Black wind

traffic on the road, the machine gun firing from behind continued. The assassins had crossed the line and were bent on killing Dirk and Sarah regardless of who got in their way. Dirk gave Sarah a quick glance and forced a grin. Her soft eyes showed a mixture of both fear and trust. Trust that he would somehow find a way to save them. He gripped the steering wheel tightly, more determined than ever to shield her from harm.
    But there were only seconds to act. The old Chrysler, which now resembled the remains of a B-2 bomber target, was clearly on its last legs. Smoke billowed from under the hood, accompanied by a throbbing melody of knocks and groans from the nearly spent motor. Sparks flew from beneath the frame, where a broken exhaust pipe scraped the pavement with a torturous grind. Even the tires had generated flat spots from the hard braking and thumped out of round. The temperature gauge, Dirk noted, had been firmly pegged in the red for several minutes now.
    Above the roar, he could hear the blast of a ferry horn just ahead as they wound closer to the water. From behind, the squeal of the Cadillac’s tires and the peppering sound of machine-gun fire rattled in his ears. The big Chrysler suddenly lurched as the hemi engine began to mortally overheat. Dirk’s eyes raced over the landscape, searching for a sheriff’s car, a bank that might employ an armed guard, any sort of help he might solicit as a last means of defense. But all he saw were quaint little bayside homes with small flower gardens.
    Then, looking down the hill toward the approaching ferry terminal)
    he had a thought. Highly improbable, he figured, but at this point they had nothing to lose.
    Sarah looked up and noticed a look of confident resolve suddenly appear on his face.
    “What is it, Dirk?” she yelled above the din.
    “Sarah, my dear,” he replied assuredly, “I think our ship has come in.”
    Larry Hatala watched as the final car in line, a pea green 1968 Volkswagen microbus, chugged up the ramp and onto the ferry. A thirty-year veteran of the Washington State Department of Transportation, the grizzled Vashon Island terminal attendant shook his head and smiled at the driver of the old hippie car, a bearded man in bandana and granny glasses. Once the VW was safely aboard the ferry, Hatala lowered a wooden orange-and-white signal arm that halted any pending traffic at the end of the pier. His work complete until the next boat arrived in thirty minutes, Hatala removed a weathered baseball cap and wiped his forehead with a sleeve, then threw a cheerful wave of the cap to a fellow employee on the departing ferry. A young man in a gray jumpsuit finished yanking a guardrail across the stern of the ferry, then returned Hatala’s wave with a mock military salute. As the pilot let loose a deep blast from the air horn, Hatala untied a safety docking line and tossed the loose end across to the ferry, where his coworker neatly coiled it for the next stop.
    The blast from the ferry horn had barely ceased echoing across the peer when Hatala’s ears detected an unusual sound. It was the wail of tires screeching violently on asphalt. Peering up the road, he could detect only a periodic flash through the trees of two cars roaring down The hill. The whine of revving engines and squealing tires grew closer, punctuated by a popping sound Hatala recognized from his Navy days as gunfire. Finally, the cars broke free of the trees as they neared the terminal, and Hatala stared in astonishment.
    The big green Chrysler looked like a galloping dragon, complete with fire-breathing smoke and steam belching out of its grille. A black-haired man, hunched low in the seat, deftly kept the smoking behemoth on the road at speeds clearly too high for its means. Thirty feet behind, a sleek black Cadillac sedan followed in hot pursuit, a young Asian man dangling out the passenger window wildly firing an automatic weapon that did more damage to the trees bordering the road than to his intended target. To Hatala’s complete horror, the green convertible spun into the ferry landing entrance and headed onto the pier.
    By all rights, the old Chrysler should have up and died long before. A withering rain of fire had plastered the car in lead, cutting through wires, hoses, and belts, in addition to pasting the body and interior with myriad holes. Burning oil mixed with radiator fluid spewed from the red-hot motor that was nearly drained of fluids. But with an apparent heart