19

AS ELLIOT DROVE AWAY FROM THE BURNING house, his instinctual sense of danger was as sensitive as it had been in his military days. He was on the thin line that separated animal alertness from nervous frenzy.

He glanced at the rearview mirror and saw a black van pull away from the curb, half a block behind them.

“We’re being followed,” he said.

Tina had been looking back at her house. Now she turned all the way around and stared through the rear window of the sports car. “I’ll bet the bastard who rigged my furnace is in that truck.”

“Probably.”

“If I could get my hands on the son of a bitch, I’d gouge his eyes out.”

Her fury surprised and pleased Elliot. Stupefied by the unexpected violence, by the loss of her house, and by her close brush with death, she had seemed to be in a trance; now she had snapped out of it. He was encouraged by her resilience.

“Put on your seat belt,” he said. “We’ll be moving fast and loose.” She faced front and buckled up. “Are you going to try to lose them?” “I’m not just going to try.”

In this residential neighborhood the speed limit was twenty-five miles an hour. Elliot tramped on the accelerator, and the low, sleek, two-seat Mercedes jumped forward.

Behind them the van dwindled rapidly, until it was a block and a half away. Then it stopped dwindling as it also accelerated.

“He can’t catch up with us,” Elliot said. “The best he can hope to do is avoid losing more ground.”

Along the street, people came out of their houses, seeking the source of the explosion. Their heads turned as the Mercedes rocketed past.

When Elliot rounded the corner two blocks later, he braked from sixty miles an hour to make the turn. The tires squealed, and the car slid sideways, but the superb suspension and responsive steering held the Mercedes firmly on four wheels all the way through the arc.

“You don’t think they’ll actually start shooting at us?” Tina asked.

“Hell if I know. They wanted it to appear as if you’d died in an accidental gas explosion. And I think they had a fake suicide planned for me. But now that they know we’re on to them, they might panic, might do anything. I don’t know. The only thing I do know is they can’t let us just walk away.”

“But who—”

“I’ll tell you what I know, but later.” “What do they have to do with Danny?” “Later,” he said impatiently.

“But it’s all so crazy.” “You’re telling me?”

He wheeled around another corner, and then another, trying to disappear from the men in the van long enough to leave them with so many choices of streets to follow that they would have to give up the chase in confusion. Too late, he saw the sign at the fourth intersection—NOT A THROUGH STREET—but they were already around the corner

and headed down the narrow dead end, with nothing but a row of ten modest stucco houses on each side.

“Damn!”

“Better back out,” she said. “And run right into them.” “You’ve got the gun.”

“There’s probably more than one of them, and they’ll be armed.”

At the fifth house on the left, the garage door was open, and there wasn’t a car inside. “We’ve got to get off the street and out of sight,” Elliot said.

He drove into the open garage as boldly as if it were his own. He switched off the engine, scrambled out of the car, and ran to the big door. It wouldn’t come down. He struggled with it for a moment, and then he realized that it was equipped with an automatic system. Behind him, Tina said, “Stand back.”

She had gotten out of the car and had located the control button on the garage wall. He glanced outside, up the street. He couldn’t see the van.

The door rumbled down, concealing them from anyone who might drive past. Elliot went to her. “That was close.”

She took his hand in hers, squeezed it. Her hand was cold, but her grip was firm. “So who the hell are they?” she asked,

“I saw Harold Kennebeck, the judge I mentioned. He—”

The door that connected the garage to the house opened without warning, but with a sharp, dry squeak of unoiled hinges.

An imposing, barrel-chested man in rumpled chinos and a white T-shirt snapped on the garage light and peered curiously at them. He had meaty arms; the circumference of one of them almost equaled the circumference of Elliot’s thigh. And there wasn’t a shirt made that could be buttoned easily around his thick, muscular neck. He appeared formidable, even with his beer belly, which bulged over the waistband of his trousers.

First Vince and now this specimen. It was the Day of the Giants.

“Who’re you?” the pituitary-challenged behemoth asked in a soft, gentle voice that didn’t equate with his appearance.

Elliot had the awful feeling that this guy would reach for the button Tina had pushed less than a minute ago, and that the garage door would lift just as the black van was rolling slowly by in the street.

Stalling for time, he said, “Oh, hi. My name’s Elliot, and this is Tina.” “Tom,” the big man said. “Tom Polumby.”

Tom Polumby didn’t appear to be worried by their presence in his garage; he seemed merely perplexed. A man of his size probably wasn’t frightened any more easily than Godzilla confronted by the pathetic bazooka-wielding soldiers surrounding doomed Tokyo.

“Nice car,” Tom said with an unmistakable trace of reverence in his voice. He gazed covetously at the S600.

Elliot almost laughed. Nice car! They pulled into this guy’s garage, parked, closed the door bold as you please, and all he had to say was Nice car!

“Very nice little number,” Tom said, nodding, licking his lips as he studied the Mercedes.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93