hallway.
The sedan didn’t pick up on me right away. They were too good for that. It came into my rearview mirror when I was two blocks down Trumbull, and maintained that distance until I turned onto Michigan, where it fell back. That was what I’d been waiting for.
I had time to kill before Barney Zacharias came back from lunch. Without signaling I hung a sharp right onto Harrison, cutting across two lanes of traffic in front of a tanker with good air brakes and a healthy horn, squealed into a private driveway and sat there pretending to consult a map of Indiana while I waited for the fireworks. I barely got the thing unfolded when more rubber screamed, accompanied by fresh horns, and a dark green bullet shot down Harrison past the end of the strip of concrete where I was parked, rear end fishtailing on the slushy street surface. I banged the indicator into the R position and swung out behind them, gunned the engine, spun slush and snow until the tread caught, and tore off in their wake.
They must have seen me looming up in their rear-view mirror, because I was almost on their bumper when they began pulling away. There was more mill under that nondescript hood than the engineers had in mind when they’d designed it. Even with my disguised Caddy I couldn’t take time out to burn tobacco without losing half a block. Bravery and cowardice had nothing to do with it; it’s disconcerting to go along thinking you’re the hunter and then suddenly find yourself the quarry. You need time to get away by yourself and think it out. I wasn’t letting them have it.
In a chase, all the advantage belongs to the guy doing the chasing. If the driver of the Merc knew where he was going, I knew where he’d been, and if he could take a forty-five-degree curve at eighty without turning his car into a football, or plow through a snowbank without getting stuck, I knew I could too. There were a couple of times when I could have swept alongside and forced him over, but I resisted the temptation. That kind of stuff works on the tube, but the only time you can expect the odds to be in your favor east of Hollywood is when you’re at the wheel of a semi or a tanker or a Sherman tank and your quarry isn’t. What I was doing was waiting for him to make his second mistake. His first was tailing me to begin with.
We shot past a couple of stop signs and splattered dirty spray over a pedestrian or two, and I was beginning to wonder if the eighth of a tank of gas I had left was going to hold out, when the idiot up ahead stood on his brakes. I was two car lengths behind him when I reacted. I floored the brake pedal, twisted the wheel left, and let the ice and snow under my tires do the rest. When Detroit stopped whirling I was parked facing in the direction from which I had come, one wheel was crammed up over the curb, and my right rear fender was snuggled against a stout maple planted in a box on the sidewalk. The tree would never be the same and neither would my bridgework.
My mirror had been knocked askew by something, probably my head. In the rectangular job mounted outside the driver’s window I could see the familiar rear of a dark green sedan and, hurrying toward me, the most average-looking guy I’d ever met. He had on a blue suit and a black topcoat and his hair was dark and the automatic in his left hand shone like a movie starlet’s hopes.
My revolver was in the glove compartment where I kept it while driving, a whole arm’s length away. My engine was still running. I punched the accelerator. The rear wheels whined merrily and that was it. I was stuck in a snowbank. My mirror was full of Mr. Everyday. I lunged for the glove compartment, but before I got there a hot light exploded at the base of my brain and suddenly it didn’t seem so important anymore. Stretching out on the seat did.
“He’s down, General,” said a voice on the other side of a blaze orange nightmare.
11
F ICTION’S NICE. W HEN A writer hits his
The sedan didn’t pick up on me right away. They were too good for that. It came into my rearview mirror when I was two blocks down Trumbull, and maintained that distance until I turned onto Michigan, where it fell back. That was what I’d been waiting for.
I had time to kill before Barney Zacharias came back from lunch. Without signaling I hung a sharp right onto Harrison, cutting across two lanes of traffic in front of a tanker with good air brakes and a healthy horn, squealed into a private driveway and sat there pretending to consult a map of Indiana while I waited for the fireworks. I barely got the thing unfolded when more rubber screamed, accompanied by fresh horns, and a dark green bullet shot down Harrison past the end of the strip of concrete where I was parked, rear end fishtailing on the slushy street surface. I banged the indicator into the R position and swung out behind them, gunned the engine, spun slush and snow until the tread caught, and tore off in their wake.
They must have seen me looming up in their rear-view mirror, because I was almost on their bumper when they began pulling away. There was more mill under that nondescript hood than the engineers had in mind when they’d designed it. Even with my disguised Caddy I couldn’t take time out to burn tobacco without losing half a block. Bravery and cowardice had nothing to do with it; it’s disconcerting to go along thinking you’re the hunter and then suddenly find yourself the quarry. You need time to get away by yourself and think it out. I wasn’t letting them have it.
In a chase, all the advantage belongs to the guy doing the chasing. If the driver of the Merc knew where he was going, I knew where he’d been, and if he could take a forty-five-degree curve at eighty without turning his car into a football, or plow through a snowbank without getting stuck, I knew I could too. There were a couple of times when I could have swept alongside and forced him over, but I resisted the temptation. That kind of stuff works on the tube, but the only time you can expect the odds to be in your favor east of Hollywood is when you’re at the wheel of a semi or a tanker or a Sherman tank and your quarry isn’t. What I was doing was waiting for him to make his second mistake. His first was tailing me to begin with.
We shot past a couple of stop signs and splattered dirty spray over a pedestrian or two, and I was beginning to wonder if the eighth of a tank of gas I had left was going to hold out, when the idiot up ahead stood on his brakes. I was two car lengths behind him when I reacted. I floored the brake pedal, twisted the wheel left, and let the ice and snow under my tires do the rest. When Detroit stopped whirling I was parked facing in the direction from which I had come, one wheel was crammed up over the curb, and my right rear fender was snuggled against a stout maple planted in a box on the sidewalk. The tree would never be the same and neither would my bridgework.
My mirror had been knocked askew by something, probably my head. In the rectangular job mounted outside the driver’s window I could see the familiar rear of a dark green sedan and, hurrying toward me, the most average-looking guy I’d ever met. He had on a blue suit and a black topcoat and his hair was dark and the automatic in his left hand shone like a movie starlet’s hopes.
My revolver was in the glove compartment where I kept it while driving, a whole arm’s length away. My engine was still running. I punched the accelerator. The rear wheels whined merrily and that was it. I was stuck in a snowbank. My mirror was full of Mr. Everyday. I lunged for the glove compartment, but before I got there a hot light exploded at the base of my brain and suddenly it didn’t seem so important anymore. Stretching out on the seat did.
“He’s down, General,” said a voice on the other side of a blaze orange nightmare.
11
F ICTION’S NICE. W HEN A writer hits his
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