Kiss

8

The white Cadillac stayed dead on the speed limit, cut east toward the ocean, then drove north along Beachside Avenue for a while, parallel with the shore. The wide and gleaming Atlantic made the car look small.

After about five minutes it leaned into a left turn and headed inland. Carver stayed well back and didn’t think the Caddie’s ominous driver had seen him, but there was no way to be sure. The broad and powerful Latino seemed to be an expert in his dubious profession of intimidator.

In the older, industrial section of Del Moray, the Cadillac suddenly picked up speed and rounded a corner with a scream of rubber on pavement. That was okay; the Olds could keep up. Carver goosed the vintage convertible up to sixty, played the brake and accelerator, and two-wheeled it around the corner in pursuit of the Cadillac.

Another screech of heat-softened tires on concrete. He leaned forward to peer intently through the windshield.

But the Caddie wasn’t in sight on the narrow street. It must have taken the corner at the end of the short block, at the north side of a long, abandoned building that looked as if it might have been some kind of factory but was now obsolete and gradually surrendering to weeds and weather,

Carver sped to the intersection, braked to a skidding halt, and glanced east and west. No white Cadillac. The driver must have realized at some point that he was being followed and driven to this area of narrow avenues where he could lose Carver. The knowledge gave Carver the creeps; maybe the Latino had cunning in proportion to his muscle. Which would make him very dangerous indeed.

Carver cursed, made a left turn, and decided it was time to drive back to Edwina’s and think things through. Past time, actually. This hadn’t been one of his better days. He was feeling distinctly mortal.

Whack!

The right side of the Olds’s windshield shattered and fogged. Tentacles of the webbed crack zagged over to the driver’s side and tiny, glistening shards of glass fell and sparkled like bright sequins on the dashboard.

Carver sucked in his breath and dropped low in the seat, scrunched sideways and half on the floor. He did this almost instantly, but not before he saw the white Cadillac filling the rearview mirror. Fear shot through him with the suddenness of the bullet through the windshield.

With his head just high enough so he could peer over the dashboard, he kept one hand on the steering wheel and used the other to press down on the accelerator. All he could really see was the long expanse of the Olds’s gleaming hood. He tried to picture the straight, narrow street, tried to remember if there were any parked cars. Any oncoming traffic. Tried to forget his fear.

Hell with it. No choice but to stay close to the center line and go.

Go!

The Olds jumped forward, engine roaring and tires screaming. Carver’s heart kept pace with the racing engine. His hip battered against the transmission hump. After a few seconds, he chanced bouncing up high enough to get a fix on what was ahead, ducking back down immediately so he wouldn’t provide a target.

It looked clear all the way to the intersection. He risked giving the car more gas, picking up speed. Flying low! He was going to make it!

There was a loud grinding sound and the steering wheel bent his thumb back painfully and jerked out of his damp and slippery hand. The Olds lurched sideways, rocked, shuddered, stopped. The engine died.

Carver didn’t want to die next, but that seemed to be the idea.

Wishing like crazy he’d brought his old Colt automatic that was taped to the back of a dresser drawer in Edwina’s bedroom, he lunged sideways and worked the passenger door handle. He shoved the door open, gripped the side of the seat and pulled, gaining enough leverage to help him clamber out the right side of the car.

As soon as he struck the pavement he was up on one elbow, looking in every direction, tensed for a bullet, trying to figure out which way to roll. He swiveled his head this way and that so violently he hurt his neck.

The white Cadillac was gone.

He was alone in the middle of the street.

It wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where citizens rushed outside at the sound of an accident, even when the temperature wasn’t in the nineties. There weren’t many people living in the degenerating industrial neighborhood at all. He thought he heard a door slam. An old man carrying a bottle in a crinkled paper sack glanced over at him and shuffled on out of sight. A dog began barking incessantly in the next block, as if to warn everyone that something unusual was going down and for God’s sake don’t get involved.

The Olds was angled at forty-five degrees in the street. Carver used the side of the car for support to lever himself to his feet. The elbow he’d landed on was throbbing, but he didn’t think it was broken. But what the hell, he wasn’t a doctor. Better wait to see if it swelled.

On the left of the Olds and slightly behind it was an old black pickup truck. Carver had sideswiped it, adding to its lifetime collection of dents. The driver’s-side door was creased, and flakes of rust jarred loose from the impact lay like dried blood on the street.

No choice but to stay inside the law. Carver kept his palms on the Olds’s sun-heated metal and limped around to the damaged truck. He fished in his pocket and got out one of his business cards, then reached through the truck’s open window and got a yellow stub of a pencil that was lying on the dash. He wrote “Sorry-call me” on the back of the card and stuck it beneath one of the truck’s wipers, then tossed the pencil back inside. He didn’t really expect to hear from the truck’s owner, who might not even notice the new dent.

The man in the Cadillac had only been trying to frighten him further, he was sure. The bullet that had starred the Olds’s windshield had penetrated the plastic rear window in the convertible top and snapped over the passenger seat next to Carver. The white Cadillac had been only a few feet behind the Olds; the shot had been a deliberate miss.

Carver could still see out the driver’s side of the smashed windshield, and damage to the Olds from the accident was minimal. Anyway, the car was almost as dented and rusty as the truck it had hit. Here was an accident to make an insurance adjuster shake his head.

Carver eased his sore body back behind the steering wheel, started the Olds’s engine, and slipped the shift lever into Drive. He was tentative at first, but within a few blocks he was sure the massive and outdated car was running as well as ever. It was a rolling symbol of Detroit’s long-ago best; it wasn’t easy to harm a monument. After winding around side streets in the depressing neighborhood, he found his way back to Beachside Avenue and drove home.

He knew Edwina would still be out trying to sell real estate, but there was someone seated at the table on the veranda. It was dusk and Carver couldn’t make out who it was.

There was an old umbrella on the backseat of the car. Carver twisted around and managed to reach it.

Using it as a cane, he climbed out of the car. The unopened umbrella supported him okay, but he had to stoop slightly to walk, and he had to be careful to plant the pointed metal tip on hard surfaces.

He swung the gate open and limped toward the seated figure, trying to think who it might be. A man, very tall-basketball-player tall. Loose-jointed and slouched in a casual-almost insolent-attitude. As if this were his home and Carver was dropping by to see him. Though almost entirely in outline, the man was familiar to Carver. Familiar in a way that stirred something unpleasant in the murky depths of memory.

When he got closer and the figure raised a can or glass in a mock toast, Carver still didn’t know for sure who it was. Didn’t know until the man spoke:

“Heard my old asshole buddy had some trouble, so I hustled right over here. Lock on your cunt’s house is cheap shit, easy to pick, so I wandered on in and helped myself to a beer while I waited.” A loud belch. “Knew you wouldn’t mind.”

McGregor.