The light inside the van wasn’t good enough to reveal exactly what was happening, but Tommy saw the glass begin to smoke.
He said, “Uh-oh.”
“What?”
“It’s burning through the glass.”
“Burning?”
“Eating.”
“What?”
“Acid.”
Barely braking for the turn, she hung a hard right off the highway into the entrance drive of the Newport Beach Country Club.
The van canted drastically to the right and centrifugal force threw Tommy against the door, pressing his face to the window, beyond which the mini-kin’s extruded guts wriggled on the smoking glass.
“Where are you going?”
“Country club,” she said.
“Why?”
“Truck,” she said.
She turned sharply to the left, into the parking lot a manoeuvre that pulled Tommy away from the door and the dissolving window.
At that late hour the parking lot was mostly deserted. Only a few vehicles stood on the blacktop. One of them was a delivery truck.
Aiming the van at the back of the truck, she accelerated.
“What’re you doing?” he demanded.
“Detachment.”
At the last moment she swung to the left of the parked truck, roaring past it so close that she stripped the elaborate custom paint job off the front fender and tore off the van’s side mirror. Showers of sparks streamed from tortured metal, and the mini-kin was jammed between the van window and the flank of the big truck. The rocker panel peeled off the side of the van, but the mini-kin seemed tougher than the Ford—until its suckers abruptly popped loose with a sound Tommy could hear even above all the other noise. The window in the passenger door burst, and tempered glass showered across Tommy, and he thought the beast was falling into his lap, Jesus, but then they were past the parked truck, and he realized that the creature had been torn away from the van.
“Want to circle back and run over the damn thing a few times?” she shouted over the howling of the wind at the broken-out window.
He leaned toward her, raising his voice, “Hell no. That won’t work. It’ll grab the tire as you pass over it, and this time we’ll never shake it loose. It’ll crawl up into the undercarriage, tear through, squeeze through, get at us one way or another.”
“Then let’s haul ass out of here.”
At the end of the country-club drive, she turned right onto the highway at such high speed that Tommy expected the Ford to blow a tire or roll, but they came through all right, and she put the pedal to the metal with less respect for the speed limit than she had shown, earlier, for the seatbelt law.
Tommy half expected the mini-kin to explode out of the storm again. He didn’t feel safe until they crossed Jamboree Road and began to descend toward the Newport harbour.
Rain slashed through the missing window and snapped against the side of his head. It didn’t bother him. He couldn’t get any wetter than he already was.
At the speed they were making, the hooting and gibbering of the wind was so great that neither of them made an effort to engage in conversation.
As they crossed the bridge over the back-bay channel, a couple of miles from the parking lot where they had left the demon, the blonde finally reduced speed. The noise of the wind abated somewhat.
She looked at Tommy in a way that no one had ever looked at him before, as though he was green, warty, with a head like a watermelon, and had just stepped out of a flying saucer.
Well, in fact his own mother had looked at him that way when he first talked about being a detective-story writer.
He cleared his throat nervously and said, “You’re a pretty good driver.”
Surprisingly she smiled. “You really think so?”
“Actually, you’re terrific.”
“Thanks. You’re not bad yourself.”
“Me?”
“That was some stunt with the Corvette.”
“Very funny.”
“You went airborne pretty straight and true, but you just lost control of it in flight.”
“Sorry about your van.”
“It comes with the territory,” she said cryptically.
“I’ll pay for the repairs.”
“You’re sweet.”
“We should stop and get something to block this window.”