The Mercedes was about fifty yards back, closing fast.
“Mom—”
“I see them, honey.”
She was headed toward Big Bear City, but unfortunately the place was inaptly named. It was not only less than a city but not even much of a village, hardly a hamlet. There were not enough streets for her to hope to lose their pursuers, and the police presence was inadequate to deal with a couple of fanatics armed with submachine guns.
Light traffic passed them going the other way, and she got behind another car in their lane, a gray Volvo, around which she whipped on an almost blind stretch of road, but she had no choice because the Mercedes was within forty yards. The killers passed the Volvo with equal recklessness.
“How’s our passenger?” she asked.
Without unfastening his safety harness, Chris turned to look into the back of the Jeep wagon. “He looks okay, I guess. He’s getting bounced around a lot.”
“I can’t help that.”
“Who is he, Mom?”
“I don’t know much about him,” she said. “But when we get out of this fix, I’m going to tell you what I do know. I haven’t told you before because … I guess because I didn’t know what was going on, and I was afraid it might be dangerous somehow for you to know anything about him at all. But it can’t get more dangerous than this, huh? So I’ll tell you later.”
Assuming there was going to be a later.
When she was two-thirds of the way along the south shore of the take, pushing the Jeep as fast as she dared, with the Mercedes just thirty-five yards behind, she saw the ridge-road turnoff ahead. It led up through the mountains past dark’s Summit, a ten-mile county road that that cut off the thirty- or thirty-five-mile eastern loop of state
Route 38 rejoining that two-lane highway south near Barton Flats As she recalled, the ridge road was paved for a couple of miles at but was only a upgraded dirt lane for six or seven miles in the Unlike the Jeep, the Mercedes did not have four-wheel it had winter tires, but they were not currently equipped with chains The men driving the Mercedes were unlikely to know that the ridge road’s pavement would give way to a rutted dirt surface patched with ice and in some places drifted over with snow.
“Hold on!” she told Chris.
She didn’t use the brakes until the last moment, taking the right turn onto the ridge road so fast that the Jeep slid sideways with a tortured squeal of tires. It shuddered, too, as if it were an old horse that had been forced to make a frightening jump.
The Mercedes cornered better, though the driver had not known what she was going to do. As they headed into higher elevations and greater wilderness, the car closed the gap to about thirty yards.
Twenty-five. Twenty.
Thorny branches of lightning abruptly grew across the sky to the south. It was not as near to them as the lightning at the house but near enough to turn night to day around them. Even above the sound of the engine she could hear the roar of thunder.
Gaping at the stormy display, Chris said, “Mommy, what’s going on? What’s happening?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and she had to shout to be heard above the cacophony of the racing engine and clashing heavens.
She did not hear the gunfire itself but heard bullets smacking into the Jeep, and a slug punched a hole through the tailgate window and thudded into the back of the seat in which she and Chris were riding; she felt as well as heard its solid impact. She began to turn the wheel back and forth, weaving from one side of the road to the other, making as difficult a target as possible, which made her dizzy in the flickering light. Either the gunman stopped firing or missed them with every shot, because she did not hear any more incoming rounds. However, the weaving slowed her, and the Mercedes closed even faster.
She had to use the side mirrors instead of the rearview. Though most of the tailgate window was intact, the safety glass was webbed with thousands of tiny cracks that left it translucent and useless.