Sinister Heights (14 page)

As I rumbled the engine to life, Matthew asked his mother, “Are they married?”

“I don't think so, honey. They just like to fight.”

We headed up I-75. Matthew approved of the acceleration; he made a noise of pure joy as I slid into the pocket between a tanker and an RV hauling an inboard on a trailer, then swung out to pass the RV. I figured he'd been conceived in Detroit. Iris found a retro country station Constance liked on the radio, and we listened to Jerry Reid for four miles.

Traffic was light. The evening rush had been over for an hour, it was the middle of the week, and with the Tigers in the cellar nobody was in a hurry to get to the ballpark, especially the new one. I let the speed freaks take out their payment frustrations on the fast lane and tooled along at a safe ten miles over the limit.

Approaching Downriver a pickup got on my tail and stuck there like a decal. Its square headlamps were set just high enough to blind me bouncing off the rearview mirror. I flipped it to night-side and slowed down to let the truck pass. It crept a little closer, then slowed too.

I turned off the radio. Iris picked up on it. “What we got?”

“Could be nothing. They give out driver's licenses to the first hundred callers.” I fed the 455 some gas. The pickup fell behind a length, then closed the gap. I could hear its engine winding up. He'd had some work done on it after it left the factory.

“It's David!” Constance's voice was almost a shriek.

The truck was pale in the reflection from my taillights, with rounded retro fenders, riding high on big tires. It could have been a white Ram. I'd seen one parked in Glendowning's garage.

Something bit into my right thigh just behind the knee; Iris's fingernails.

“Cheer up.” I pushed down the pedal.

All four barrels dumped open and the big block pounced ahead. After a microsecond the rest of the car caught up, a stretching action, like the coaches falling in behind a locomotive. The bubbling acceleration vibrated in the soles of my feet. The truck slipped back. Then it began to come on all over again.

I nearly climbed up the trunk of a Ford Fiesta with dirty taillights, invisible until my headlamps threw its shadow forty feet ahead. Iris's nails drew blood, but I cranked the wheel and skinned past it in the passing lane, my chrome literally tickling its left rear fender. This brought me bumper-to-bumper with a U-Haul van, but instead of braking I cranked right and cut in front of the Ford, the Cutlass rocking on its suspension as I straightened out. The complaining bleat of the Ford's horn reached me with the remote impersonality of a gong struck underwater; there was already a quarter-mile separating us. I glanced at the speedometer, just for entertainment. We were coming up on a hundred—whoops, nope, we were past it.

In the mirror, square headlamps separated themselves from those of the U-Haul, like a cell dividing, and slid in front of the little Ford. For most of a mile, the Ram maintained the distance between us, neither closing nor falling back. Then it began to creep closer. From that point on the gap narrowed steadily. I looked at the speedometer again, on the hunch I'd blown the radiator hose or thrown a rod and was losing speed, but the needle was edging past 102. Glendowning had to have eliminated the anti-pollution equipment, added ballast to the pickup's box, struck a deal with Satan for immunity to the laws of physics. It had been thoughtful of whoever had customized the truck to remember to leave room for a driver in that rolling power plant.

“Amos,” Iris said. It sounded like the opening of a prayer.

“There's a state police post in Trenton. Highway eighty-five. Keep an eye out for the sign. I don't know the exit number.” I raised my voice for Constance. “Hang on tight to Matthew. I don't trust that belt.”

“Maybe we should pull over.” Her voice was thin and tight.

“No.” Iris.

“We're just making him madder.”

Iris twisted in her seat. “Listen. That's not David. It's a two-ton bullet, and it's already been fired. You don't stop to talk things over with a bullet. Do what the man says and we'll be out of this in a minute.”

A sign flashed in my headlamps: TRENTON ONE MILE EXIT 28. The diamond-shaped state highway emblem showed and vanished. I eased up on the accelerator. I remembered it was a short exit ramp.

Glendowning read my mind. The black pavement between us shrank. The front of the heavy truck, with its curving lines and open grille, looked medieval, like a battering-piece with a crude face carved into it.

“Don't slow down! Speed up!” Iris was shouting.

