Shadowfires

occupied with
dreams of fire hydrants and well-fitted false teeth, but here they
were.
    “Benny!” Rachael shouted.
    “I see, I see!”
    He had no hope of stopping in time, so he not only jumped on the
brakes but turned across Palm Canyon, a combination of forces that
sent the Mercedes into a full spin combined with a slide, so they
went around a full hundred and eighty degrees and wound up against
the far curb. By the time he peeled rubber, roared back across the
street, and was headed north again, the old man and the cocker had
finally tottered for the safety of the sidewalk-and the police
cruiser was no more than ten yards behind him.
    In the mirror, he could see that the Caddy had also turned the
corner and was still giving chase, undeterred by the presence of the
police. Crazily the Caddy pulled out around the black-and-white,
trying to pass it.
    “They're lunatics,” Ben said.
    “Worse,” Rachael said. “Far worse.”
    In the passenger seat, Sarah Kiel was making urgent noises, but
she did not appear to be frightened by the current danger. Instead,
it seemed as if the violence of the chase had stirred the sediment of
memory, recalling for her the other-and worse-violence that she had
endured earlier in the night.
    Picking up speed as he headed north on Palm Canyon, Ben glanced
again at the mirror and saw that the Cadillac had pulled alongside
the police cruiser. They appeared to be drag racing back there, just
a couple of carloads of guys out for some fun. It was… well, it was
downright silly was what it was. Then suddenly it
wasn't silly at all because the intentions of the men in the Caddy became horribly clear with the repeated winking of muzzle flashes and the tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat of automatic weapons fire. They had opened up on the cops with a submachine gun, as if this weren't
Palm Springs but Chicago in the Roaring Twenties.
    “They shot the cops!” he said, as astonished as he had ever been
in his life.
    The black-and-white went out of control, jumped the curb, crossed
the sidewalk, and rammed through the plate-glass window of an elegant
boutique, but still a guy in the back seat of the Cadillac continued
to lean out the window, spraying bullets back at the cruiser until it
was out of range.
    In the seat beside Ben, Sarah said, “Uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh,” and
she twitched and spasmed as if someone were raining blows on her. She
seemed to be reliving the beating she had taken, oblivious of the
immediate danger.
    “Benny, you're slowing down,” Rachael said urgently.
    Overcome by shock, he had relaxed his foot on the accelerator.
    The Cadillac was closing on them as hungrily as any shark had ever
closed on any swimmer.
    Ben tried to press the gas pedal through the floorboards, and the
Mercedes reacted as if it were a cat that had just been kicked in the
butt. They exploded up Palm Canyon Drive, which was relatively
straight for a long way, so he could even put some distance between
them and the Cadillac before he made any turns. And he did make
turns, one after the other, off into the west side of town now, up
into the hills, back down, working steadily south, through older
residential streets where trees arched overhead to form a tunnel,
then through newer neighborhoods where the trees were small and the
shrubbery too sparse to conceal the reality of the desert on which
the town had been built. With every corner he rounded, he widened the
gap between them and the killers in the Cadillac.
    Stunned, Ben said, “They wasted two cops just because the poor
bastards got in the way.”
    “They want us real bad,” Rachael said. “That's what I've tried to
tell you. They want us so very bad.”
    The Caddy was two blocks behind now, and within five or six more
turns, Ben would lose them because they
wouldn't have him in sight and wouldn't know which way he had
gone.
    Hearing a tremor in his voice that surprised him, a quavering note
that he didn't like, he said, “But, damn it, they never really had much of a chance of catching us. Not with us in this little beauty and them in a lumbering Caddy. They had to see that. They had to. One chance in a hundred. At best. One chance in a hundred, but they still wasted the cops.”
    He half wheeled and half slid around another turn, onto a new
street.
    “Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod,” Sarah said softly, frantically,
drawing down in the seat as far as the safety harness would allow,
crossing her arms over her breasts as she had