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"Look, said Jim, "Lt Olsen has got orders to take the plates back to HQ without delay. I'd like you to ride with him and wait for me in the Department, okay?"
Blair turned towards Charlie Olsen with a questioning look. The man smiled.
"Hey, gotta get these plates to the Treasury guys before they bust a gasket. And given you've been pretty instrumental in getting them back, I think it's only right and proper I give you a blue light into the PD, right?" Blair looked quickly back at Jim, who just raised an arm in farewell as he plunged back into the crowd.
"Counterfeit plates," mused Blair, as Olsen powered the car away, swinging in a wide loop before taking off fast down the nearest open street. "It's the 1990s; you'd think there'd be a more technological approach to printing money by now."
"Hey, we don't make the rules, we just catch the bad guys."
Olsen turned to smile at Blair, but before Blair could even smile back, his world erupted with a body-blow of shrieking, twisting metal and splintering glass as another vehicle crashed at full speed into Olsen's side of the car. Olsen practically landed in Blair's lap, thrown across the car by the impact of the assailant vehicle. He had had no time to cry out in that split second of his death, but Blair screamed his own terror as the impact carried Olsen's car, the metal screeching, across the street until it smashed into a corner building.
The car rocked to a dead stop, and Blair's yells cut off short. He sat there panting, eyes and mouth wide with shock. The attacking car had managed to pull back a few yards and men were getting out. He thrust poor Olsen's body off his lap and shouldered the car door, but it was stuck against the masonry; there was no way it could open.
Blair found he was yelling again. He grabbed the box by its handle and twisted himself over the back of the seat to land in the rear, where the nearside door was already hanging loose.
"Ah! Ah! Shit! Ah! Ah! Ah!" He kicked at the door until he could slide out onto the sidewalk, where the box hit the ground with a crash beside him. Shouts, footsteps – the sounds curiously muffled by his own harsh breathing. Something had happened to him; he couldn't move.
"There it is!" shouted someone.
Blair grabbed at the box again, and new-found springs in his legs launched him up off the concrete and into a headlong dash down the narrow side-street. More shouts, and he felt the whoosh of a bullet before he heard it hit a parked car.
He dodged and feinted right. Fear was coursing through him like an electric current; he vibrated with it. A dumpster gave him height; a fire-escape ladder, elevation to the next block. He had no plan but to run.