Shiver

flutter of relief that she wasn’t going to have to run over him to escape did not mean that she really wouldn’t have run him down. It just meant that she was glad she hadn’t had to. She was just starting to put him out of her mind when a thump against the passenger-side door ripped her gaze from the now-clear path to the open gate in front of her and redirected it toward the sound.
    “Stop!” It was a roar. A battered face glared at her through the passenger-side window. With one eye swollen almost shut and bruises on the forehead and a cheekbone and a bloody, lumpen-looking nose, it was downright scary. It was also unhappily way too familiar. Scrabbling at the door handle—the door was locked, thank God!—then banging on the rolled-up passenger window with her gun, Quasimodo was hanging onto the too-damned-sturdy struts of the oversize side-view mirror for dear life.
    Oh, no.
    “Goddamnit, let me in!”
    “In your dreams!” Keeping one wary eye on him, she jerked the steering wheel back and forth in a desperate effort to dislodge him. It didn’t work: at the end of every maneuver, he was still there. Sending sprays of gravel everywhere, zigzagging wildly, Big Red kept on barreling toward the street. Only one side of the big double gates was open, which meant the space the truck momentarily would be shooting through was narrow. Narrow enough to knock him off?
    Please, God.
    “Lean over and open the door!” He banged on the window with her gun again. He banged so hard she was afraid he might break it. Then she remembered that the window had been broken the previous year by an irate debtor whose car was in the process of being towed away, and replaced by heavy safety glass. Which, she had been assured at the time by the guy installing it, was practically unbreakable.
    “No! Get off my truck!” She jerked the wheel sharply to the left, then to the right. Yelling curses, swinging precariously back and forth, he nevertheless managed to hang on. Hoping to attract attention—attract help —she hit the horn. The resultant air-horn-quality blast split the night. She winced. So did he.
    “Are you brain-dead? Quit blowing the fucking horn!” he roared, swinging toward the door again and grabbing for the handle.
    “Get off my truck!”
    “Open the damned door!”
    “No way in hell! Get off!”
    The only way she was knocking him off for sure was if she took out the side mirror, too, was Sam’s lightning conclusion as she glanced from him to the gate the truck was quickly closing in on. Even then it wasn’t a done deal unless she wanted to risk trying to scrape up the entire side of the truck, which she hesitated to do. Number one, she needed her truck to make a living, and didn’t have the money to fix any damage that might result. Number two, if she miscalculated, she could end up having a wreck, getting the truck hung up on the gate, and thwarting her own escape. Mashing the horn again—“For fuck’s sake, stop doingthat!” he screamed through the window at her—she jerked the wheel back and forth in quick succession, fighting to make him lose his grip. It didn’t work. He didn’t even flap around as much. From his sudden relative stability she surmised that he had found a way to wedge his feet more securely onto the running board, where they were obviously perched. His expression, she thought as she cast another poisonous glance at him, had turned purposeful. She frowned. Just as it had been, one arm was hooked around the mirror strut while the other hand—Sam’s heart leaped as she watched it jerk upward, watched him aim the gun inside the cab. Sweet merciful God, was he going to shoot her?
    Her blood ran cold.
    “No!” she screamed, cringing even as she whipped the wheel hard to the left and then to the right. The tires spun. Gravel flew everywhere. Her cell phone skittered uselessly over the hard plastic mat lining the foot well, tantalizingly close but impossible to reach. Quasimodo teetered backward with the motion of the truck, then swung forward again, then reaimed the gun . . .
    When it blasted, blowing out the passenger window and showering the seat and rear windshield and tiny backseat of the truck with BB-size chunks of safety glass, Sam shrieked and ducked and almost drove into one of the mountains of scrap. Only at the last possible minute did she see where the truck was headed and correct course with another sharp jerk of the wheel.
    “Jesus!” he yelled, windmilling