Chapter 8 - THE GRADE ON ROUTE 42
"They took Tyler and Evelyn?" I gasped, my knees nearly buckling on the concrete porch steps as Sarah caught my arm and pulled Lucy back into the safety of the doorway.
Down at the end of our cul-de-sac, two Columbus patrol officers were pinning District Investigator Marcus Vance against the hood of his wrecked sedan while water from the sheared hydrant geysered twenty feet into the October night sky.
The police sergeant standing on my porch held up his hand as his shoulder radio crackled with high-priority dispatch traffic.
"All north-end units and State Highway Patrol Post 25," the dispatcher’s voice barked into the cold night air. "Franklin County deputies on scene at the Route 42 garden center have Robert Ellis and Gregory Daniels in custody by the loading dock, negative contact on the blue Ford F-250 or the two kidnapped civilians. Repeat—Robert Ellis states Thomas Whitfield and Rebecca Morgan left the barn eight minutes ago heading north on Old Mill Ridge Road toward the Delaware County quarry in the blue pickup."
The Delaware County quarry.
Wait. Why would Thomas Whitfield and Principal Rebecca Morgan take a sixty-eight-year-old woman and a seven-year-old boy toward the abandoned limestone quarry at the top of Old Mill Ridge?
"Wait a minute!" Lucy’s voice piped up beside me, sharp and clear despite the shivering in her thin pink pajamas. She grabbed the sergeant’s uniform sleeve with both hands. "They aren't going to the quarry! That’s where Brandon said his uncle hides the yellow buses when it rains!"
The sergeant looked down at my ten-year-old daughter. "What yellow buses, sweetheart?"
"The old gravel barn at the top of the big hill behind Willowbrook Elementary!" I said, the memory of mechanic David Miller’s last words on the infrared video flashing through my mind like lightning: Those buses carry forty elementary kids down Route 42 Hill every morning! If that compression fitting blows on the grade, those kids will go straight through the guardrail! "Thomas Whitfield owns the site-prep yard at the top of Route 42 Hill, half a mile above the school! That’s where the replacement Bus 17—the uninspected salvage rig from Kentucky—is parked overnight so he doesn't have to pay garage fees at Industrial Parkway!"
If Thomas Whitfield and Rebecca Morgan had realized Robert Ellis and Greg Daniels were about to be caught by the deputies at the garden center at the bottom of the hill, they wouldn't stay in a pickup truck that had Evelyn Miller’s bruised DNA and chemical drums in the back—and they wouldn't drive down the main highway past the sheriff’s roadblock! They had taken Evelyn and Tyler up the ridge road to Whitfield’s equipment yard at the top of the hill so they could force Evelyn to tell them where I lived, swap vehicles in the dark, and take the back logging road into Delaware County!
"Sergeant, let me ride with you to the top of the ridge!" I begged, handing my laptop to Sarah. "Tyler is seven years old and he’s terrified of strangers—if he sees my face, he won't panic!"
"Get in the back of the cruiser, ma'am, you don't step one inch outside the bulletproof glass when we get there," the sergeant ordered, sprinting down my driveway toward his patrol SUV while barking the Route 42 Hill coordinates into his mic.
I kissed the top of Lucy’s head, left her locked securely inside our house with Sarah and a uniformed patrolman stationed on our front steps, and jumped into the rear cage of the sergeant’s cruiser.
Three minutes later, with the siren wailing and blue strobes flashing against the dark pine trees, our cruiser and two State Highway Patrol interceptors tore up the steep, winding eight-percent grade of Route 42 Hill, half a mile above Willowbrook Elementary.
As we rounded the blind hairpin curve below Whitfield’s fenced gravel yard, the sergeant slammed on his brakes.
Coming straight down the steep hill toward the elementary school intersection with its headlights completely turned off was the counterfeit yellow Bus 17—the salvage rig from Kentucky!
Inside the open chain-link gate of the gravel yard above us, the dented blue pickup truck was wedged sideways against a concrete barrier with a blown front tire where it had clipped a culvert pipe in the dark. With his truck disabled and police sirens closing in from the north quarry road, Thomas Whitfield had forced Rebecca Morgan, Evelyn Miller, and little Tyler onto the parked school bus in the yard to smash through the gate and coast down the dark back hill toward the county line!
"He’s running without headlights on an eight-percent grade!" the sergeant yelled into his radio as he whipped our cruiser around in a screeching J-turn to pull alongside the Careening forty-foot bus. "Clear the intersection at Willowbrook! He’s doing fifty-five miles an hour!"
Through the side window of the patrol SUV, illuminated by our blinding white alley takedown spotlights, I saw a sight that stopped my heart.
In the front passenger seat of the careening yellow bus, sixty-eight-year-old Evelyn Miller wasn't sitting down—she had lunged across the center aisle, wrapping both arms around seven-year-old Tyler while Principal Rebecca Morgan screamed and clawed at the dashboard handhold.
And behind the steering wheel, school board member Thomas Whitfield was standing up on both feet, stomping down with all of his weight on a brake pedal that had gone straight to the floorboard!
A cloud of white, acrid hydraulic smoke was pouring out from beneath the rear wheel well of the bus.
The illegal compression fitting David Miller had warned about two summers ago had finally blown under the load of an emergency stop on the steep grade.
"His brakes are gone!" the sergeant shouted. "If he hits the bottom curve at sixty, that bus is going right over the bridge embankment into the creek!"
Three hundred yards ahead, at the bottom of the hill right before the concrete bridge, sat the broad asphalt loop of the Willowbrook Elementary bus turnaround—bordered not by a cliff, but by a four-foot-deep municipal gravel drainage swale and the newly plowed dirt softball field!
"Turn your PA speaker on!" I screamed from the back cage, pressing my face against the steel mesh partition. "Give me the microphone! Tyler knows the emergency door lever in the back—Lucy told me they practiced the bus evacuation drill on Monday, and the air-door release knob above the windshield will lock the front hydraulic axle if Rebecca pulls it!"
The sergeant didn't hesitate. He snatched the heavy black PA handset off the dashboard bracket and shoved it through the sliding Plexiglas slot into my hand as he gunned the cruiser’s V8 engine, pulling nose-to-nose beside the passenger doors of the runaway yellow bus at fifty-eight miles an hour.
I hit the metal transmit key, my voice booming out across the roaring highway from the roof-mounted bullhorn at a hundred and ten decibels:
"REBECCA MORGAN! THE HYDRAULIC LINE IS BLOWN! PULL THE RED EMERGENCY AIR VALVE ABOVE THE DOOR AND TURN INTO THE SOFTBALL FIELD SAND PIT RIGHT NOW, OR YOU ARE ALL GOING OFF THE BRIDGE!"
Inside the brightly lit glass cab of the runaway bus ten feet away from my window, Rebecca Morgan looked straight out at me in sheer, mortal terror.
Thomas Whitfield swung his arm back to knock her away from the controls, trying to steer the bus onto the main highway bridge—and for the first time in her life, Rebecca Morgan stopped obeying her brother. She grabbed the red emergency air-dump valve above the folding doors with both hands, yanked it straight down, and grabbed the right side of the massive steering wheel, wrenching it hard toward the open school entrance gate!
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With a deafening hiss of compressed air, the rear spring-brakes locked up in a shower of orange sparks across the asphalt.
The forty-foot yellow bus slewed sideways through the wooden perimeter fence of the Willowbrook Elementary softball field, plowed fifty yards through the deep, soft red clay of the infield diamond in a billowing cloud of dust, and came to a shuddering, upright stop with its front bumper buried three feet deep in the backstop dirt pile.
