On the High Road to Oblivion

Chapter 2—Rotten Tomatoes

Initially, Dodge couldn’t see the panel truck, but it seemed likely that the kidnappers would continue in the same direction and remain on the main thoroughfares, at least until they drew near to whatever their final destination might be.

The cool breeze blowing across his face helped clear his head and soon the unanswered questions began to bubble to the surface. “Why dynamite?” he asked, inclining his head toward Hurley. “It’s not the subtlest of methods.”

“Anarchists.” This opinion did not come from Hurley, who was still trying to shake off the effects of the blast, but instead from Nora. “They like to blow things up. Cause mayhem. It’s a good way to distract attention from their real motive.”

“Which was to grab the Doc.”

“No offense, but I doubt your friend rates this kind of attention from the anarchists.”

“Then why…you think they were after Lafayette? Why on earth would they care about him?”

“Rodney gets death threats all the time from crazy people who don’t like the way he presents their cause in his stories. Why, just last month, he did a story where Detective Jack Bixbee tussled with a gang of Fennian’s in Hell’s Kitchen. You wouldn’t believe the letters we got after that one. Someone even sent us a dead rat.” She shuddered at the memory.

Dodge’s forehead creased. “I never get death threats.”

Hurley made a choking noise. Evidently he was feeling better as well.

“You know what I mean,” Dodge countered, his cheeks suddenly feeling hot with embarrassment. “But still, dynamite? They could just as easily have killed us all.”

“I don’t think so. If they’d wanted to do that, they would have used a lot more’n just one stick, and they’d’ve put it in a sack full of washers or nails. One stick in a big room like that? I’d say they just wanted to knock us all senseless…Scratch that, they probably wanted to knock me senseless.”

“You?” Nora retorted. “How could they have even known you were in that room?”

“No offense, miss, but I’m afraid I have to agree with Dodge. This was about grabbing Doc Newton, and they know that I’m watching out for him.”

Nora rolled her eyes. “Why on earth would they want him?”

“Because he just happens to be one of the smartest men in the country.” Dodge didn’t want to elaborate, but he knew that answer would only further stoke the woman’s curiosity. He quickly changed the subject. “Does anyone see them?”

Hurricane squeezed his eyes shut, and then opened them, straining to see into the distance. Under normal circumstances, Hurley had the eyes of an eagle, but Dodge knew how the explosion had affected him, and could only imagine what it had done to Hurley’s senses. The big man squinted, staring straight ahead, then abruptly looked skyward. “Well that’s not something you see every day.”

Dodge took his eyes off the road only long enough to glance up. In that brief instant he saw a pair of aircraft, moving in the same direction and just a little bit faster than the Speedster. The two flying machines were relatively low to the ground, only a little higher than most of the rooftops, and despite the fact that his gaze lingered on them for only a moment or two, he was able to make out several key details. The aircraft had long tapering fuselages with swallowtail rudder assemblies in the rear, just like most airplanes, but had no wings. Instead, there was a faintly transparent disk above the body, and when Dodge blinked, he saw that the disk was actually a spinning assembly of long fan-like blades.

“Why, it’s an autogyro!” Nora exclaimed. “It’s like an airplane, but instead of having wings, it has a giant propeller on top that can lift it almost straight up off the ground, so that you don’t need a runway for take-off and landing.”

Dodge rolled his eyes. He knew what an autogyro was, and was irked that the woman had assumed he would be ignorant, but he withheld the sarcastic reply that had welled up automatically from his bruised ego. “Think it’s a coincidence?”

Hurley shrugged. “The Padre would say, ‘There are no coincidences.’”

Nora glanced first at Hurricane and then at Dodge. “I’m sorry, are you actually suggesting that anarchists have autogyros? That’s absurd.”

“Who said anything about anarchists,” Hurricane answered, winking at Dodge. “Did you, Dodge? I sure didn’t”

Nora folded her arms and made a pouting face. “Hmmph.”

Before Dodge could even think of an answer, he realized that the autogyros had banked to the right and were moving east. “Decision time. Do we follow the gyros, or keep looking for that panel truck?”

Hurricane grimaced. “Well, we know where the gyros are. Can’t say the same for your tomato truck.”

That was good enough for Dodge. He accelerated ahead looking for the cross street that marked the new heading for the two aircraft. Although traffic was light, he veered and wove through the moving maze, occasionally cutting off other drivers and when necessary blowing through traffic signals with his horn blasting a warning to clear the way. A policeman, his traffic control whistle shrieking like a banshee, tried to wave them to a stop at one intersection, but Dodge dared not comply.

