Jake relaxed a little, only occasionally glancing at the side mirror mounted outside his window. There were no signs of pursuit. Only city lights fading into the distance. Outside it was rapidly becoming darker. Warehouses and factory buildings loomed large against the night. The widely spaced street lights they encountered were islands of light on the dark road.
“Down on your luck then,” said the driver. Jake studied him. Couldn’t be much more than seventeen, if he was that. He wondered what the youngster was doing out so late, then decided that it was none of his business. The kid still had acne mixed with his freckles. Combined with a deep West Texas tan it gave his face the look of a Landsat false-color photograph. The western hat he wore was a little too big for his head and he had to keep nudging it back off his forehead. Some unfortunate rattlesnake had given its all for that hatband.
The truck was as comfortable as its driver was awkward. Jake began to consider the possibility of going back to sleep.
“Shoot, everybody has money troubles,” the kid was saying. His words were supported by beer fumes, but he kept the truck slow and steady as it swung around the traffic circle.
“Had an enjoyable night?” Jake murmured conversationally.
“Sure as hell did,” the kid said proudly.
“Your family know where you are?”
He laughed. “Shit, half the time they don’t know where I am and the other half they don’t much care. I’m my own man. Didn’t have no luck with the ladies last night, but it weren’t for lack of tryin’.” He laughed again, looking more than ever like an adenoidal Huck Finn. “If you don’t mind my askin’, what put you down on your luck?”
Jake thought a moment, then said, “I made trouble for some people with bad tempers.”
“Cops? You runnin’ from the law, mister?” The boy sounded excited instead of frightened. Different from my day, Jake thought dourly.
“No.” The driver looked disappointed. “I’m not completely sure who I’m running from, son. But they’re not good people.” He thought again of the murdered couple lying back in the motel, whose only crime had been helping him. It made him angry. His heart started to hurt slightly. Anger and tension weren’t good for him, but at the moment he didn’t much care. Somebody ought to be made to pay for what happened at the motel, he knew. It wasn’t right that something like that should go unpunished.
The boy leaned forward until his chin was practically resting on the wheel. “Now that’s funny.” They were approaching the old steel bridge which spanned the Clear Fork of the Brazos east of town. “Looks like some kind of a roadblock up ahead.”
Jake squinted through the windshield. His eyes were old, but he could still make out the two cars parked hood to hood that blocked both lanes at the far end of the bridge. At the same time a sudden roar announced the appearance of two more cars. They materialized from a parking lot concealed by trees and accelerated until they were tight close behind the pickup. Figures were moving around the two cars parked ahead.
“Wonder what’s goin’ on?” the boy muttered. “Sure a lot of excitement for so early in the mornin’.” He glanced sharply at his passenger. “Hey, you sure you didn’t cross no cops, mister?”
Jake didn’t hear him. The intent was clear. They were going to trap him on the bridge. There’d be no escape this time, no friendly back window to slip through, no familiar old car to speed to safety in. The boy was starting to slow down.
“I’d better see what they want.” His youthful bravado was fading fast and he sounded frightened and uncertain. Beer makes a lousy crutch.
“Damn them,” Jake whispered to himself, haunted by the image of the slain couple who’d helped him. “Damn them all to hell.” His heart was hammering away and the angina stole his breath. The fear of the moment, his anger, an overwhelming feeling of helplessness in the face of relentless pressure, the fact that this time there was no way out, all combined inside him. Maybe it was all those things and maybe it was nothing more than forced repetition, but for the very first time in his life Jake suddenly knew how he made things slipt.
Funny, after all these years, a distant part of him thought. How strange, all those bottles of soda opened for the neighborhood kids, all those erasers mysteriously falling loose from their pencils back in grade school. All the card tricks he’d deftly performed without having to read the instructions. Bottle caps and erasers and wheels and rags.
He suddenly didn’t care much what happened anymore. Twenty years he’d spent nursing a bad heart and now it didn’t seem to matter. He could go at any time anyway, whether he took care of himself or not.
But he wasn’t going to go at the hands of these people, and he wasn’t going to give them what they wanted from him, and he was going to find out what they’d done to his beloved Amanda.
“Pull over,” someone was shouting. The voice came from one of the cars that had pulled out behind them. It was in the wrong lane now, paralleling the truck. “Come on, kid, pull it over. Right now.” The speaker gestured with a pistol of indeterminate caliber.
