He jerked his head around and whipped the binoculars up to his eyes to focus on what had suddenly destroyed the morning’s calm. He quickly located the origin of the explosion of sound. Through the trees he spied two cars hurtling down from the road where the country estate was situated, their respective engines at full throttle. The car in front was a big BMW sedan. The car behind it was a smaller vehicle. What the smaller car lacked in muscle power to the big Bimmer, it more than made up for in agility around the winding road. At the speeds the two were doing, Riggs thought it most likely they would both end up either wrapped around a tree or upside down in one of the steep ditches that bordered either side of the road.
The next two visuals he made through his binoculars made him turn and run as fast as he could back to his truck.
The look of raw fear on the woman’s face in the Bimmer, the way she looked behind to check her pursuer’s progress, and the grim countenance of the man apparently chasing her were all he needed to kick-start every instinct he had ever gained from his former life.
He gunned the engine, unsure exactly what his plan of action would be, not that he had much time to come up with one. He pulled onto the road, strapping his seat belt across him as he did so. He normally carried a shotgun in the truck to ward off snakes, but he had forgotten it this morning. He had some shovels and a crowbar in the truck bed, although he hoped it wasn’t going to come to that.
As he flew down the road, the two cars appeared in front of him on the main road. The Bimmer took the turn almost on two wheels before stabilizing, the other car right behind it. However, now on the straightaway, the three hundred plus horses of the BMW could be fully used, and the woman quickly opened a two-hundred-yard gap between herself and her pursuer, a gap that grew with every second. That wouldn’t last, Riggs knew, because a curve that would qualify for deadman’s status was fast approaching. He hoped to God the woman knew it; if she didn’t he would be watching the BMW turn into a fireball as it sailed off the road and crashed into an army of unyielding hardwoods. With that prospect nearly upon them, his plan finally came together. He punched the gas, the truck flew forward, and he gained on what he now saw was a black Honda. The man apparently had all of his attention focused on the BMW, because when Riggs passed him on the left, the man didn’t even look over. However, he took abrupt and angry notice when Riggs cut in front of him and immediately slowed down to twenty miles an hour. Up ahead, Riggs saw the woman glance back in her rearview mirror, her eyes riveted on Riggs and his fortuitous appearance on the scene as the truck and Honda fought a pitched battle for supremacy of the road. Riggs tried to motion to her to slow down, to make her understand what he was trying to do. Whether she got the message or not, he couldn’t tell. Like the coils of a sidewinder, the truck and the Honda swayed back and forth across the narrow roadway, coming dangerously close to the sheer drop on the right side. Once, the truck’s wheel partially skidded in the gravel shoulder and Riggs braced himself for the plunge over, before he barely managed to regain control. The driver of the Honda tried mightily to pass, leaning on the horn the whole time. But in his past career Riggs had done his share of dangerous, high-speed driving and he expertly matched the other man maneuver for maneuver. A minute later they rounded the almost V-shaped curve, a wall of sheer jutting rock on his left and an almost vertical drop to the right. Riggs anxiously looked down that steep slope for any sight of the Bimmer’s wreckage. He breathed a sigh of relief as he saw none. He looked up the once again straight road. He saw the glint of a bumper far up ahead and then the big sedan was completely out of sight. Admiration was his first thought. The woman hadn’t slowed down much, if any, coming around that curve. Even at twenty miles an hour Riggs hadn’t felt all that safe. Damn.