Джонатан Келлерман - When the Bough Breaks

I kept a watch on him through the side mirror. He rolled toward me, three feet away, now two, approaching on the driver’s side. One hand went inside the leather jacket. A young mother wheeled a small child in a stroller, passing directly in front of my bumper. The child wailed, the mother chewed gum, heavy legged, moving oh so slowly. Something metallic came into the hand in the mirror. The motorcycle was just behind me, almost flush with the driver’s window. I saw the gun now, an ugly little snub-nosed affair, easy to conceal in a large palm. I raced my engine. The gum-chewing young matron wasn’t impressed. She seemed to move in slow motion, indolently working her jaws, the child now screaming at the top of his lungs. The light remained red but its cater cornered cousin had turned amber. The longest light in the history of traffic engineering… how long could an amber light last?

The snout of the revolver pressed against the glass, directly in line with my left temple. A black hole miles long wrapped in a concentric halo of silver. The mother still dragged her heavy body lazily across the intersection, her heel in line with my right front tire, unaware that the man in the green Cadillac was going to be blown away any second. The finger on the trigger blanched. The mother stepped clear by an inch. I twisted the steering wheel to the left, pressed down hard on the accelerator and shot diagonally across the intersection into the path of the ongoing traffic. I gunned the engine, laid a long patch of rubber, heard a Delphic chorus of curses, shouts, honking horns and squealing brakes, and shot up the first side street, narrowly missing a head-on collision with a Water and Power van coming from the opposite direction.

The street was narrow and winding, and pocked with potholes. The Seville was no sports car and I had to fight its slack steering system to maintain speed and control around the turns. I climbed, bounced down hard, and swooped steeply down a hill. A boulevard stop at the bottom was clear. I sped through. Three blocks of level turf at seventy miles an hour and the buzz was back, growing louder. The motorcycle, so much easier to maneuver, was catching up fast.

The road came to an end at a cracked masonry wall. Left or right? Decisions, decisions, with the adrenaline shooting through every corpuscle, the buzz now a roar, my hands sweaty, slipping off the wheel. I looked in the mirror, saw one hand come off the bars and aim the gun at my tires. I chose left and floored the Seville, putting my body into it. The road rose, scaling empty streets, higher, spiraling into the smog, a roller coaster of a street planned by a berserk engineer. The motorcyclist kept riding up on my rear, raking his gun hand off the bars whenever he could, striving for steady aim…

I swerved continuously, dancing out of his sights, but the narrowness of the street gave me little leeway. I knew I had to avoid slipping unconsciously into a regular rhythm – back and forth, back and forth, a gasoline-fueled metronome – for to do so would be to offer an easy target. I drove erratically, crazily, jerking the wheel, slowing down, speeding up, careening against the curb, losing a hubcap that spun off like a chromium Frisbee. It was a direct assault on my axle and I didn’t know how long it could last.

We continued to climb. A view of Sunset below appeared around a corner. We were back in Echo Park, on the south side of the boulevard. The road hit its peak. A shot whizzed by so close that the Seville’s windows vibrated. I swerved and a second shot went far afield.

The terrain changed as the altitude rose, thinning from residential blocks of frame houses to progressively emptier stretches of dusty lots, with here and there a decrepit shack. No more telephone poles, no cars, no signs of human habitation… perfect for an afternoon killing.

We began to race downhill and I saw with horror that I was heading full-speed into a dead end, mere yards from slamming into a pile of dirt at the mouth of an empty construction site. There was no escape – the road terminated at the site and was additionally blocked by piles of cinder block, stacks of drywall, lumber and more mounds of excavated dirt. A goddam box canyon. If the impact of smashing nose-first into the dirt didn’t kill me, I’d be imbedded, tires spinning hopelessly, as immobile as parsley in aspic, a perfect, passive target…

The man on the motorcycle must have harbored similar thoughts in that same instant, for he engaged in a quick series of confident actions. He removed his gun hand from the bars, slowed, and came around to the left, ready to be at my side when my escape came to an end.

I made the only move left for me: I jammed on the brakes. The Seville convulsed, skidded violently, spun and rocked on its bearings, threatening to capsize. I needed the skid to continue, so I steered away from it. The car spun like a rotor blade.

Then a sudden impact threw me across the seat.

My front end had gone out of control and collided with the cycle as it came out of a spin with full torque behind it. The lighter vehicle bounced off the car, caromed and sailed through the air in a wide arc over the hill of earth. I watched as man and machine parted ways, the cycle climbing, stunt like falling, its rider thrown loose, flying higher, a scarecrow cut free from its stake, then falling too, landing unseen.

The Seville stopped spinning and its engine died. I pulled myself up. My sore arm had been knocked against the passenger door panel and it hummed with pain. No sign of movement came from the site. I got out quietly, crouched behind the car and waited there as my head cleared and my breathing slowed. Still nothing. I spied a two-by-four several feet away, snatched it, hefted it like a stave and circled the mound of dirt, staying low to the ground. Creeping onto the site I saw that a partial foundation had been laid – a right angle of concrete from which corrugated steel rods protruded like flowerless stalks. The remains of the motorcycle were visible immediately, a rubbish heap of seared metal and shattered windshield.

It took several more minutes of poking amid the rubble to find the body. It had landed in a ditch at the junction of the two cement arms, a spot where the earth was etched with caterpillar tread marks, next to a broken fiberglass shower stall and half-concealed by molding sheets of insulation.

The opaque helmet was still in place but it had offered no protection from the steel rod that stuck out through a large, jagged hole in the rider’s throat. The shaft extended just below the Adam’s apple; it had created a good-sized exit wound coming through. Blood seeped from the hole, turning muddy in the dirt. The trachea was visible, still pink, but deflated, leaking fluid. A fleck of gore tipped the rod.

I knelt and undid the helmet strap, and tried to pull off the headpiece. The neck had bent unnaturally upon being pierced and it proved a difficult task. As I struggled I felt steel scrape against vertebrae, cartilage and gristle. My belly quaked with nausea. I heaved and turned away to vomit in the dirt.

With a bitter taste in my mouth and eyes brimming with tears, breathing hard and loud, I returned to the grisly chore. The helmet finally came loose and the bare skull flopped to the ground. I stared down into the lifeless, bearded face of Jim Halstead, the coach at La Casa de los Niños. His lips were drawn back in death, cast in a permanent sneer. The force of landing after his final free fall had snapped his jaws down upon his tongue, and the severed tip rested on the hairy chin like some fleshy, parasitic grub. His eyes were open and rolled backward, the whites flooded with blood. He cried crimson tears.

I looked away from him and saw the sun hit something shiny several feet to the right. I walked to it, found the gun and examined it – a chrome-plated .38. I took it and tucked it in the waistband of my trousers.