Our Buick screeched around the entrance into the lot. Again, the black Annihilator missed the turn, but rode right up over the curbs, its fat wheels rolling over them like they were Kit Kat bars. “Here comes the fun part,” Lawrence said, using the wide-open spaces of the mall lot to do huge circles. “What I’m gonna do,” he shouted, “is come up around behind him, and then we’ll give him a taste of his own medicine.”
“What do you mean, own medicine?”
“He took a few shots at us, now we’ll return the favor.”
“How are you going to shoot and drive at the same time?”
“If you can’t handle a gun, surely you can handle a fucking steering wheel.”
“You gotta be kidding.”
“Does steering compromise your journalistic integrity, too?”
So I leaned over in the seat, ready to grip the wheel whenever Lawrence wanted me to.
The Annihilator was trying hard to keep up with us, but the SUV was leaning precariously. I wondered if maybe this was Lawrence’s real plan, to trick our pursuer into flipping his own vehicle over. If it was, I approved.
But the driver seemed to know what he was doing. He wasn’t pushing the truck to extremes. I glanced back and saw a leather-jacketed arm hanging out the window. The hand was clutching a weapon that looked a lot bigger than the gun I’d handed to Lawrence.
The Buick lurched and its tires squealed. A hubcap went flying off, spinning across the pavement toward the Sears. But Lawrence seemed to know what he was doing, too. We were now actually coming up around behind the Annihilator.
“Okay,” he said. “Hold the wheel.”
I gripped it like I was holding on for dear life, allowing Lawrence to switch the gun to his left hand, get his arm and shoulder out the window, and start firing.
He got off two shots, but the Annihilator was bearing to the right, so he wrested the wheel back from me and changed course.
“Again!” he said, and I grabbed the wheel as he leaned out the window, firing the gun twice more. “Shit!” he shouted, wind blowing into his face.
“Did you hit him?” I asked as he took control of the steering wheel again.
“I don’t think so. And even if I did, the thing’s a fucking elephant.”
Ahead, the Annihilator abruptly turned, but where it was headed didn’t make any sense. The SUV was speeding to the far end of the lot where the ground sloped steeply upward to a road that was actually a ramp that led from a city street that circled the mall, and on to the highway.
“What’s he doing?” I said. “He’s got nowhere to go.”
The Annihilator’s brake lights came on only briefly, as if the driver had lightly tapped the pedal, and then the truck drove off the end of the parking lot and up the embankment, all four tires kicking up sod and dirt, its headlight beams dancing in the night sky like a searchlight. The vehicle bucked and jerked as it climbed, the embankment clearly a challenge even for an Annihilator.
“He’s going for the highway,” Lawrence said. “He’s creating his own shortcut, the son of a bitch.”
The Annihilator crested the embankment and hung a right onto the ramp, then, with another roar of its massive engine, sped off in the direction of the highway. There was no way Lawrence’s old, two-wheel-drive Buick could even begin to scale the hill. And by the time we’d wound our way out of the mall lot, onto the street, and found that ramp, our friends in the Annihilator would be home, tucked into their beds.
Lawrence brought the car to a stop, and neither of us spoke for a moment as we listened to the motor idle and tick, as though trying to catch its breath.
“Fuck me,” said Lawrence.
“I take it that’s not an actual invitation,” I said.
6
I GOT HOME around three in the morning, and rather than try to sneak into our bedroom without disturbing Sarah, I turned on the lights, plopped myself down on the bed next to her, and said, “You won’t believe what happened! We started following them, and then they were following us, and things were getting smashed, and then they started shooting, and we lured them into the parking lot at Midtown, and we came up around behind them, and that’s when Lawrence tried to shoot out their tires, and then they drove right up the side of a hill and took off and I can’t fucking believe it happened!”
Sarah sat up in bed, bleary-eyed. “Huh?”
I told it all to her again, more slowly this time. She asked a couple of clarifying questions, and then, once I was finished, said, “Are you out of your goddamn mind?”
“I was fine, really, Lawrence knew what he was doing. He’s a professional.”
“You are. You are out of your goddamn mind.”
I shrugged, then realized she might be onto something, and suddenly felt that I was going to lose my coffee and doughnuts, because car chases laced with gunplay are not typical activities for former-science-fiction-authors- turned-newspaper-feature-writers. I was breathing pretty rapidly, and Sarah let me fall into her arms. It’s possible that I was, perhaps very slightly, shaking.
“You are a stupid, stupid man,” she said quietly. “You’re not cut out for a life of adventure. You’re not Indiana Jones. If you tried to be, instead of carrying a whip tucked into your belt, you’d have a bottle of Maalox.”
“We’re going back out there tomorrow night,” I whispered into her hair, and she shoved me away abruptly.
“You really have lost your mind,” she said, suddenly looking angry enough to slug me.
I held up my hands, as much to protest as to defend myself. “We’re going into it with our eyes open this time. And Lawrence will be talking to the cops, and it’s not going to be the same kind of thing at all. We know what we’re up against.”
“So what does that mean? You’re taking a bazooka next time? Something big enough to bag an SUV?”
Seriously, I said, “I let Lawrence make the firepower decisions. It’s really not my area.”
She got up, stormed into the bathroom, and closed the door behind her. From inside, she shouted, “You’re done. This assignment is terminated. Write what you’ve got, it’ll be a fine feature.”
Whoa. Wait a minute.
“Who’s that in the bathroom?” I asked. “Is that my wife in there, or is it my editor?”
Sarah opened the door abruptly, a fierce expression on her face. “Take your pick.”
“Is that what you’d tell Cheese Dick Colby? If he was on this assignment, would you pull him off it, just when it was getting good, because he might hurt himself?”
“I don’t know. I don’t sleep with Colby.”
“I don’t even know how he sleeps with himself. You gotten close to him?”
She went back into the bathroom and closed the door. I shook my head, then unbuttoned my shirt and slipped off my pants. What was I supposed to do? Apologize? Had I done something wrong?
Maybe. Maybe not. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from twenty years of marriage, it’s that you don’t have to be wrong to apologize.
It was awfully quiet in the bathroom, so I went up to the door and quietly rapped on it. “Listen,” I said. “I-”
And the door swung open and Sarah, tears running down her cheeks, threw her arms around me and buried her face in my chest. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just don’t want anything to happen to you. Nearly losing you once was enough.”
Neither of us slept much during the three hours that were left before sunrise, which meant this was the second night in a row where I’d hardly had any sleep. Sarah, alternately staring at the ceiling and then spooning into me under the covers, said she was going to cancel going on her management retreat.
“Don’t do that,” I said. “Really, everything’s fine.”