“I won't make the exit.”

“Screw the exit! Pour it on!”

I pushed the pedal the rest of the way. The needle climbed past 105, 108, 110. I'd never had it up that high. A thirty-year-old engine was prone to overheating at unaccustomed tachs.

In the back seat, Constance was making soothing shooshing noises, as much for herself as for Matthew. Hell, for me, too; I nearly lost it when a billowing plastic bag bounded across the lane and I thought it was a small deer. My tires screeched on the swerve and I only kept the rear end from fishtailing by main might on the steering wheel.

112, 115, 118, 120. And the Ram was gaining. The curly-horned emblem on the front of the hood was square in the middle of the rearview mirror.

“
Amos!
”

The second syllable was a scream. Iris's nails tore through the fabric covering my thigh. The benign front end of a Geo Prizm came up level with the windshield, with another stacked atop it. I hadn't seen the Christmas-tree lights of the haulaway trailer until I was almost aboard it.

I couldn't see if there was anything in the left lane. I tore the wheel right. I think my left front fender clipped one of the trailer's taillights, perched on a stalk on the corner of its bumper. Iris screamed again. Constance and Matthew screamed too. I joined them. I read the sign in a flash just before the post buckled the hood of the Cutlass and fissured the windshield:

TRENTON EXIT

MICHIGAN STATE POLICE POST 51

I didn't have time to appreciate the irony. Wrestling with a locked wheel, I heard gravel crunching, then grass swishing. Then the world stopped with a crush and blackness fell across me like a telephone pole.

CHAPTER
FIFTEEN

During the next few minutes—or hours, or days—my car entertained more visitors than it had anytime since it was in the showroom. David Glendowning showed up and poked around; so did Rayellen Stutch and Connor Thorpe and Ralph Nader, clucking about how unsafe my machine was. Some of the drop-ins had animals' heads on human bodies, and there was an assortment of griffins, sphinxes, and pesky fairies flitting about to vary the mix, along with the Taco Bell Chihuahua and Mr. Auerbach, my high school shop teacher, smelling as always of linseed oil and peppermint Schnapps.

“Walker,” he said, “you're never going to make a first-class mechanic as long as you keep trying to put on a timing belt any old way. You want to be a grease monkey your whole life?”

Of course, I might have dreamt some of it.

The last time I woke up I got sore. Alternating strobes of red and blue light refracted through the fissures in the windshield, and a collision of distorted voices racketing out of someone's two-way radio stuck an icepick through my ear and stirred it around inside my skull.

I said, “I can't hear you with the bandsaw going, Mr. Auerbach. Anyway, you're dead. You passed out smoking a cigarette in 1969 and they buried you in a closed coffin.”

“Don't move, fella. Wait for EMS. We don't know what's busted inside.”

This wasn't Auerbach's voice; the German accent was missing, as well as the Schnapps. I blinked at a deep black face with regular features and kind tired eyes, movie-star handsome, under a flat felt brim and a shield bearing the Michigan State seal. He was leaning through the open door on the driver's side with his flashlight beam slanting away from my eyes.

I remembered the exit sign. The icepick in my skull poked out through the back of my neck when I turned my head. Iris was sitting calmly in the passenger's seat, still strapped in, a reassuring sight. A shaft of white, thrown by a search beam, lay across her left shoulder. Only it wasn't made entirely of light. The light shone flatly off a slab of dull steel with a pitted surface. The end of a guardrail had punched through the windshield and across the top of the seat, impaling the car like a giant harpoon. And I knew then why I hadn't noticed the pattern on Iris's shirt when she'd put it on for the trip. It looked purple when the blue light took its turn.

I lurched in my seat. My belt was still fastened, and when it resisted, the icepick stabbed my neck again and I fell back with blackness filling my head.

“Easy, I said. We don't want no more fatalities on this run.”

