Elaine pulled through the second gate and clutched, looking over at the veteran. “Unless you don’t want it to,” she said in a voice whose surface brightness Kelly had already learned to associate with a mind nervously in overdrive.
“No problem.” He chopped his left hand down the road as if the woman were a squad he was sending forward. “Dougie-boy got on my nerves, that was all. But I really don’t bite, I promise.”
“Sure, Kelly.” Elaine gassed the car and shifted directly from first to third after revving smoothly to the top of the powerband. “And one of these days I’ll get a job instead of living off my daddy’s money.” After a moment she added, “But I know what you mean. Thanks.”
There was no bar for traffic outbound from the fort, but the woman slowed and waved toward the guard post. This time she accelerated away fast, keeping the back tires just beneath the limit of traction throughout the radius of the turn and beyond as she straightened onto the highway.
“You didn’t get the keys from Doug before you came out,” Kelly said while they waited at what he remembered as the last of the traffic lights, if they were headed back into the District as they seemed to be.
“I’d given him my spare set,” the woman said, coming off the light as if she were dropping the hammer at a drag strip. “I’ll pick them up tomorrow.”
Eyes on the entrance ramp and the possible traffic on the turnpike into which they were merging, she added, “Blakeley doesn’t get only on your nerves, Tom. But let me keep my mind on what I’m doing right now, okay?”
They were heading south for the skyglow above the capital much faster than Doug had brought them to Meade, though there was no similarity between the styles of the two drivers. Doug had a heavy foot for brake and accelerator, and a muffled curse for other vehicles which did not behave in the manner he wished them to.
Elaine dabbed, sliding diagonally through interstices in traffic with a verve which Kelly had thought only a motorcycle could achieve. She was anticipating not only the cars nearest in front and beside them, but the next tier of vehicles as well, so that the drive had the feel of a chess game. Most of the time she kept the Volvo’s engine snarling in third gear or fourth. Only on the rare stretches of really empty pavement did she shift up into the overdrive fifth, trading acceleration for the car’s absolute top end.
“Motor’s to European specs,” she called in satisfaction over the engine note at one of the fifth-gear upshifts. “And the suspension’s had a little work.”
The team in the follow-car must be royally pissed, thought Kelly as he relaxed against the seat cushions, but they had a destination and might even be used to this sort of run if they were assigned regularly to Elaine. She wasn’t in a hurry, particularly, and she wasn’t trying to prove her competence – or manhood, though it was a joke to think about it that way – to Kelly.
Driving on the edge of control – and control was what was important, not speed – was a hell of a good way to burn away hormones and emotions which had to be bottled up in social situations. If you understood what was going on, you could achieve catharsis without acting as if you were furious with everyone else on the road at the same time. Elaine knew that very well, and she drove with a razorlike acuity not muffled by the need for false emotions to justify it.
“You know,” said the veteran as they halted at the first traffic light in downtown Washington, “you could fool me into thinking that you don’t like the people you work for a whole lot better than I do.”
“You had an escape valve in that meeting.” Elaine proceeded through the intersection sedately. The sodium-vapor street lights emphasized the color raised on her cheeks by the high-intensity drive. “You could always decide you were going to try to kill everybody else in the room. I didn’t have that luxury.”