“How about I get twenty questions?”
“I can’t talk about it.”
“Why the hell not?”
“For one thing, knowing would put you in jeopardy.”
“As opposed to, say, now?”
Drummond nodded, ceding the point. He began to speak, only to stop.
“Come on,” Charlie said. “The suspense is going to kill me first.”
Again Drummond hesitated. “The truth is, Perriman Appliances is just a cover,” he finally said in a whisper. “I really work for the government, in clandestine operations.”
That would explain a lot of tonight. But knowing Drummond as he did-the man who complained the History Channel aired too much violence-Charlie couldn’t swallow it. “So, what, you’re a spy?”
“Company!”
“Like, the CIA?”
“Behind us!”
Charlie glanced at his side mirror. The players had changed only in that the teal Dodge had drawn half a block closer. “Which one?” he asked, doubtful it was any.
“The teal car,” Drummond said, as if it should have been obvious.
“If you say so.”
“Teal cars are very often rentals.”
“I guess no one would buy a teal car…”
“They may fire.”
“With all these other people around?”
Charlie’s side mirror burst into particles of glass. The aluminum housing swung toward him, smashing a spiderweb into his window. He would have jumped if he weren’t pinned in place by astonishment.
“Eyes forward!” Drummond shouted.
Charlie rotated his head to see a painter’s van darting from a curbside parking space and into their path.
Reflexively he heaved the steering wheel counterclockwise, directing the Hippo into the left lane. There were buildings easier to maneuver than the Hippo. He sideswiped the van as the truck thumped into the left lane.
He barely registered the impact. His world had compacted into a tunnel that contained only the Hippo, the street, and the teal Dodge. Everything else was in soft focus, all sounds were muted. It took a beat to register that Drummond was speaking. “… we’re fortunate to have a vehicle that’s five tons of steel. Otherwise they could T- bone us.”
Charlie had heard T-bone applied only to beef, but he didn’t doubt its place in car chase terminology. Like Drummond’s take on teal cars, it didn’t seem like the stuff of delusion. So when Drummond added, “Stay as far to the left as you can,” Charlie pitched the Hippo that way and only afterward asked why.
Drummond’s response was forestalled by a hollow thud. A thin beam of light shone from a new poker-chip- sized hole between them in the steel wall dividing the cab from the cargo hold. A bullet must have first pierced the truck’s rear door, then burrowed through the newspapers. The hole in the windshield told the rest of the story.
Every last cell in Charlie tensed in anticipation of the next bullet. “I guess they don’t make five tons of steel like they used to,” he said.
Drummond seemed unusually relaxed. “Did Grandpa Tony ever tell you about his apartment on State Street?”
Charlie feared a non sequitur to top the Merrimack River. “No.”
“As you’ll recall, he lived in Chicago during the Capone mob’s heyday. Sometimes he’d hear machine-gun fire, and he’d peek out his window to see mobsters speeding by in a Cadillac that had been shot to Swiss cheese, followed by a police wagon that wasn’t in much better shape. Always though, the vehicles were speeding, and the drivers were alive. The point is, it’s extremely difficult to fire from one moving vehicle at another with any degree of accuracy. In all likelihood, they’re just trying to fluster you. One of us getting hit by a bullet would be a matter of incredibly rotten luck.”
“Then we’re in trouble,” Charlie said.
17
“Get over as far into the right lane as you can,” Drummond said.
“The left lane, you mean?” Charlie wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly; air was howling like a jet through the bullet hole. Also, he thought, albeit based on video game car chases, the idea was to obstruct the shooter’s aim at the driver, not facilitate it.
“No, no, the right,” Drummond said. “I don’t want to let them get a line on our back right wheel well.”
As if on cue, the Dodge drifted to that side. The man in the passenger seat nosed a gun out of his window, braced the stout barrel on his side mirror, and tipped it toward the Hippo’s back right tire.
Charlie clocked the steering wheel. “Is he going for our gas tank?”
“Apparently.”
“I thought, outside of B-movies, bullets don’t ignite gasoline.”
“In general that’s true, but if he can put a hole in the tank, the diesel will gush out and soon we’ll run dry. And in the meantime, if he can blow the tire, all it will take is one spark and-”
“Big blob of fire?”
“Essentially, yes,” Drummond said.
Impressed by Drummond’s knowledge, as well as flabbergasted by it, Charlie nosed right, just as the man in the Dodge pressed the trigger. Drummond’s side mirror filled with the shot’s white glare.
The bullet struck the Hippo’s rear cargo door, decimating its upper hinge. Already ajar, the door swung outward. The lower hinge kept it dangling from the truck. It hammered the road, creating a comet tail of sparks, until swinging sideways and clipping the trunk of a streetlamp. Charlie felt the high-pitched clank in his teeth.
Severed from the truck, the cargo door flew at the Dodge like a hatchet.
The Dodge swerved to avoid it. The door gouged the pavement a few feet ahead of the Dodge, cartwheeled past its windshield, and slammed into a cluster of garbage pails, scattering them like tenpins.
Charlie would have cursed the luck, but the monstrous banging and rumbling in the cargo hold seized his attention.
“The newspapers,” Drummond said.
“Or Hippo actually refers to a hippo,” Charlie said.
It was quickly evident that Drummond was right: The stacks of newspapers were toppling, due either to the collision with the streetlamp or suction through the rear doorway. Bundles of papers could be heard bouncing around, like corn in a popper. The side mirror showed the cargo hold disgorging hundreds of individual copies.
The Dodge slalomed to avoid the bulk of this tabloid-sized confetti. Sheet after sheet slapped its windshield, flattened, and stayed put. The driver had to lower his window and stick out his head to maintain his course.
A still-intact newspaper clouted him in the face, bloodying his nose. A page clung over his eyes, blinding him. He kept one hand on the wheel and swept the other wildly in an effort to peel away the paper.
The passenger shouted and pointed. The driver cleared his eyes in time to see the dumpster. Too late to dodge it.
Charlie looked on like a baseball fan whose cleanup hitter has just sent one deep.
The driver of the Dodge jogged his wheel counterclockwise, so rather than head-on, he struck the dumpster with his right front quarter panel. The car bounced back into the street, its hood tented, the right headlight gone. The quarter panel flopped off.
Still, the car resumed its pursuit.
“They don’t make dumpsters like they used to either,” Charlie grumbled.
The newspapers had been a lucky break, he thought. Per horseplayer calculus, that severely diminished the chances of another lucky break, and it was hard to imagine escaping the Dodge, let alone lasting the night, without another half-dozen lucky breaks. As the horseplayers say, “Luck never gives; she only lends.”