“There!” Hurley shouted, too late for Dodge to make the turn. “That was the one.”

Dodge twisted the wheel and feathered the brakes. The rear end of the Auburn slewed around in a half circle, leaving curving streaks of rubber on the macadam. He downshifted to second gear and let out the clutch, even as the car was still sliding, and charged back into the intersection, cutting a wide turn onto the cross street. Dodge had no idea where they were, but the two autogyros were plainly visible, flying directly above the roadway, perhaps three blocks further down.

Dodge kept the accelerator pedal pushed to the floor and watched as the speedometer needle swept past the ten mile an hour increments like the sweep second hand of a stopwatch.

“Tomato!” Hurricane exclaimed. “Maybe four blocks. They’re stopped at a signal.”

“Unbelievable,” Nora said, shaking her head.

Dodge wasn’t sure what exactly was proving to be such a challenge to her credulity — maybe she just couldn’t fathom Hurley’s astonishing eyesight — but just then, he didn’t much care. With one foot resting on the brake but never depressing it, he charged ahead, passing other cars like they were parked, and after a few seconds, the panel truck appeared before his eyes.

The signal changed and the tomato truck began moving forward with the rest of the cars, but then it abruptly charged ahead, and Dodge knew their prey had at last been alerted to the fact that they were being hunted. Since there was no longer any reason to mask their approach, Dodge laid on the horn and kept the pedal to the floor.

The cars between the Speedster and the panel truck seemed to quickly grasp that they were in the middle of a veritable dogfight, and one by one they slowed down and got out of the way. Dodge seized on this advantage, and in a few moments pulled to within about fifty feet of the more cumbersome delivery vehicle.

“How do we stop them?” he shouted to Hurricane.

“Get alongside them.” The big man said extended one long arm down into the gap behind the seat, and when he drew it back, in his fist was one of his legendary, custom-made .50 caliber semi-automatic pistols. “I’ll persuade them to pull over.”

Dodge nodded and angled the front end to the left side of the panel truck. But before he could close the remaining distance, the back door of the truck opened and he saw one of the men that had earlier attacked them, no longer masked, but smiling like he knew a secret that would ruin Dodge’s day.

As it turned out, he did.

Although they had been partially protected from the dynamite blast by Hurricane’s hasty barrier, Newcombe and Lafayette had been standing at the moment of detonation, and as such had been hit that much harder by the shockwave. Whereas the others had been left dazed, the scientist and the writer had been knocked unconscious, and remained that way as the two masked bombers had manhandled them down the ladder and into the back of the panel truck. So when he gradually floated back to the surface of awareness, Findlay Newcombe had no sense of the passage of time; in fact, even his memory of the bomb attack itself had been knocked out of his head. One moment he was visiting with Dodge and Hurricane — and who could forget the rather charming Nora Holloway? — and the next he was…

Where am I?

Newcombe jolted in place, as if waking from a dream of falling. He would have thrown his hands out to catch himself, but they didn’t respond. That was when he realized that his wrists were bound.

He struggled for a few moments, even as his eyes grew accustomed to the dim conditions. There was enough illumination — indirect light that seemed to be constantly moving and shifting — for him to make out the cramped dimensions of the enclosure in which he now found himself. That, coupled with the vibration and occasional shift from side to side, told him he was in a moving vehicle. He was also able to make out two men, squatting near his feet, at what he took to be the rear of the vehicle, quietly conversing. They both wore dark clothes, and had saturnine features and unkempt facial hair. One of them was smoking a foul cigar, and its smoke hung in great brown curls overhead,

“What the devil’s going on here?” This indignant eruption was practically in Newcombe’s ear — which he only now realized wasn’t working properly — and he started again. His foot struck the man with the cigar, but the only reaction from the man was a disdainful glance. The source of the shout, whom he now realized was Rodney Lafayette, was lying alongside him, similarly bound.

“Rodney!” Newcombe shouted. He felt awkward doing so; he wasn’t a loud person by nature, and his evident deafness didn’t make it any easier. It actually took several attempts to reach a level of volume sufficient to overwhelm the other man’s bluster. “Shut up!”

Lafayette did not shut up, but he did change the focus of his outrage. “How dare you take that supercilious tone with me? Have you any idea who I am?”

