Donovan de Boer, Keith Shaw, Grant Gilmore
Dial Jones
It’s the Christmas Season and times are tough in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
And a customized Dodge Challenger SRT Demon is worth $11,000 cash to Timper, a desperate ex-car thief. $12,500 if she can deliver it in pristine condition. Even though she’s young, Timper is already something of a living legend. Known throughout the auto black-market underground as Strawberry, her reputation is built upon her uncanny ability to snatch any vehicle anywhere—even directly off the auto transporter trailer itself. At the age of 17, Timper was so good at stealing cars, she was living weekly in the Beverly Hilton and wearing $1,400 Gucci boots.
But times have changed.
Even though she’s been in and out of juvy and foster homes since the age of 4, has the rap sheet of someone ten years her senior, and is still wanted in numerous cities along the eastern seaboard, a most recent event has Timper reconsidering her life choices. —Her 2-year-old son, Jonathan. Once a chain-smoking, devil-may-care adrenaline junkie armed only with superior driving skills and nothing for which to live, Timper now wants to see her baby boy grow up without the same grime that layered her own life. She’s stopped drinking, she’s trying to stop the cigarettes (for the third time) and she’s trying to take night classes while holding down a job at the local hardware store, all while taking care of Jonathan and trying to remain off the radar.
But during these snow-laden holidays, Timper can hardly think about having the Christmas Spirit.
Her Jonathan needs a $50,000 operation for a rare heart condition that’s stunting his growth and threatening his life. Timper’s a month and a half behind on the rent and she’s just barely got the lights turned back on in her half of the duplex that she rents. Social workers have been sniffing around her son at the local daycare, and no man is interested in helping her without expecting something in return. Hers is a very tough row to hoe—especially when she possesses the ability to bring in an average of $7,000 a night for about three hours’ worth of work.
Timper’s trying desperately to remain on the straight and narrow—but times are tough. And a customized Hellcat is worth $11,000 cash.
$12,500 if she can deliver it in pristine condition. This is the only thought running through her desperate young mind when she makes one last move on one last unsuspecting mark to try and collect the rest of the money she needs for her son’s operation. Just one last time for a quick remedy to bridge the gap and she’ll never don those driving gloves of hers again.
But Timper will learn—after the fact, as she burns rubber—that this particular vehicle doesn’t just belong to any ol’ mark who’ll simply resort to filing a meaningless police report that won’t even see the ink on the paper dry before she’s delivered the car to be stripped and distributed throughout Mexico and Europe.
This particular vehicle just so happens to belong to the spoiled son of one of the most powerful federal chiefs in the nation…
-A spoiled son with a nasty streak of sadism…
-A spoiled son with a nasty streak of sadism and a penchant for foreign prostitutes and speedballs…
-A spoiled son with a nasty streak of sadism and a penchant for foreign hookers and speedballs—and a powerful father who will utilize all of his power to protect him…
…Even if that means covering up his son’s dirty little secret discovered by Timper—wrapped in plastic in the back trunk.
Timper has grown up learning the art of evading various jurisdictions of the DMV area, but the federal government is another animal entirely. And the entire Department of Homeland Security making one desperate car thief their sudden top priority is an even bigger animal than that. These are the very people who not only control every database in the nation, but also the local law enforcement agencies, cable news conglomerates and any and every possible avenue a desperate young single mother with a past could possibly turn to for help. They are the eye in the sky and command fleets of police vehicles and helicopters—and this wouldn’t be the first time such resources have been utilized in the protection of one of their villains.
The grim cold gravity of her situation will soon begin to weigh on and crush Timper.
This will ignite a gritty, action-packed chase up the East Coast—in the blistering winter, no less—to prove her innocence of murder, fight for her very life, and keep her son within reach. Armed with only her wits, her superior driving ability, a desperate adrenaline rush and half a tank of 97 octane,
Timper will be trapped in a high-stakes pressure cooker that will not only see her facing the full wrath of the powerfully corrupt, but will see her face it at 202 mph over long stretches of black ice and whiteout snow squalls.
Times just got an awful lot tougher for Timper…
But she does not have the option of failing, despite the insurmountable odds against her. If she does, she will never see daylight, much less her precious Jonathan, ever again.
And if she does not act and react fast enough, she may not even live to even see the sun rise.
2024