He eased back until he felt his bumper engage the Accord’s, then gave the Hog some pedal. He felt resistance, pressed down harder. The Hog’s engine growled, all eight cylinders getting seriously involved. He heard a cry—maybe his tires’, maybe the kid’s—saw through the mirror that smoke was rising from the Hog’s rear tires, saw that the kid had lost his balance, was tumbling out his window as the Accord lurched backward.
When he figured he had made enough room, Deal let off the gas, dropped the Hog into drive, leaned hard on the wheel. The Hog turned neatly on its redone suspension, swung about, darted into a gap that had formed as the line of traffic heading out of the Grove began to move. Deal stopped, rolled down his window, motioned to the startled driver of the pickup with the scuba gear. A remarkably attractive woman, he noted. Like him, she seemed old enough to have known better.
“Turn around,” he called, motioning to the space that had opened in front of the Hog. She hesitated, staring uncertainly at him. This was Miami, after all. He ignored the wild chorus of horns behind him. “It’s a riot,” he said. “You don’t want to go that way.”
She craned her neck for a look just as the pop-pop-pop of gunfire erupted from somewhere. That did it. She threw the truck in reverse, chewed rubber all along the space where the Hog had been. She stopped just short of the still-driverless Accord, dropped into low, and swung the pickup around in front of Deal. In the next instant she was speeding away toward U.S. 1, the scuba gear dancing, a hand and slender arm waving a thank-you as she disappeared. Something about the little drama left Deal with a curious pang, but the horns were deafening at his back and he didn’t have long to consider it.
He floored the Hog, roared past the stalled traffic himself. The kid who had been driving the Accord was just struggling up off his hands and knees. You think that was something, wait till you see what’s coming next, Deal thought, then had to yank the Hog into an abrupt turn to avoid a new bottleneck headed out of the Grove.
He found himself traveling down an unfamiliar narrow lane now, a tunnel boring through a dense overhang of ficus, Florida holly, and strangler fig. He was forced into another turn and another—like running a maze—and was still trying to brush aside the image of the striking woman behind the wheel of the dive truck. Was it someone he’d met? he wondered. Or someone he wished he had? In the next instant, he was clutching the wheel tightly as the Hog bottomed out in a huge, rain-filled pothole, spraying water like a Donzi off its prow.
The filthy water was just clearing from his windshield when Deal saw the man, or what he presumed was a man. Though the whole thing couldn’t have taken more than a few seconds, Deal’s mind registered details with the precision and clarity that only impending disaster can bring. The figure stood in the middle of the gloomy tunnel of foliage, arm upflung in surprise, face twisted in the glare of the Hog’s headlights. He seemed to be draped in a tangle of old shrimp netting which itself was studded with still-dripping seaweed, battered lobster-trap buoys, and the assorted detritus you’d expect to find floating the backwaters of the nearby bay these days. There was something odd about the guy’s face, a lopsided quality that suggested he’d already had one accident in the not so distant past. He held a broken oar in his other hand—something he might have been using as a cane, or a makeshift crutch, and which had probably saved his life.
The man—the ancient mariner, Deal found himself thinking—vaulted backward, using the point of the oar for leverage, just as Deal slammed on the brakes. The Hog seemed to sail on imperturbably for a moment, until the water sloughed off the linings of the brakes. When they did catch hold, it was with a vengeance. He felt the heavy rear of the car rip loose from the pavement and whip around violently, a force like a giant hand pressing him back in the seat. He was sure that next he’d feel the muffled thud of mariner body meeting sheet metal, but the moment passed, and instead he caught a glimpse of the man’s astonished face peering at him as the Hog shot past.