Deadlock

52

Cowboy woke with a start. The engine was idling, and he was in the passenger seat. He started to sit up. ‘What the hell’s going on?’

Before he could get an answer, Trooper floored it and Cowboy was flung backwards.

‘He’s up ahead.’

‘Jogging?’

‘Taking a walk. You know that little rise we came over when we got here?’

‘Yeah,’ said Cowboy, hauling himself up so he could see through the front of the windshield.

‘Well, right now, he should be just about over that.’

The speedometer of their SUV crept past fifty, then sixty. Either side of the road was grass and trees. They had to make sure they stayed on the road. And so did the man up ahead of them.

‘Keep the speed up but the revs down,’ Cowboy said. ‘He hears the engine, he’ll jump out of the way.’

‘OK, but he’s probably going to think it’s kids, not someone who’s aiming for him.’

Junius Holmes heard the car behind him as he crested the hill. There was the road and then three feet of asphalt beyond the white line where it was safe to walk. Anyone passing him, and recognizing him, might have guessed he was thinking about weighty matters. A case the Supreme Court had before it, or what he was going to say at a seminar he was to give shortly at Harvard about law and philosophy. In fact, he was thinking about what he was going to have for dinner. Even a justice of the highest court in the land had to eat, he told himself. He was thinking chicken, with mashed potato and broccoli.

Ahead of him there was a low roar — a big rig struggling to get up the sharp gradient. It wasn’t a road ideally suited to such a wide vehicle, but there was rarely much traffic here and it would be on the opposite side to where he was walking, so he didn’t deviate from his path.

The SUV was up to seventy now. They couldn’t see Holmes, so unless he had ducked into the woods to take a leak, he was just ahead of them over the hill.

‘OK,’ Cowboy said to Trooper, ‘keep that speed.’

‘Dude, you’re worse than my ex-wife. Shut the hell up and let me do this.’

Junius glanced round and saw an SUV behind him. Life didn’t go into slow motion. Instead, he froze like a rabbit for a second as the big rig which had climbed the hill shifted up a gear.

Cowboy could see Junius Holmes, but he could also see the driver of the big rig, who was shifting the path of his vehicle to avoid the pedestrian.

‘Do it then, man!’ he shouted at Trooper. ‘Do it now!’