase was legit. There was no point in dwelling on the fusillade Cooley had let off during the pursuit, or the shots fired after the car had stopped. Nash just prayed that some of the bullets had hit the son of a bitch from the front.