Shadowfires

or risk plowing broadside into a
rare specimen of crosstown traffic. Fortunately, the Mercedes
cornered about a thousand times better than the Cadillac, so he didn't have to slow down nearly as much as his pursuers, and every time he switched streets he gained a few yards that the Caddy could not entirely regain on the next stretch of straightaway. By the time he had zigzagged to within a block of Palm Canyon Drive, the main drag, the Caddy was more than a block and a half behind and losing ground, and he was finally confident that he would shake the bastards, whoever they were-
    -and that was when he saw the police car.
    It was parked at the front of a line of curbed cars, at the corner
of Palm Canyon, a block away, and the cop must have seen him coming
in the rearview mirror, coming like a bat out of hell, because the
flashing red and blue beacons on the roof of the cruiser came on,
bright and startling, ahead on the right.
    “Hallelujah!” Ben said.
    “No,” Rachael said from her awkward seat in the open storage space
behind him, shouting though her mouth was nearly at his ear. “No, you
can't go to the cops! We're dead if you go to the cops.”
    Nevertheless, as he rocketed toward the cruiser, Ben started to
brake because, damn it, she'd never told him why they couldn't
rely on the police for protection, and he was not a man who believed
in taking the law into his own hands, and surely the guys in the
Cadillac would back off fast if the cops came into it.
    But Rachael shouted, “No! Benny, for
Christ's sake, trust me, why don't you?
We're dead if you stop. They'll blow our brains out, sure as
hell.”
    Being accused of not trusting her-that hurt, stung. He trusted
her, by God, trusted her implicitly because he loved her. He
didn't understand her worth shit, not tonight he didn't, but
he did trust her, and it was like a knife twisting in his heart to
hear that note of disappointment and accusation in her voice. He took
his foot off the brake and put it back on the accelerator, swept
right past the black-and-white so fast that the light from its
swiveling emergency beacons flashed through the Mercedes only once
and then were behind. When he'd glanced over, he'd seen two uniformed
officers looking astonished. He figured
they'd wait for the Caddy and then give chase to both cars, which would be fine, just fine, because the guys in the Caddy couldn't
catch up with him and blow his brains out if they had the police on
their tail.
    But to
Ben's surprise and dismay, the cops pulled out right after him, siren screaming. Maybe they had been so shocked by the sight of the Mercedes coming at them like a jet that they hadn't
noticed the Cadillac farther back. Or maybe
they'd seen the Caddy but had been so startled by the Mercedes that they hadn't
realized the second car was approaching at almost the same high
speed. Whatever their reasoning, they shot away from the curb and
fell in behind him as he hung a right onto Palm Canyon Drive.
    Ben made that turn with the reckless aplomb of a stunt driver who
knows that his roll bars and special stabilizers and heavy duty
hydraulic shock absorbers and other sophisticated equipment remove
most of the danger from such risky maneuvers-except he
didn't have roll bars and special stabilizers. He realized he'd
miscalculated and was about to turn Rachael and Sarah and himself
into canned meat, three lumps of imitation Spam encased in expensive
German steel, Jesus, and the car tilted onto two tires, he smelled
smoking rubber, it seemed an hour they teetered on edge, but by the
grace of God and the brilliance of the Benz designers they came down
again onto all fours with a jolt and crash that, by virtue of another
miracle, did not blow out any tires, though Rachael hit her head on
the ceiling and let out her breath in a whoosh that he felt on the
back of his neck.
    He saw the old man in the yellow Banlon shirt and the cocker
spaniel even before the car stopped bouncing on its springs. They had
been crossing the street in the middle of the block when he had come
around the corner like a fugitive from a demolition derby. He was
bearing down on them at a frightening speed, and they were frozen in
surprise and fear, both dog and man, heads up, eyes wide. The guy
looked ninety, and the dog seemed decrepit, too, so it
didn't make sense for them to be out on the street at nearly two o'clock
in the morning. They ought to have been home in bed,