Interface

Twenty One

The yellow Montego was blocked by three cars waiting at the stop sign where Lincoln and Presidio Boulevards rub noses. Docker, big hands steady on the wheel, face set in concentration, didn’t even shift his foot off the accelerator. Instead, he goosed it.

And whipped into the left-hand lane on the wrong side of the miniscule triangular concrete traffic island, horn blaring to freeze traffic. He slewed across Presidio untouched because a sports car driver had damned good reflexes, fishtailed the rear end on fog-wet blacktop and was heading down Lincoln toward the old wooden building that had been Letterman Army Hospital until the new plant had been completed.

Behind him, the air was full of sirens. Directly ahead, an olive green Military Police jeep went into a skid of its own, broadside across the street to block his way, shedding MPs expecting the crash.

Docker jumped the left-hand curb, skun the left side of the Montego on the ancient stone retaining wall in front of some officer’s white frame house, hit the blacktop still accelerating, fighting it under control with big, competent hands.

Ahead on his right behind masking palm trees, the greyish stucco cube which housed the MP Headquarters spilled men in Army greens and wearing white plastic helmet liners. They ran at the road drawing cumbersome Army-issue .45s. Docker aimed the Montego at the closest one, slewed away as the man dove back.

Men were on their bellies, squeezing off shots. One slug smashed against the post between the windshield and the frame on the far side of the car, but then the fog had closed in behind Docker again. His last mirrored view was of men sprinting toward a whippet-aerialled jeep.

The Presidio of San Francisco is an Army post, and has been in the hands of somebody’s military since the Spaniard José Moraga erected an adobe stockade there in 1776. Since it has always been a defensive, not a training camp, relatively little of its total acreage has ever been in actual use. Most of its thousands of eucalyptus, monterey pine and cypress trees were planted by school children on Arbor Days in the early 1900s. Miles of earth and blacktop roads wander through these miniature forests.

But once pursuit had begun, the Presidio was not a particularly good place for Docker to be. It was a closed system; though the gates were always open, access could be controlled by sealing them up. Once inside, Docker had very limited options.

But he did have the fog. That was on his side.

On their side were their radios. Though Docker could not hear them, the air around him crackled with messages as he knifed the big car down the Lincoln Boulevard straight-away past the Parade Ground.

“Unit Three, do you read me?”

“10–4, Control.”

“Subject vehicle outbound on Lincoln. Vehicle is 10–99. Repeat, 10–99. Stolen vehicle.”

“10–4, Control.”

“Unit Seven, is the Broadway gate closed and locked?”

“Affirmative, Control. Am now sealing Presidio Boulevard gate at Pacific Street.”

“10–4. Is any unit in the vicinity of MacDowell and Lincoln?”

“Affirmative. Unit Five en route that intersection on MacDowell. ETA, sixty seconds.”

Ahead of Docker, Lincoln divided for an old red brick building which had been there much longer than the automobile and currently housed Army CID. He slammed the brakes to set up a skid, goosed it as he came out of the slide, nose to the right, braked, jammed the wheel left. The rear end caromed off the springy steel guard-rail which divided Lincoln from a steep embankment below the Doyle Drive skyway to the Golden Gate Bridge.

He was still moving, but a tire was scraping something now.

The fog shifted momentarily; thirty yards off to Docker’s right, serenely unconscious of it all, the freeway traffic whipped along, its many eyes fog-misted. The Mercury’s headlights took ineffectual bites at the swirling mist as he roared along Lincoln. To his left, the National Cemetery’s rows of honored dead under their simple markers marching up the hillside were invisible.

“Unit Five approaching MacDowell and Lincoln.”

“10–4. Stop vehicle. Repeat, stop the vehicle. Subject is considered armed and dangerous. Subject may be heading for Crissi Airfield, over.”

