Chapter 11: Another Fine Day

“Are we taking Eagle Pass?” Delaney gave an expectant and somewhat vicious smile. She loved the hairpin turns and was looking forward to the day I’d let her take Sally down the twisting unimproved rock road with its sheer drops and complete lack of guardrails.

“Why not?” I pushed Sally harder. We were on the back roads, and I knew there were never any cops, and damn little traffic.

Delaney grinned.

She was almost good enough. I worried more about her willingness to take chances than her actual driving skill. Delaney drove better than most of the pros I’d seen; she had amazing reflexes, and a natural rapport with the machines. Maybe because of that, she was always willing to push them, and the odds, just a little bit more. And sometimes that just isn’t a good plan. Gravity is a cold and unforgiving bitch, and until I was convinced Delaney had that in the front of her head where it belonged, she wasn’t going to fly Eagle Pass.

She wasn’t pushing it though, some part of her at least seemed to sense that she wasn’t quite ready. Besides, she was in a pretty good mood.

The Learning Center had a way of doing that to her. It had taken a long time, but she had really warmed to the staff, who managed to be both helpful, and probably more importantly, not condescending. They’d been really impressed with her bloody little diorama, which had really thrilled her.

Or maybe it was that cheap pizza and the ice cream she got to eat for lunch.

Probably the pizza.

Something in the rear-view mirror caught my attention. The something was moving up, and moving up fast.

I studied the rapidly growing red dot for a moment, then glanced at the speedometer. Over 90 miles per hour, and the red car was gaining on us like we were parked.

“We have a problem.”

Delaney shifted her eyes to look into her mirror instantly. “Holy shit. How fast are they going?”

“Way faster than we can.”

I hit the first turn to the pass, vaguely hoping they’d go on by.

They didn’t; I caught the predatory outline of a red late-model widebody Charger as it turned to follow us.

Delaney’s voice was cold and measured as she studied the mirrors. “All windows just went down. I’m pretty sure I can see rifle barrels out of both rear windows.”

Her eyesight was better than mine, and she didn’t have to split her attention to keep us on the road.

I glanced into the mirror for a moment. “Damnit. Air scoop is wider than standard. It’s a Hellcat engine.”

Delaney made a sour face. “Shit. I was hoping I was wrong about that.”

“Yeah.” Even with the Coyote 5.0 engine I’d put in her, Sally was way out of her league. I started to push her through the turns, and the Charger followed smoothly.

Two faint shots sounded from the Charger; not hits, but I had a feeling they were way too damn close given the speed and the turns.

There was no way Sally could outrun the Charger. That Hellcat engine was insanely powerful, and the fucking driver clearly had his head in the game. He was obviously a pro. I was the better driver, and with all her suspension upgrades, Sally was flat-out better on the curves, so I was gaining on the turns. I knew the road better too, but I was losing too much ground every goddamn time we hit a straightaway.

Worse yet, hitting a moving car from a moving car is damn hard, but the gunman hanging out the window knew what the hell he was doing. Sooner or later, he would figure out that I had run-flat tires on Sally and switch to riddling us instead. Delaney sat in near-stony silence, looking at her mirrors to track where they were.

“We can’t lose them, can we?”

“Not a fucking chance.”

We were just about out of the turns, and then we’d be running the long gravel straightaway that led to the narrow bridge over Eagle River valley. I checked the 1911 under the dash, thumbing the safety off. It was a slim chance, but if I let them disable the car, we’d have no chance at all. Four guys, apparently pros, at least two that had long guns against a single .45 and whatever rocks Delaney could scoop up wasn’t likely to be even remotely survivable on our end.

Delaney saw me ready the .45 and narrowed her eyes. “You’re about to do something crazy, aren’t you?”

“Oh yeah.” I nodded and tried to push ahead further as we hit the last series of hairpin turns, dropping down to the valley. I needed some space to do this, and I had to get it in the turns where I still had the advantage. “Hang on, sugar. This is going to be really stupid.”

I hit the flats with Sally floored, but I dumped speed and downshifted as we closed with the narrow bridge, then smashed the clutch and yanked the handbrake. I gave the wheel a twitch to break traction with the road, then pulled hard left. Sally spun until she was ass-end toward the bridge. I could hear the blast of the Hellcat engine as the Charger howled out of the turns off the mountain. Just as I dropped the handbrake and jammed Sally into reverse. Delaney snarled, “Fuck!” and laid her seat all the way back. She was making herself less of a target for the gunman in the rapidly approaching monster. I almost smiled at that. We were probably both about to get killed, but damn if I wasn’t proud as hell of her for staying frosty.

I needed more fucking hands. I snatched up the 1911 and switched it to my left hand, juggling the steering wheel.

Off-hand shooting sucks, but it was better than nothing. I levelled the gun out the window and placed the shots as accurately as I could. The gunman pulled himself tight against the car when he saw what I was doing, but he was still holding it together and began to adjust his aim. A round snapped through the middle of our windshield.

I pushed the gas to the floor, accelerating as fast as possible in reverse to lessen the impact of the crash when they caught up. He’d put on too much speed, and wouldn’t be able to stop in time. If they rammed us, it’d probably disable both cars and maybe, just maybe, the wrecks would block the bridge and I could hold them long enough for Delaney to get into the tree line on the other side of the river. It sucked, but...

Delaney suddenly sat up, twisting the release on her harness and dragging something across her lap. I didn’t have a hand free to push her back down, and for a bizarre moment, I thought she was trying to climb out the window. A fraction of a second later, she was kneeling on the seat and leaning out the window, slamming an AUG down on top of the mirror and bracing the barrel grip against the mirror to stabilize the gun. The AUG’s insanely loud chatter overwhelmed the roar of both engines for a second. The first two armor-piercing rounds hit a little low, into the engine block, but as the Charger closed to within less than a half dozen yards, the rest of the magazine seemed to go right through the lower half of the windshield, mostly through the driver’s side.

I’m sure there were a few misses in the storm of armor-piecing rounds. There had to have been. But the driver must have been hit more than a few times, and probably everyone in the car had; the Charger veered out of control, jumped off the road, shot past us and flew almost gracefully off the edge of the cliff. It rather ungracefully slammed into the rock on the other side before dropping the seventy-five feet down into the deep river.

I let Sally slow to a stop as we reached the other end of the bridge.

Delaney melted back into her seat; the empty AUG pointing straight up. She stared blankly ahead, fighting to catch her breath. “Fu ... fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke ... right?” There was just a little bit of kid in her voice, a pleading, almost desperate sound.

I put my arm over her shoulders as best I could with the console between us. “Fuck ‘em.”