“Of course I do, you cretin. I called you by name, didn’t I? And in case you hadn’t noticed, we’re in a heap of trouble here, and you’re just making it worse with all your shouting. So…shut…up!”

Lafayette continued to writhe in righteous indignation, but Newcombe’s efforts earned a chuckle from one of the men seated at his feet. But a moment later, the man looked away, his attention fixed on something in the front of the vehicle. Someone from the front seat had spoken to him, and after exchanging a glance with his comrade, the man fired off an answer in a language Newcombe did not recognize. At least his ability to hear was returning.

“What was that?” Lafayette demanded. “What did he just say?”

“I don’t know,” the scientist answered patiently. “It sounded like Greek.”

“Well, it’s all Greek to me, too, but you don’t have to be obsequious.”

“What I meant was…” Newcombe sighed and rolled his eyes. “Never mind.”

The subject of the exchange in a language that was either Greek or something very similar, became evident a moment later as the man with the cigar cracked the rear door open a few inches, allowing daylight to stream inside. Newcombe lifted his head and caught a glimpse of the New York city streets flashing by…and then he saw something that made his heart soar. About fifty yards behind them, and closing fast, was a very familiar red sports car: Hurricane Hurley’s Auburn Speedster.

He was on the verge of whispering to Lafayette that they would soon be saved, when the man with the cigar did something that dashed his burgeoning hopes. The man delved into the box on which he had been sitting and produced what Newcombe initially took to be a long candlestick. He then puffed on his cigar until its tip glowed bright orange, and touched it to the wick.

Only it wasn’t a wick.

As the bearded man tossed the lit stick of dynamite toward the Speedster, Dodge did the only thing he could think of. He slammed on the brakes and lowered his head.

The Speedster’s tires shrieked across the pavement, and started veering out of control to the left. In that same instant, the dynamite hit the pavement, and even though there was still a bit of fuse left, it exploded.

The blast threw up a foul cloud of dust and smoke, and the shockwave slammed into the Auburn, buckling one of its side panels and peeling the paint. Nevertheless, Dodge’s instinctive reaction minimized the actual damage. In the fraction of a second between when Dodge applied the brakes and the dynamite was thrown, the truck traveled a hundred feet or more. Shop windows on either side of the thoroughfare were shattered and when the dust settled, there was a new pothole in the street, but the dynamite might simply have been an enormous firecracker for all the injury it caused.

Dodge restarted the stalled engine.

“You’re not serious,” Nora gasped. “We’ll be blown to smithereens.”

He didn’t answer, but started forward again. He wasn’t exactly sure how he would avoid subsequent explosive attacks, but now he was forewarned. Beside him, Hurley pushed Nora down into the footwell, and then extended his arm, sighting down the barrel of his pistol as the Speedster began once more closing in on their quarry. But then, inexplicably, he thumbed the safety down and lowered the weapon.

“Can’t risk shooting at them. I might hit the Doc, or worse, make ‘em crash, and with that load of dynamite they’re driving around, we can’t take that chance.”

Dodge nodded, chastened. He held back this time, keeping a healthy distance, while he wracked his brain to come up with a strategy to rescue his friend. For the moment, he could come up with nothing better than simply following the panel truck and hoping for his luck to change.

Suddenly, the back door of the delivery vehicle flew open again, and the bearded man threw out another stick of dynamite. He did not simply toss it on the pavement, but instead drew back and, to the best of his ability given the cramped space in which he sat, hurled it in a high arc, directly in the path of the sports car.

Dodge watched the sizzling end of the fuse as it tumbled end over end through the air, with the practiced eye of a home run slugger watching the pitch. He didn’t just see it, he saw where it would eventually end up, and this time his reaction wasn’t a reflex, but a perfect synchronization of eye, mind, body and machine. He punched the accelerator, steering sharply to the right, and the car swerved under and away from the dynamite. When the inevitable explosion came, it was at their back, lending its energy to the Speedster’s momentum.

Dodge immediately tapped the brakes, falling back to maintain a standoff distance. “How much more dynamite do you think he has?”

“Enough,” Hurricane answered. “You’ll know when he’s running out because he’ll get desperate.”

“People are going to get hurt if we keep this up.” Dodge chewed his lip thoughtfully. “We need to figure out where they’re going. And why they want the Doc.”

“Or Rodney!” Nora chirped from her place of concealment.

