Blind Pursuit

58

“I did it.”

Gund spoke the words between gulps of air as he sprinted to the barn.

He threw the double doors wide, climbed into the Astro, started the engine.

As he backed out into the open, as he swung the van toward the open gate, as he pulled out onto the side road, he felt strange tics and twitches in his face, peculiar muscular contractions at the corners of his mouth-and in his eyes, beads of dampness, blurring his world.

In the sideview mirror, the receding ranch house glowed with a red, feverish light.

Another ripple of his facial muscles, and the shape of his mouth changed. It took him a moment to understand that he was smiling, really smiling-the first smile he had worn in years, decades-almost the first he could remember.

This, then, was happiness. That word he so often had heard and never comprehended.

“I did it,” he said once more as he eased his foot down on the accelerator pedal.

The smile remained fixed on his face even while the water in his eyes spilled over, warm droplets tracking slowly down his cheeks.

Walker led the three backup units off the freeway at Houghton Road. He headed north, maintaining a steady speed of seventy.

Behind him, the patrol cars switched on their light bars, red and blue dome lights pulsing. The sirens stayed silent.

Ravine Road must be directly ahead. Walker pumped the brake pedal, slowing in preparation for a sharp right turn.

Gund reached Houghton Road, and abruptly the newfound smile faded from his face.

To his left, three squad cars, rooftop flashers twinkling, with an unmarked Ford Mustang in the lead.

Arrest.

Punishment.

No.

With a snarl of rage he steered the van hard to the right.

As the Chevy swung onto Houghton, Gund reached under the dashboard with one hand and released the sawed-off Remington from its mounting.

Walker had run an M.V.D. check on Harold Gund during the drive to the ranch. He drove a Chevrolet Astro van.

The same make and model as the van that now squealed out onto the road, directly ahead.

“That’s our guy,” he said over his walkie-talkie.

Three sirens blared at his back.

He sped up, closing on the van.

Gund thrust the shotgun out the driver’s-side window, muzzle pointing backward.

Under these circumstances he couldn’t possibly aim. Fortunately, he didn’t have to. The wide spray of shot would cut apart anything in its path.

He spun the steering wheel, barreling onto the shoulder, leaving the Mustang completely exposed in the middle of the road.

A single blast would tear the driver to pieces. With luck, the careening coupe would wreck one or more of the other pursuit cars in a deadly pileup.

He wedged the shotgun’s stock against the windshield pillar and pulled the trigger.

Walker saw the van slide to the right, glimpsed a flash of metal near the driver’s window.

Gun barrel.

He swerved onto the shoulder as the gun bucked with a booming report.

His windshield starred but didn’t shatter.

Shotgun. He’d caught only a couple of stray pellets.

Accelerating, he rammed the rear of the van.

Damn.

The other driver had been too quick for him.

Now Gund couldn’t see the unmarked car. It was directly behind the van’s windowless cargo compartment, out of the side mirrors’ field of view.

He released the steering wheel momentarily to pump another shotgun shell into the chamber.

Impact. From the rear.

The wheel spun crazily, the van skidding out of control.

He dropped the gun in his lap. Seized the wheel.

Too late.

The Chevy screamed off the shoulder, through a waist-high wire fence, and plunged down, the front end tilting almost vertically, the lone headlight beaming into a sandy pit ten feet below.

The arroyo.

He was a hundred yards north of Ravine Road, at the point where the dry wash passed under Houghton. With the fence ruptured, there was nothing to stop the van as it plummeted headfirst into the gully.

Rushing up at him, a dry parcel of ground, pitted and whorled like the surface of some wind-scoured alien planet. For a timeless moment there was no sense of distance-the scarred landscape might be a yard away or a mile-and he was conscious only of inertia shoving him roughly against the seat as a high, keening protest escaped his open mouth.

With a howl of metal, the front of the van met the ground and crumpled in a mist of sparks and sudden smoke, the windshield exploding, the dashboard popping free as the lights of the gauges went dark, steering wheel wrenched loose, horn jammed, its blare ear-splitting and continuous.

Gund waited for the van to tip over, to crash down on its roof or on its side.

Nothing happened.

Dimly he understood that the chassis still leaned on the roadway above, propped against the overpass like a ladder against a wall.

He coughed. Something harsh and foreign scratched his throat.

Smoke.

Clouds of it. All around.

Red glow from the ruined engine. Heat underneath the floor.

The van was on fire.

“Hell,” he whispered dully. He groped for the door handle, turned it, but the door wouldn’t open.

Wedged shut.

He remembered how the door frame had buckled slightly in last night’s crash, how he’d had to hammer it back into shape. This new trauma had undone his work, sealing the door again.

Out the window, then, or through the shattered windshield.

But he couldn’t. The dashboard, punched backward by the crash, trapped his legs.

Hotter now.

He coughed again, and this time found it hard to stop.

Smoke rose on both sides of him, billowing up from under the driver’s seat.

He had seen people burn.

Couldn’t die that way. Not him.

Wildly he pounded the dashboard, fighting to shove it free, like an animal clawing at the metal teeth of a trap.

Pain in his feet, his legs.

Downward glance. Caldron of black smoke where his lower body ought to be. Glinting in the smoke, malevolent pinpoints of fire.

The blare of the horn went on, and for a moment he didn’t even hear the new sound overlaid on it, the piercing wail of his own scream.

Get it off me, he begged without voice, as if the fire crawling up his pants were some kind of ravenous animal. Get it off, get it off, get it off -

He was beating his pants with both hands, trying to slap the fire down, and screaming, screaming, screaming.

Had it hurt this much for the others? Were his daughters screaming with the same agony right now?

Impossible. There never had been this much pain before, not in all the world.

He was drowning in smoke, being eaten alive by flame, and now he couldn’t scream anymore; he had swallowed too much smoke and could only wheeze, light-headed with pain and fumes, as he writhed and twisted, head whipsawing frantically, arms flapping, and then his hand touched hot steel, smooth and cylindrical, the barrel of the shotgun, thrown onto the passenger seat in the crash.

He thought of Lincoln Connor, of the real Harold Gund, their bodies sprawled together in the woods, a sawed-off Remington 870, like this one, clutched fast in Lincoln’s hands.

Clumsily he turned the gun toward his own face.

The muzzle brushed his cheek, his chin. Mouth open, he swallowed it.

Somewhere at the end of the sixteen-inch barrel was a trigger.

He groped for it as the back of his seat erupted in flame and his scalp began to crisp.

Twenty feet from the van Walker was slip-sliding down the embankment, carrying his Smith. 38 and a dry-chemical fire extinguisher from his car, when he caught sight of Harold Gund.

The man couldn’t be alive, certainly couldn’t be conscious, not in that hell of folded metal and spurting flame.

But he was.

Walker saw movement. A gleam of steel.

The shotgun again.

For a wild moment he thought Gund was trying to take another shot at him. Then the barrel swung toward Gund’s own face and the muzzle disappeared into his mouth.

A sharp crack, a viscid spatter.

The fire still burned, but Gund didn’t feel it anymore.

Walker turned away from the van, then stopped, staring along the length of the arroyo toward a distant radiance.

Another fire. Larger than this one. A house or some other structure.

“Christ,” he hissed. “Annie.”

He scrambled back up the slope to his car, praying he wasn’t already too late.