The state cop kept his hand on me until I settled down, then withdrew his flash. Heavy feet slithered through tall grass going away. I let a minute go by—it might have been longer, I might have blacked out again—then groped for the release button on the belt. I made a careful inspection: arms, legs, ribs, collarbone, head. I had a knot on my forehead. I felt along the rim of the steering wheel and found the place where I'd caved it in. I'd been right not to trust the tension in my old seatbelts. Little cartoon lightning bolts shot out of my neck when I turned my head or tipped it back. Common whiplash. There was a whole chapter about it in Sam Spade's manual of home remedies for private eyes, right after the one on concussions.

There was nothing in it about decapitation.

I touched the back of Iris's hand where it rested between the seats. It felt cold. That was just shock, my shock. It takes hours for the body heat to drain, and I was pretty sure it hadn't been hours. I could still feel the pressure of her nails on my thigh. I squeezed the hand and withdrew mine. I had a hole through me as big as the Windsor Tunnel.

She'd accused me of being a Republican. Matthew had asked his mother if we were married.

Matthew.

Constance.

Pieces of memory were coming back, like lights clicking on in separate rooms. I'd had other passengers.

I couldn't twist my head around without pain, and behind it the lights clicking off; every time I lost consciousness, someone died. Moving slowly—I felt as if I'd gone over the falls in a barrel full of rocks—I drew up one leg, then the other, grasped the back of my seat, and pulled myself up onto my knees to peer into the back. Constance lay sprawled across the seat, her body covering Matthew's booster. I reached out and touched her arm. It felt warm through the open weave of her thin sweater. I grasped her upper arm and shook her gently. A noise came from her throat. She stirred and rolled half over. A claw-mark pattern of blood had dried down the right side of her face from a gash in the temple. The end of the guardrail that had killed Iris had grazed her.

The booster seat was empty. The two ends of the seatbelt lay loose inside. They weren't torn. The buckle had come open, or someone had opened it. I looked at the floor between the seats. It was in deep shadow. I groped through the darkness to the carpet. I didn't want to search too thoroughly. The guardrail had not gone through the back window. That meant the rest of Iris was still in the car.

I forced myself. On the floor my hand brushed something that was not Matthew. Blackness welled up. I hit the door handle hard and threw myself out.

My ankle turned. Pain swept up me like a sheet of flame. I raised the leg, crane fashion, and grasping the roof of the car worked my way toward the trunk. I was searching the ground to see if the boy had fallen out.

A hand grasped my shoulder. “I told you don't move. I seen folks walk around after a crash and laying dead an hour later.”

It was the state cop. “There's a child,” I said. “That's his mother in the back seat.”

“She's unconscious, is all. Well, it may not be all. She took a hit in the head and I don't know what else. Let's go and sit down.”

He laced an arm across my back and I leaned against him. His cruiser was parked broadside to the Cutlass with its doors open. He half-carried me there—me at one eighty-five stripped and one leg not doing anything to help—and lowered me onto the edge of the seat. The left side of the Cutlass was visible in his headlamps and spotlight. The frame was unbent and the engine probably hadn't been touched. Its lights were still on. It was skewered on the guardrail like a hog on a spit.

“I ain't seen one of these in years,” the cop said. “These days they bury the ends of them rails in the ground, or bend them back so the cars just kind of scrape along the edge. They moved the ramp about fifteen years ago. I guess they just didn't get around to taking out the rail. I'm real sorry about your lady.” He sounded real sorry. “It don't help much now, but it will later, so I'll say it: She never felt a thing.”

I looked up at him. “How would you know?”

He nudged his hat back with a knuckle. He was six and a half feet and close to three hundred in a neatly pressed uniform and starting to get a paunch. It would be as hard as the rest of him. “Well, that's a point. I guess all the people who could tell you for sure couldn't tell you. But, mister, I seen more of these things than a human man should be able to stomach. I heard folks yelling, you know to look at them they ought to be dead and will be soon. Yelling and cussing so you want to draw down and put them out of it right there. I can't help but think this is better.

“I didn't see no boy. I saw the car seat, so I went looking. The doors weren't open when I got here and the windows was up, so he wasn't thrown out. He might of let himself out and went wandering. I called it in. I ain't been here but five minutes. You want to tell me what happened while we wait?”

I heard a siren far off, and then the insistent airhorn, activated for the benefit of the slow-to-react.