More sirens, they seemed to be coming from every compass point now, rising and falling as they cried to one another through the night. Docker’s window was down so their voices poured in at him with the fog and the wet. He was hunched over the wheel like a race driver, his face, by the upthrust glow of the dash lights, was rendered less than human from intense concentration.

Ahead, intersection. MacDowell, leading down to Crissi Field. His hands did not twitch the wheel that way. Headlights on MacDowell in the fog.

“Subject vehicle approaching at high speed...”

The jeep leaped from the fog, trying to cut Docker off. But he was by MacDowell ahead of them with inches to spare. The jeep shot right across Lincoln, rammed headfirst into a tree.

“Unit Five, come in.”

Docker heard only motor roar, saw only grey wetness, arc of his own lights.

“Unit Five, this is Control. What is your 10–20?”

“Bastard beat us to MacDowell. 10–51. Repeat, 10–51. Need a tow truck. No injuries.”

“We do not read you, Unit Five. Did you make connection with subject vehicle, over?”

“We made connection with a tree, over.”

“Unit Two, what is your 10–20?”

“Ruckman Avenue, heading for the underpass below US. One, over.”

“Intercept—”

“Subject vehicle just passed intersection with Ruckman.”

“Believe subject headed for Golden Gate Bridge access from view area. Can any unit block that intersection?”

Behind the wheel, Docker was laughing with apparent exhilaration. He shouted a snatch of song. He screamed through the stop sign where Crissi Avenue came up from the airfield below, shot a look down Crissi over his shoulder. Just fog.

“This is Unit Four. We are en route Golden Gate Bridge access from Lincoln Boulevard view area over Baker Beach. Will intercept subject vehicle.”

“10–4. If subject attempts to run roadblock, initiate fire. Subject armed and dangerous.”

Docker avoided the tempting trap of Marine Drive, which dead ended at old Fort Point under the soaring red steel parapets of the bridge. Instead, he drifted the yellow car around the curved approach toward the intersection with the bridge view area. He had a momentary glimpse of yellow pinpricks on the Marin headlands hiding Sausalito, then the fog slammed the door shut, closing him back into its narrow dripping grey room.

“Control, this is Unit Four. Turn-off to View Area is a hundred yards ahead. No sight of subject veh... Headlights!”

“Detain vehicle, Unit Four.”

The open window gave Docker the screaming sirens. Dim in the fog, a splash of light to mark the intersection. A hard right, a hard left, and he would have been aimed into the northbound lanes of the bridge. Northbound to Marin where a thousand suburban roads waited.

Headlights, glaring in his eyes. White flashes behind them whining bullets at him; none hitting.

Docker stood on the brakes. Docker put her into a skid, spinning the wheel hard.

But not going right. Going left. The nose tore through dirt, a rear fender wiped out a signpost bearing the words:

But he was into narrow Armistead Road, behind him the jeep went by like a hog on ice, all wheels locked uselessly as the MPs within raked the darkness into which Docker had disappeared with equally useless carbine fire.

Ahead, Y-junction. Left, Hoffman Street, dipping seductively downhill. No hesitation. Docker stayed on Armistead, accelerated as the street climbed between enlisted men’s housing, past parked cars and the litter of the complex kids’ toys only an affluent technological society can create. Up, all four wheels momentarily off the ground.

Crash! the car struck the blacktop, rocked. Barrier ahead. Flimsy wood, another crash, boards flew. Roaring down a steep grade, following the twisting street unerringly, braking, braking...

T-junction just below. Docker came to a full stop, lights out, just as an olive green MP sedan whipped by unseeing on Lincoln. Intentionally or not, Docker had come in a circle. Lights still out, he wrenched the wheel over, shot into line behind the MP vehicle, using their lights. Crissi angled in again like a bad summer rerun.

“This is Control. Where is subject vehicle?”

“Unit Four. Vehicle left Lincoln at Hoffman Street.”

“Hoffman Street has a temporary wooden barricade across it. Block access...”

