‘Kelly, what’s happening?’ Pam asked, her voice cracking on every word.
His reply was in the same calm voice he’d used for the past few minutes. ‘What’s happened is that they’re not very smart.’
‘That’s Billy’s car – he loves to race.’
‘Billy, eh? Well, Billy likes his car a little too much. If you want to hurt somebody, you ought to be willing to – ‘ Just to surprise them, Kelly stomped on his brakes. The Scout nose-dived, giving Billy a really good look at the chromed trailer hitch. Then Kelly accelerated again, watching the Roadrunner’s reaction. Yeah, he wants to follow close, but I can intimidate him real easy, and he won’t like that. He’s probably a proud little fuck.
There, that’s how I do it.
Kelly decided to go for a soft kill. No sense getting things complicated. Still, he knew that he had to play this one very carefully and very smart. His brain started measuring angles and distances.
Kelly hit his accelerator too hard taking a corner. It almost made him spin out, but he’d planned for that and only botched the recovery enough to make his driving look sloppy to Billy, who was doubtless impressed with his own abilities. The Roadrunner used its cornering and wide tires to close the distance and hold formation on Kelly’s starboard-quarter. A deliberate collision now could throw the Scout completely out of control. The Roadrunner held the better hand now, or so its driver thought.
Okay …
Kelly couldn’t turn right now. Billy had blocked that. So he turned hard left, taking a street through a wide strip of vacant lots. Some highway would be built here. The houses had been cleared off, and the basements filled in with dirt, and the night’s rain had turned that to mud.
Kelly turned to look at the Roadrunner. Uh-oh. The right-side passenger window was coming down. That meant a gun, sure as hell. Cutting this a little close, Kelly … But that, he realized instantly, could be made to help. He let them see his face, staring at the Roadrunner, mouth open now, fear clearly visible. He stood on the brakes and turned hard right. The Scout bounded over the half-destroyed curb, obviously a maneuver of panic. Pam screamed with the sudden jolt.
The Roadrunner had better power, its driver knew, better tires, and better brakes, and the driver had excellent reflexes, all of which Kelly had noted and was now counting on. His braking maneuver was covered and nearly matched by the Roadrunner, which then mimicked his turn, also bouncing over the crumbling cement of an eradicated neighborhood, following the Scout across what had recently been a block of homes, falling right into the trap Kelly had sprung. The Roadrunner made it about seventy feet.
Kelly had already downshifted. The mud was a good eight inches deep, and there was the off-chance that the Scout might get stuck momentarily, but the odds were heavily against that. He felt his car slow, felt the tires sink a few inches into the gooey surface, but then the big, coarsely treaded tires bit and started pulling again. Yeah. Only then did he turn around.
The headlights told the story. The Roadrunner, already low-slung for cornering paved city streets, yawed wildly to the left as its tires spun on the gelatinous surface, and when the vehicle slowed, their spinning merely dug wet holes. The headlights sank rapidly as the car’s powerful engine merely excavated its own grave. Steam rose instantly when the hot engine block boiled off some standing water.
The race was over.
Three men got out of the car and just stood there, uncomfortable to have mud on their shiny punk shoes, looking at the way their once-clean car sat in the mud like a weary sow hog. Whatever nasty plans they’d had, had been done in by a little rain and dirt. Nice to know I haven’t lost it yet, Kelly thought.
Then they looked up to where he was, thirty yards away.
‘You dummies!’ he called through the light rain. ‘See ya ’round, assholes!’ He started moving again, careful, of course, to keep his eyes on them. That’s what had won him the race, Kelly told himself. Caution, brains, experience. Guts, too, but Kelly dismissed that thought after allowing himself just the tiniest peek at it. Just a little one. He nursed the Scout back onto a strip of pavement, upshifted, and drove off, listening to the little clods of mud thrown by his tires into the wheel wells.
‘You can get up now, Pam. We won’t be seeing them for a while.’
Pam did that, looking back to see Billy and his Roadrunner. The sight of him so close made her face go pale again. ‘What did you do?’
‘I just let them chase me into a place that I selected,’ Kelly explained. ‘That’s a nice car for running the street, but not so good for dirt.’
Pam smiled for him, showing bravery she didn’t feel at the moment, but completing the story just as Kelly would have told it to a friend. He checked his watch. Another hour or so until shift change at the police station. Billy and his friends would be stuck there for a long time. The smart move was to find a quiet place to wait. Besides, Pam looked like she needed a little calming down. He drove for a little while, then, finding an area with no major street activity, he parked.
‘How are you feeling?’ he asked.
‘That was scary,’ she replied, looking down and shaking badly.
‘Look, we can go right back to the boat and -‘
‘No! Billy raped me… and killed Helen. If I don’t stop him, he’ll just keep doing it to people I know.’ The words were as much to persuade herself as him, Kelly knew. He’d seen it before. It was courage, and it went part and parcel with fear. It was the thing that drove people to accomplish missions, and also the thing that selected those missions for them. She’d seen the darkness, and finding the light, she had to extend its glow to others.
‘Okay, but after we tell Frank about it, we get you the hell out of Dodge City.’
‘I’m okay,’ Pam said, lying, knowing he saw the lie, and ashamed of it because she didn’t grasp his intimate understanding for her feelings of the moment.
You really are, he wanted to tell her, but she hadn’t learned about those things yet. And so he asked a question: ‘How many other girls?’
‘Doris, Xantha, Paula, Maria, and Roberta … they’re all like me, John. And Helen … when they killed her, they made us watch.’
‘Well, with a little luck you can do something about that, honey.’ He put his arm around her, and after a time the shaking stopped.
‘I’m thirsty,’ she said.
‘There’s a cooler on the backseat.’
Pam smiled. ‘That’s right.’ She turned in the seat to reach for a Coke – and her body suddenly went rigid. She gasped, and Kelly’s skin got that all-too-familiar unwelcome feeling, like an electric charge running along its surface. The danger feeling.
‘Kelly!’ Pam screamed. She was looking towards the car’s left rear. Kelly was already reaching for his gun, turning his body as he did so, but it was too late, and part of him already knew it. The outraged thought went through his mind that he’d erred badly, fatally, but he didn’t know how, and there was no time to figure it out because before he could reach his gun, there was a flash of light and an impact on his head, followed by darkness.
CHAPTER 7
Recovery
It was a routine police patrol that spotted the Scout. Officer Chuck Monroe, sixteen months on the force, just old enough to have his own solo radio car, made it a habit to patrol his part of the District after taking to the street. There wasn’t much he could do about the dealers – that was the job of the Narcotics Division – but he could show the flag, a phrase he’d learned in the Marine Corps. Twenty-five, newly married, young enough to be dedicated and angry at what was happening in his city and his old neighborhood, the officer noted that the Scout was an unusual vehicle for this area. He decided to check it out, record its tag number, and then came the heart-stopping realization that the car’s left side had taken at least two shotgun blasts. Officer Monroe stopped his car, flipped on his rotating lights, and made the first, preliminary call of possible trouble, please stand by. He stepped out of the car, switching his police baton into his left hand, leaving his right at the grip of his service revolver. Only then did he approach the car. A well-trained officer, Chuck Monroe moved in slowly and carefully, his eyes scanning everything in sight.
‘Oh, shit!’ The return to his radio car was rapid. First Monroe called for backup and then for an ambulance, and then he notified his District desk of the license number of the subject automobile. Then, grabbing his first-aid kit, he returned to the Scout. The door was locked, but the window was blown out, and he reached inside to unlock it. What he saw then froze him in his tracks.