For a moment or so, it looked like we had gotten clear. In the rearview mirror the pickup seemed to be trapped in a maelstrom of stalled vehicles, while before us Invergordon lay straight and flat and empty.
But before I could breathe a sigh of relief, I saw the DEAD END sign beside the street and knew we were still in trouble.
'Dead end!' I yelped. 'What the hell do they mean, dead end?'
'The canal,' Rhonda replied through clenched teeth. 'The Arizona Canal. It's right up here.'
'Shit! So how do we get out of here? Right or left?'
'I don't know.'
I wanted to get off Invergordon and duck into a side street before the pickup got loose from Camelback. I figured there was a fifty-fifty chance of making the right choice. I swung left onto a small side street. For a moment I thought it was going to be all right, but then we ran into a T.
People on the run instinctively turn right, so I swung left again, hoping to outfox our pursuer. We came out on a street called Calle Redondo that seemed to run on a diagonal. Behind it was a tall chain link fence.
'What's beyond the fence?' I asked, 'The canal?'
'Yes.'
'Is there water in it?'
Rhonda craned her neck. 'I can't tell. Probably.'
'How deep?'
'Seven or eight feet.'
'Great.'
Beyond the canal was another street, one that appeared to cross the canal, if only we could find a way to get over onto it. The problem was, the guy in the pickup had come to the same conclusion. He must have seen me turn left off Invergordon and realized there was only one way out of the maze. As we came around a blind corner onto Lafayette, I saw him lying in wait, parked inside the fence on the access road that ran next to the canal. He was hanging back, hoping to pounce as soon as we surfaced.
'What are you going to do?' Rhonda asked.
'Something that son of a bitch doesn't expect,' I told her. 'Brace yourself.'
Shoving the accelerator all the way to the floor, I aimed for the 4-X-4's looming front left tire and nailed that sucker head-on, doing a good thirty-five miles an hour.
From what I remember of Doc Ramsey's high school physics class at Ballard High School, when a moving object hits a stationary one, the stationary one shares the momentum of the moving one. During the intervening twenty-eight years, everything else may have changed, but the laws of physics hadn't.
The Subaru stopped dead in its tracks with its nose bent straight into the ground while the pickup started moving. As the shoulder belt cut painfully into my collarbone, I caught only a brief glimpse of the shocked driver's open-mouthed amazement as his behemoth truck went ass-backwards into the canal. With the oversized tires half floating and half bouncing off the bottom, the truck, still right side up, floated out of sight under the bridge.
In this updated, four-wheel-drive version of David and Goliath, the Subaru may have won hands down, but the folks at Alamo sure as hell weren't going to like it.
CHAPTER 16
Whoever said you can never find a cop when you need one was dead wrong. By the time I had helped a dazed but unhurt Rhonda Attwood out of the crippled Subaru, we found a whole wad of cops, or rather they found us, summoned to the scene by an irate jogger who insisted he had seen the whole thing and it was all my fault. The incident left me with a whole lot of explaining to do, although not nearly as much as I would have expected.
Once we gave him a description of the 4-X-4, the patrol officer in charge seemed to pay a lot closer attention to what I was saying. Within moments of hearing that Rhonda Attwood was Joey Rothman's mother, he was on the horn to his dispatcher, calling for a helicopter backup to search the canal for our assailant. His use of the word 'assailant' struck me as important, especially in view of the fact that the jogger was still jumping up and down and telling anybody who would listen that I had attacked the pickup with my Subaru.
Subdued but uninjured, Rhonda seemed content to sit on the berm between the road and the canal with a blanket thrown around her shoulders while I worked my way through the tangle of paperwork. The last representative of officialdom was the tow-truck driver, a burly barrel-chested man in his late fifties who looked at the battered wreck of the Subaru and shook his head.
'I've picked up Alamo casualties for years,' he said with a scowl. 'But I've never heard that whole office so riled up as they are over this.'
'They're pretty upset?' I asked innocuously. He nodded. 'And you don't think it would be such a good idea for me to ride along out there with you tonight to get things straightened out?'
The tow-truck driver grinned. 'It's up to you, buddy. Just how brave are you?'
'Not very,' I said. 'Maybe I'll send my attorney out to handle it in the morning.'
'That's the ticket,' he said.
I watched him load the crumpled remains onto a slanted rack on the back of his tow truck. The Subaru was neither driveable nor towable.
Boeing test pilots talk about flying the biggest piece home. They claim that you're all right as long as you keep the shiny side up and the greasy side down. The game little Subaru was still shiny side up, but her flying days were over.
'Detective Beaumont?' I turned to see who was calling. It was the Scottsdale patrol officer who had been first on the scene, although I didn't remember telling him or anyone else there my title as well as my name.
He motioned me over to his car. 'We're about finished up here. Are you done with the car?'
I nodded. 'He'll be gone in a few minutes.'
'The Town of Paradise Valley has two detectives waiting for Mrs. Attwood at La Posada. We're sending one of ours as well. We'd like her to accompany the detectives when they go through her room. Another detective, one from Prescott, is on her way to pick you up.'
'Delcia? How did she find out about it?'
'I wouldn't know about that, sir,' the patrolman said, 'but she should be here in a few minutes.'
I went back over to where Rhonda was sitting. 'Are you all right?' I asked.
'My collarbone hurts, where the shoulder strap cut into me, but I don't think anything's broken.'
'Me too,' I agreed, rubbing my finger along the painful bruise that cut diagonally across my own chest. 'It could have been worse. That's why I aimed for the tire. The rubber took some of the shock.'
'Have they found him yet?'
'No,' I answered, 'but I'm sure they will. A pickup stuck in the canal should be easy enough to spot.'
Another car approached the scene, red lights flashing. 'Come on,' I said, gently helping Rhonda to her feet. 'That's probably our ride.'
It was. Delcia Reyes-Gonzales came around the car to meet us. 'Are you two all right?' she asked anxiously.
'So far,' I told her. The tow truck was just pulling away, and she allowed her eyes to follow it. 'I'm going to need some more help with Alamo,' I said.
She nodded. 'I can see that. Ready?'
Delcia held open the back door of her Reliant, and I handed Rhonda into the back seat. There wasn't enough leg room for me, so I went around and climbed in on the rider's side. Delcia's unquestioning acceptance of what had happened seemed odd to me. I expected her to ask who was in the 4-X-4 and why I had deliberately collided with him. Instead, she drove us back to La Posada in thoughtful silence.
We went by way of Camelback and Invergordon. An assortment of officers had cleared away the wrecked cars, but the intersection was still lit with flashing lights while someone armed with a massive broom finished sweeping broken glass out of the street.
'In the entire Phoenix metropolitan area, you couldn't have picked a worse place than this,' Delcia said, as she eased her way through the still-stalled traffic.