“What the hell!”

“Receiving your transmission poorly, Unit Four. 10–9 your message.”

“Subject vehicle riding your lights, Unit One.”

The olive green sedan with Docker tight behind had swung around Lincoln and back toward the view area access again. The sedan began bucking and sliding as it tried to stop where it could block the bridge access road. Instead, it slid right by and into the side of Unit Four, which was backing out of Hoffman Road like a frustrated foxhound from a blocked lair. No way by for Docker now, on Lincoln, to get out to Twenty-Fifth Avenue.

Hard right, his lights transfixing gaping neckers, fish-mouthed in the glare as he slewed by them. Across the access to the northbound bridge lanes was parked a CHP black-and-white, meticulously observing the Military Police’s jurisdictional sway.

Docker didn’t even try. Instead, he whipped a vicious left between concrete traffic islands, stuffed her straight into the underpass which led beneath the toll plaza’s multilanes.

Beyond the open square of tunnel, T-junction. Left again.

This put the fleeing Montego on a sunken access road that rose quickly up to highway level. Left again would put him on the return lanes to the city, inbound on US 101.

But right...

Gunning forty, forty-five, fifty, right through the Bridge Employees Only parking lot. This was enclosed by a ten-foot high hurricane fence but at the far end was a wide double gate with a green sign reading “25th Ave Exit.”

Twenty-Fifth Avenue was where Sea Cliff began — Sea Cliff, where Walter Hariss lived.

A jeep was beside the gate, two uniformed MPs were in the act of running the two sides shut.

“Hai!” yelled Docker as if he were delivering a karate blow.

His lights pinned them to the mesh. They leaped, for the instant movie stuntmen caught up with by real life, then they were tumbling away, skun-up but unhurt, as with a terrible spronging impact Docker’s car hit the place where the two gates met.

Through, gates wide and drunkenly bent behind him, instantly gone in the fog. Lights probing great shadowy cypresses bent back away from the road, from the sea, by the incessant ocean winds.

By breasting the hill, Docker would find an intersection with Lincoln Boulevard which still might be able to carry him out of the Presidio at Twenty-Fifth Avenue.

But the big yellow car just kept going straight after it had gone through the gate. Off the reddish shoulder of the road, crash, thump, metal dragging the ground but still moving. Docker not decelerating, roaring along a narrow, rutted gravel and dirt road full of potholes that struck the springs like cannon fire. High beams here, where the fog was made patchy by crumbling concrete gun emplacements from World War II on the right, the backs of weathered clerical buildings of the same vintage with old-fashioned screen windows on the left.

For the moment Docker was totally lost to the pursuers behind. Fog like smoke, close-set cypresses, the gravel road suddenly three gravel roads, each of them also branching...

Hard shuddering turn to the right, gravel thundering on the car’s underbody. Toward the ocean, losing options, trapped in a narrow strip of wild wasteland between sea-cliffs and Lincoln Boulevard. Scrub brush. Gnarled, wind-tortured cypresses. Somewhere behind, faint as baying hounds, the lights and sirens of pursuit.

Here, dripping fog. Brush. Then an opening out, a sense of breadth and distance. On his right, the immense grey bulk of an abandoned gun emplacement and bunkers pitted by the shell-fire of time.

Swirling fog sent his lights reflecting whitely back, but Docker could see he was on a huge flat gravel area nearly as large as a football field. He drove on, slowly now as if feeling his way.

The breadth narrowed. Great flat brow of bunker on the right, unbroken as a prison wall, pinching him left, left. Until ahead the wall ended in densely tangled brush no car could get through.

Wall on the right, impenetrable brush ahead, pursuit somewhere behind. And to the left, the gravel expanse just... ended.

Dead ended. The only way out was the way by which he had come in.

Docker backed the sleek, battered car away from the brush fifteen, twenty feet, paused, then turned left and drove very slowly forward toward the abrupt lip his lights showed him despite the great ropes of fog flowing up over the cliff face. He stopped a dozen feet from the edge of oblivion.

