MINUS 042 AND COUNTING

The day was very bright (the constant rain of Harding seemed light‑years away) and everything was very sharp and clearly defined. The troopers’ shadows might have been drawn with black Crayolas. They were unhooking the narrow straps that crossed their gunbutts.

Mrs. Williams swung open the door and leaned out. “Don’t shoot, please,” she said, and for the first time Richards realized how cultured her voice was, how rich. She might have been in a drawing room except for the pallid knuckles and the fluttering, birdlike pulse in her throat. With the door open he could smell the fresh, invigorating odor of pine and timothy grass.

“Come out of the car with your hands over your head,” the cop with the clip­board said. He sounded like a well‑programmed machine. General Atomics Model 6925‑A9, Richards thought. The Hicksville Trooper. 16‑psm Iridium Batteries in­cluded. Comes in White Only. “You and your passenger, ma'am. We see him.”

“My name is Amelia Williams,” she said very clearly. “I can’t get out as you ask. Benjamin Richards is holding me hostage. If you don’t give him free passage, he says he’ll kill me.”

The two cops looked at each other, and something barely perceptible passed between them. Richards, with his nerves strung up to a point where he seemed to be operating with a seventh sense, caught it.

“Drive!” he screamed.

She stared around at him, bewildered. “But they won’t—”

The clipboard clattered to the road. The two cops fell into the kneeling posture almost simultaneously, guns out, gripped in right hands, left hands holding right wrists. One on each side of the solid white line.

The sheets of flimsy on the clipboard fluttered errantly.

Richards tromped his bad foot on Amelia Williams’s right shoe, his lips drawing back into a tragedy mask of pain as the broken ankle grated. The air car ripped forward.

The next moment two hollow punching noises struck the car, making it vibrate. A moment later the windshield blew in, splattering them both with bits of safety glass. She threw both hands up to protect her face and Richards leaned savagely against her, swinging the wheel.

They shot through the gap between the veed cars with scarcely a flirt of the rear deck. He caught a crazy glimpse of the troopers whirling to fire again and then his whole attention was on the road.

They mounted a rise, and then there was one more hollow thunnn! as a bullet smashed a hole in the trunk. The car began to fishtail and Richards hung on, whip­ping the wheel in diminishing arcs. He realized dimly that Williams was scream­ing.

“Steer!” he shouted at her. “Steer, goddammit! Steer! Steer!”

Her hands groped reflexively for the wheel and found it. He let go and batted the dark glasses away from her eyes with an openhanded blow. They hung on one ear for a moment and then dropped off.

“Pull over!”

“They shot at us.” Her voice began to rise. “They shot at us. They shot at—”

“Pull over!”

The scream of sirens rose behind them.

She pulled over clumsily, sending the car around in a shuddering half‑turn that spurned gravel into the air.

“I told them and they tried to kill us,” she said wonderingly. “They tried to kill us.”

But he was out already, out and hopping clumsily back the way they had come, gun out. He lost his balance and fell heavily, scraping both knees.

When the first cruiser came over the rise he was in a sitting position on the shoul­der of the road, the pistol held firmly at shoulder level. The car was doing eighty easily, and still accelerating; some backroad cowboy at the wheel with too much engine up front and visions of glory in his eyes. They perhaps saw him, perhaps tried to stop. It didn’t matter. There were no bulletproof tires on these. The one closest to Richards exploded as if there had been dynamite inside. The cruiser took off like a big‑ass bird, gunning across the shoulder in howling, uncontrolled flight. It crashed into the hole of a huge elm. The driver’s side door flew off. The driver rammed through the windshield like a torpedo and flew thirty yards before crash­ing into the puckerbush.

The second car came almost as fast, and it took Richards four shots to find a tire. Two slugs splattered sand next to his spot. This one slid around in a smoking half‑turn and rolled three times, spraying glass and metal.

Richards struggled to his feet, looked down and saw his shirt darkening slowly just above the belt. He hopped back toward the air car, and then dropped on his face as the second cruiser exploded, spewing shrapnel above and around him.

He got up, panting and making strange whimpering noises in his mouth. His side had begun to throb in slow, aching cycles.

She could have gotten away, perhaps, but she had made no effort. She was star­ing, transfixed, at the burning police car in the road. When Richards got in, she shrank from him.

“You killed them. You killed those men.”

“They tried to kill me. You too. Drive. Fast.”

“THEY DID NOT TRY TO KILL ME!”

” . . . Drive!”

She drove.

The mask of the well‑to‑do young hausfrau on her way back from the market now hung in tatters and shreds. Beneath it was something from the cave, some­thing with twitching lips and rolling eyes. Perhaps it had been there all along.

They drove about five miles and came to a roadside store and air station.

“Pull in,” Richards said.

Date: 2015-04-20; view: 512