He was at last warm. He turned off the heater in order to hear the sound better.
Something was loose and working steadily looser. Frowning, he leaned over the steering wheel, listening closely.
The noise persisted, low but troubling. He thought he detected an industrious quality to it.
He felt a queer vibration through the floorboards. The noise grew no louder, but the vibration increased.
Tommy glanced at the rear-view mirror. No traffic was close behind him, so he eased his foot off the accelerator.
As the sports car gradually slowed from fifty-five to forty miles per hour, the noise did not diminish in relation to the speed, but continued unabated.
The shoulder on his side of the highway was narrow, with a slope and then a dark field or a gully beyond, and Tommy didn’t want to be forced to pull off here in the blinding downpour. The Newport Beach Library lay in the near distance, deserted looking at this hour, and the lights of the high-rise office buildings and hotels in Fashion Island loomed somewhat farther away through the silvery veils of rain, but in spite of being in a busy commercial and residential area, this stretch of MacArthur Boulevard was less of a boulevard than its name implied, with no sidewalks or streetlamps along its westbound lanes. He wasn’t sure that he would be able to pull off the pavement far enough to eliminate the risk of being sideswiped – or worse – by passing traffic.
Abruptly the noise stopped.
The vibration ceased, as well.
The ‘vette purred along as smoothly as the dream machine that it was supposed to be.
Tentatively, he increased his speed.
The rattling and scraping didn’t return.
Tommy leaned back in his seat, letting out his pent-up breath, somewhat relieved but still concerned.
From under the hood came a sharp twang as of metal snapping under tremendous stress.
The steering wheel shuddered in Tommy’s hands. It pulled hard to the left.
‘Oh, God.’
Traffic was headed upslope in the eastbound lanes. Two cars and a van. They were not moving as fast in the rain-slashed night as they would have been in better weather, but they were coming too fast nonetheless.
With both hands, Tommy pulled the wheel to the right. The car responded – but sluggishly.
The oncoming vehicles began to swerve to their right as the drivers saw him cross over the centre line. Not all of them were going to be able to get out of his way. They were restricted by a sidewalk and by the concrete-block wall surrounding a housing development.
The catastrophic twang under the hood was immediately followed by a clattering-pinging-clanking-grinding that instantly escalated into cacophony.
Tommy resisted the powerful urge to stomp the brake pedal flat to the floorboards, which might cast the Corvette into a deadly spin. Instead he eased down on it judiciously. He might as well have stood on the pedal with both feet, because he had no brakes.
None. Nada. Zip. Zero. No stopping power whatsoever.
And the accelerator seemed to be stuck. The car was picking up speed.
‘Oh, God, no.’
He wrenched at the steering wheel so forcefully that he felt as though he would dislocate his shoulders. At last the car angled sharply back into the westbound lanes where it belonged.
Over in the eastbound lanes, the wildly sweeping glimmer of headlights on the wet pavement reflected the other drivers’ panic.
Then the Corvette’s steering failed altogether. The wheel spun uselessly through his aching hands.
The ‘vette didn’t arc toward oncoming traffic again, thank God, but shot off the highway, onto the shoulder, kicking up gravel that rattled against the undercarriage.
Tommy let go of the spinning steering wheel before the friction between it and his palms could burn his skin. He shielded his face with his hands.
The car flattened a small highway-department sign, tore through tall grass and low brush, and rocketed off the embankment. It was airborne.
The engine was still screaming, demanding acceleration.
Tommy had the crazy notion that the Corvette would sail on like an aircraft, rising instead of descending, soaring gracefully above a cluster of phoenix palms at the corner of MacArthur and Pacific Coast Highway, then over the businesses and houses that lay in the last couple of blocks before the coast, out across the black waters of the vast Pacific, head-on into the storm, eventually up-up-up and beyond the rain and the turbulence, into a tranquil realm of silence with an eternity of stars above and deep clouds below, with Japan far to the west but growing nearer. If the genie of medicine, Tien Thai, could fly around the world on his own engineless mountain, then surely it was possible to do so even more easily in a Corvette with three hundred horsepower at five thousand rpm.