Kickaha thought that his antics and those of the Beller must have seemed very peculiar to the witnesses. Here were these two youths, each with a box, pointing ballpoint pens at each other, dodging, ducking, playing cowboy and Indian. And the woman who had been screaming as if she had suddenly seen Frankenstein’s monster was now in the game.
One of the policemen shouted at them.
Kickaha said, “Don’t let them catch us! We’ll be done for! Get the Beller!”
They began running at top speed. The cops shouted some more. He looked behind him. Neither had his gun out but it would not be long before they did.
They were overtaking the Beller, and the policemen were dropping behind. He was breathing too hard, though.
Whatever his condition, the Beller’s was worse. He was slowing down fast. This meant that very shortly he would turn again, and Kickaha had better be nimble. In a few seconds, he would have the Beller within range of the beamer, and he would take both legs off. And that would be the end of possibly the greatest peril to man, other than man himself, of course.
The Beller ran up concrete steps in a spurt of frantic energy and onto the street above. Kickaha slowed down and stopped before ascending the last few steps. He expected the Beller to be waiting for his head to appear. Anana came up behind him then. Between deep gasps, she said, “Where is he?”
“If I knew, I wouldn’t be standing here,” he said.
He turned and left the steps to run crouching across the steep slope of the hill. When he was about forty feet away from the steps, he got down on his belly and crawled up to the top of the slope. The Beller would be wondering what he was doing. If he were intelligent, he would know that Kickaha wasn’t going to charge up and over the steps. He’d be looking on both sides of the steps for his enemy to pop up.
Kickaha looked to his right. Anana had caught on and was also snaking along. She turned her head and grinned at him and waved. He signaled that they should both look over the edge at the same time. If the Beller was paralyzed for just a second by the double appearance, and couldn’t make up his mind which one to shoot first, he was as good as dead.
That is, if the cops behind them didn’t interfere. Their shouts were getting louder, and then a gun barked and the dirt near Kickaha flew up.
He signaled, and they both stuck their heads up. At that moment, a gun cracked in the street before them.
The Beller was down on his back in the middle of the street. There was a car beside him, a big black Lincoln, and several men were about to pick the Beller up and load him into the car. One of the men was Kleist.
Kickaha swore. He had run the Beller right into the arms of Orc’s men, who were probably cruising this area and looking for a man with a big box. Or maybe somebody had-oh, irony of ironies!-seen Kickaha with his box and thought he was the Beller!
He gestured at Anana and they both jumped up and ran off toward the car. More shouts but no shots from the policemen. The men by the limousine looked up just as they hurled the limp form of the Beller into the car. They climbed in, and the car shot away with a screaming of burning rubber into the temporarily opened lane before it.
Kickaha aimed at the back of the car, hoping to pierce a tire or to set the gasoline tank on fire. Nothing happened, and the car was gone yowling around a corner. His beamer was empty.
There was nothing to do except to run once more, and now the policemen would be calling in for help. The only advantage for the runners was the very heavy rush hour traffic. The cops wouldn’t be able to get here too fast in automobiles.
A half hour later, they were in a taxi, and, in another twenty minutes, they were outside a motel. The manager looked at them curiously and raised his eyebrows when he saw no luggage. Kickaha said that they were advance agents for a small rock group and their baggage was coming along later. They’d flown in on fifteen minutes’ notice from San Francisco.