pedal with her left foot, finessing the small car into a slide, which
carried it onto the access road that led around the big building. She
turned the steering wheel into the slide, then gave the heap some gas
again even before the back end had stopped skidding and shuddering. The
tires barked, and the engine shrieked, and with a rattle-squeak-twang of
tortured metal, the car leaped forward.
They were shooting at Bobby, and Bobby probably wasn’t even able to
shoot back, because he was lax about carrying a gun on every job; he
went armed only when it seemed that the current business was likely to
involve violence. The Decodyne assignment had looked peaceable enough;
sometimes industrial espionage could turn nasty, but the bad guy in this
case was Tom Rasmussen, a computer nerd and a greedy son of a bitch,
clever as a dog reading Shakespeare on a high wire, with a record of
theft via computer but with no blood on his hands. He was the high-tech
equivalent of a meek, embezzling bank clerk-or so he had seemed.
But Julie was armed on every job. Bobby was the optimist; she was the
pessimist. Bobby expected people to act in their own best interests and
be reasonable, but Julie half expected every apparently normal person to
be, in secret, a crazed psychotic.
A Smith & Wesson.357 Magnum was held by a clip to the back of the glove
box lid, and an Uzi-with two spare, thirty-round magazines-lay on the
other front seat. From what she had heard on the earphones before
they’d gone dead, she was going to need that Uzi.
The Toyota virtually flew past the side of Decodyne, and she wheeled
hard left, onto Michaelson Drive, almost rising onto two wheels, almost
losing control, but not quite. Ahead, Bobby’s Dodge was parked at the
curb in front of the building, and another van-a dark blue Ford-was
stopped in the street, doors open wide.
Two men, who had evidently been in the Ford, were standing four or five
yards from the Dodge, chopping the hell out of it with automatic
weapons, blasting away with such ferocity that they seemed not to be
after the man inside but to have some bizarre personal grudge against
the Dodge itself. They stopped firing, turned toward her as she came
out of the driveway onto Michaelson, and hurriedly jammed fresh
magazines into their weapons.
Ideally, she would close the hundred-yard gap between herself and the
men, pull the Toyota sideways in the street, slip out, and use the car
as cover to blow out the tires on their van and pin them down until
police arrived. But she didn’t have time for all of that. They were
already raising the muzzles of their weapons.
She was unnerved at how lonely the night streets looked this hour in the
heart of metropolitan Orange County, bare of traffic, washed by the
urine-yellow light of the sodium-streetlamps. They were in an area of
banks and office buildings no residences, no restaurants or bars within
a couple of blocks. It might as well have been a city on the moon, or a
vision of the world after it had been swept by an Apocalyptic disaster
that had left only a handful of survivors.
She didn’t have time to handle the two gunmen by the book and she could
not count on help from any quarter, so she would have to do what they
least expected: play kamikaze, use her car as a weapon.
The instant she had the Toyota fully under control, pressing the
accelerator tight to the floorboards and rocketed straight at the two
bastards. They opened fire, but she was already slipping down in the
seat and leaning sideways a little trying to keep her head below the
dashboard and still hold the wheel relatively steady. Bullets snapped
and whined off the car. The windshield burst. A second later Julie hit
one of the gun men so hard that the impact snapped her head forward,
against the wheel, cutting her forehead, snapping her teeth together
forcefully enough to make her jaw ache; even as pain needled through her
face, she heard the body bounce off the front bumper and slam onto the