Its size didn’t matter to the now-pale youngster. “Yes sir. Geez,” he muttered, “you wouldn’t think sneakin’ a few crummy drinks would cause so much trouble.” His right foot started to shift from the accelerator to the brake pedal. The pickup started to slow. Jake roused himself from his stupor and jabbed out with his left foot. The accelerator went toward the floor.
“Jesus, mister,” the kid yelled, “cut it out!” He put his own foot over Jake’s, but that only increased the pressure on the accelerator. He tried to kick Jake’s leg aside, but the oldster resolutely leaned over with his weight and held the pedal down.
The pickup responded with admirable speed. It leapt forward, leaving the paralleling car in its wake and allowing its driver only enough leeway to steer. Jake put a hand to his forehead as something happened.
Behind the pickup the paralleling car started to speed up in pursuit when the rear half of the steel bridge groaned and began to collapse. No one saw the bolts holding the key beams together turn to powder. The men in the car screamed as they went over the edge.
Behind them, the second car which had emerged from the hidden parking lot squealed as the driver frantically crushed his brakes. The back of the car went sideways and it came to a halt at the lip of the abyss. Echoes from the folding steel beams and massive chunks of falling concrete continued to reverberate through the night as they filled in the riverbed. Of the first car there was no sign.
“Oh Lord,” the boy was moaning as he fought to concentrate on his steering, “we’re gonna die, we’re gonna die. Please, mister, you’re gonna kill both of us, please!”
Jake said nothing, kept his foot on the accelerator and his eyes on the roadblock they were approaching. The men who’d emerged from the cars and started down the bridge had stopped when the rear section of the span had started to collapse. Now they scattered as the pickup exploded toward them.
“Get out of the way!” Jake found himself yelling to them. “I don’t want to hurt anyone. Get out of the way!” Behind the pickup one of the huge support beams toppled sideways, pulling the middle section of the bridge down with it. Like a falling redwood, the mass of steel fell into the side of the power substation which occupied the lower river bank. The beam and bridge section tore through the chain link fence and smashed transformers like popcorn. The air was filled with ozone and a rippling, crackling sound like frying bacon. Blue sparks and thin fireballs lit the night.
“I don’t want to hurt anyone!” Jake shouted above the thunder that pursued them. His foot was still jammed against the pedal, his leg locked in position so stiffly that no two men could have moved it. He was crying as he shouted useless warnings.
One of the cars blocking their path went WHOOM and scattered itself all over the road. The other car did likewise a split second later, blowing itself backward into the trees. Something had slipt inside their fuel tanks. The disintegration didn’t halt there. Engines and seats and even headlights explosively disassembled in the air, sending metal and glass shrapnel rocketing in every direction.
Several of the stunned occupants of the two cars, who’d expected nothing more difficult than restraining an old man, had the presence of mind to dive for cover. Those sluggish of foot and thought were shredded by the flying debris. That same debris flew lethally toward the pickup but for some reason only dust struck it, particles too tiny even to pit the windshield.
The truck rumbled through the gap where the blockade had been seconds ago. Men lay on the road and in the grass, moaning and bleeding. One lay crumpled in one place, his arm in another.
Two of those who’d been hiding in the bushes dove into the river, heedless of its depth or the presence of rocks. Others melted into the foliage. One had the presence of mind, or perhaps it was instinct, to pull a pistol and start shooting at the fleeing pickup. Jake saw him standing by the side of the road and aiming with both hands. Several shots were fired, but they never reached the truck. Then the gun blew up in the man’s hands, turning them red and ugly. What was left of the tranquilizer rifle and its unique contents burned furiously inside one of the destroyed cars.
The pickup raced unimpeded down the road toward the onramp leading onto the interstate, carrying to safety a badly frightened young man and a sobbing, cursing older one who more than anything else didn’t want to hurt anybody….
Somerset had never heard Huddy sound so tired. It wasn’t just lack of sleep that plagued her lover. There were undertones of defeat in his voice that were utterly alien to him.
“Pull yourself together, Benjamin,” she said into the phone.
“You weren’t there, Ruth,” he said weakly over the line. “You didn’t see what happened.”
“Neither did you, Benjamin.”
“No, but I saw the results, and I talked to the men who did see it, and that’s as close as I ever want to get. How’s the grandniece?”