Hurricane ignored her. “They don’t want him dead; we know that much.”

“He’s a scientist. He knows about…” Dodge glanced at the huddled woman and chose his words carefully. “Important things.”

“But those…ah, things…don’t work anymore.”

“These anarchists, or whoever they are, might not know—”

“Look out!”

Ahead of them, the panel truck door came open again, and Dodge reacted even as Hurley shouted his warning, preparing himself physically and mentally for the next dynamite attack.

But nothing could prepare him for what happened next.

Newcombe gasped in alarm as the man with the cigar tossed the dynamite out, mostly out of fear for his friends’ safety. But when the dynamite exploded less than a second later, and the panel truck rang like a bell from the close proximity of the blast, he realized that the explosives were as much a threat to him as they were to Dodge.

Dynamite was really nothing more than a way of making nitroglycerine — an extremely delicate and very explosive liquid — safe to handle by binding it in a matrix of inert material, sawdust or diatomaceous earth, wrapped in paper. But if the dynamite wasn’t stored and maintained properly, the nitroglycerine could seep out of the matrix. When that happened, you didn’t need fuses or blasting caps to make the dynamite explode; simply dropping it on the ground might be enough to ruin your day. Evidently, this was true of the dynamite his kidnappers were using.

The two men exchanged angry words in their shared tongue, and the man with the cigar hung his head in embarrassment. Newcombe didn’t have to speak their language to decipher the gist of the conversation.

“Good heavens!” Lafayette exclaimed. “They’re using trinitrotoluene.”

Newcombe frowned. “No, I’m pretty certain it’s dynamite. Trinitrotoluene would be more stable—”

“What difference does it make, man? We’ll be blown to smithereens.”

Newcombe thought Lafayette seemed more upset about having been corrected, or perhaps about having failed to impress him, but he couldn’t argue with the man’s conclusion. Before he could respond, however, the man with the cigar delved into the box and brought forth another stick, which he promptly lit. This time he waited a few moments, letting the fuse burn down more than halfway, before opening the door wide, drawing back and heaving it with all his might.

He slammed the door well ahead of the blast, but the concussion nevertheless reverberated through the vehicle. The other man nodded approvingly and then the unseen driver made a comment, which prompted the man to begin preparing yet another stick of dynamite.

“Inspiration dawns!” Lafayette announced abruptly.

“What?”

Lafayette did not answer, but as soon as the smoking man opened the door in preparation to launch another bomb, the pulp writer drew his knees up, then kicked straight out. His feet slammed into the wooden box holding the dynamite. Like one billiard ball striking another, the box in turn struck the man with the cigar and knocked him right out of the moving truck.

The remaining captor dove forward to catch the box before it too slid out. He succeeded, barely, wrapping both arms around the crate as it teetered on the edge. Newcome sagged in relief, knowing that they had come within a whisker of being erased from existence.

And then Lafayette kicked again.

Dodge was ready for another stick of dynamite to come flying his way, but not one that was still in the hands of the bomber.

The man pitched forward, out of the back of the panel truck and slammed face down into the macadam, where he skidded and tumbled to a stop. Dodge angled the Speedster to go around him on the left, but before he could pass, the dazed bomber weakly propped himself up in order to fling one arm out. A hissing stick of dynamite arced through the air, directly in the Speedster’s path.

Dodge hauled the wheel in the opposite direction, but he was going too fast. The rear end swung around and the car went into an uncontrollable spin, sliding diagonally across the street, away from the dynamite but right into the man who had thrown it. The Speedster’s unique boat-shaped tail end clipped the bomber and sent him tumbling once more down the road toward the retreating delivery truck.

The gravitational forces caused by the spin pushed Dodge across the seat, crushing him into the immovable Hurley, and at almost the same instant, the explosive detonated in mid-air, hammering them with the shockwave. Dodge’s hands slipped from the steering wheel and his feet were pulled right off the control pedals as the vehicle turned two complete circles before slamming into a parked car.

Waves of vertigo and pain rolled over Dodge. Even though he was now motionless, the entire world seemed to be whirling around him like a tornado, and at the center of the gyre, a strange series of images appeared: A wooden box, poised on the edge of the panel truck… A man diving to prevent it from falling… Both suddenly pushed out of the truck. Then, Dodge’s gaze was inexplicably drawn to the bright red letters stenciled on the box as it dropped toward the pavement.

“Oh, no!”