Docker left the lights on, the motor running, got out almost leisurely. He seemed to have all the time there was. Behind, somewhere, the ineluctable keen of sirens, but it was as if these had lost all meaning and importance now.

He walked out beyond his headlights, stood with his feet on the crumbly edge of California. From directly in front and far below, three hundred feet below, came the startling blunt thud of breakers on jagged rock and hard wet sand. Thud, thunder of withdrawal, like distant, outmoded trains, thud again. Since the million years of rain which had cooled a spinning mass to make it the planet earth, it had been like that. And would be till the planet ceased to turn.

Darkness, death and thunder down below, pursuit and capture and another sort of death behind.

Docker walked almost idly back to the car, sat behind the wheel, leaving his door open for the moment. It could have been that the sirens were fractionally closer through the muffling fog. But sound plays tricks on dripping, misted nights.

Docker picked up the attaché case from the seat, got out, limped over to the brush with it. He opened it by the glow of his parking lights stuffed into it his few small personal things; he would never need them again. Then he set the case in behind the twisted bushes where only someone with an idea of where to look would be likely to find it.

He went back to the car, got into it again. The sirens were definitely louder. There might have been a vague ghost of light cast momentarily up against the bottom of the fog somewhere behind him.

“Docker, baby, you’ve run out of time,” he said aloud.

He picked up the lug wrench he had placed on the seat earlier, hefted it in his still-gloved hands as if momentarily considering it as a weapon.

But the lug wrench was not a weapon. The time for weapons was past. Docker snorted through his nose as if at his own hesitation.

He looked back once again. Aura of light, definite now. The sirens moaning closer, perhaps only seconds away. He turned and looked to his front, through the windshield that could show him only pouring fog. Docker’s hands convulsed around the wheel.

Docker shifted his weight, and the accelerator was depressed, stayed down, the motor rose to a whine, a roar like a jet’s run-up. Finally his hand hovered over the gear shift. The fingers flexed. The hand, with a convulsive movement, rammed it into low.

The Montego shot forward, Docker’s final shout lost in the rattling spray of gravel against the undersides of the fenders as the rear wheels spun for traction. Slightly fishtailing, the car shot out into the void. Its lights glared for a moment at the lip of gravel, then looked at only vertical fog as it dropped into space.

The first pursuing jeep, whippet-aerial slashing like a rider’s crop, burst out onto the gravel field just as the Montego, somersaulting lazily in mid-air, struck the sharp granite shoulder which thrust far out into the sea three hundred feet below. The jeep slowed to a stop with its lights on the drag-strip wheel marks leading to infinity.

“What the hell...” the shocked driver had begun, when the car, far below, exploded.

The four men were out and running for the edge with the thump hitting their ears after the light of the blast had already dazzled their eyes. They stood in a clump, staring down at the fiercely burning wreckage. Despite the fog, it lit up the brown sand and the ugly black teeth around which the sea boiled in oddly delicate traceries of foam.

“Do you think he—”

“Yeah. He ran out of room,” said the driver.

He looked back over his shoulder. The lieutenant was getting out of the sedan which had pulled up, slowly, as befits an officer. He had all the time he needed, neither car nor driver was going anywhere again. The lieutenant’s watch didn’t end until morning, he had nowhere else to go either. He was a young tight-ass black man.

With infinite leisure, the lieutenant sauntered over and looked down at the glowing mess on the rocks below, now scattered and burning through the mist in a dozen different places.

“Always some goddam thing,” he said. He motioned to his driver. “Better call the fire department.”

The man went away to work the radio.

“Alert the Coast Guard, too,” the lieutenant called after him. “They’ll want to send a patrol boat in from the ocean side.”

After that, all they could do was watch it burn, and take turns wondering whether they really could smell the roasting flesh.