Jeff Abbott - Collision

Ben pressed the accelerator hard against the floor. The Explorer- graceless, then finding its speed-roared down the street. A stop sign stood at the end of the street but Ben accelerated, took the turn hard, a police car honking at him as it slammed on its brakes. The development was all new, curving streets and cul-de-sacs and circles, and the wrong turn would leave him no place to go.

Wiping grime from his eye and steering with his elbow-his right arm hurt as though a lit match had been jammed under the skin-Ben saw, in the rearview, the police car closing in on him. Perhaps someone had heard the sounds of shots inside Delia’s house. He weighed stopping, telling the officer everything, and started to slow down. The police car came close behind him.

But then, revving up behind the cop, came a black Mercedes, sleek as night.

He couldn’t stop now; Jackie would kill both him and the officer. He gunned the engine and arced away from the curb as the Mercedes revved, accelerating with its much more powerful engine.

The Mercedes caught up with the police cruiser and Jackie poured gunfire. He still couldn’t see well and the spray mercifully hit tires instead of flesh. The police car screeched to a stop. The officer fumbled for a weapon, got out, and aimed at the Mercedes.

I’m not sure I can outrace him, Ben thought, and he slammed hard into a left turn. Jackie stayed close. Ben thought of all the car chases he’d ever seen in movies. Always on highways, or in urban cores, with lots of options to turn and nip and evade, the cars dancing with the cameras to delight the audience. But this terrain was gently rolling prairie shaped into newborn suburbia. He had no place to hide. There were new houses and half-built houses and empty lots. He was going to die on these newly minted streets.

The road curved, dead ending, and Ben took the turn hard enough that he felt the Explorer’s wheels lift and crash back to ground.

He faced a cul-de-sac of new houses, one finished, the other four in various stages of completion, one bricked, two more framed, the other just foundation waiting for wooden bones. Ben floored the car into the circle and didn’t stop.

The back window exploded, shot out. Glass peppered the back of his head, sharpened confetti, nipping at his neck and ears.

He couldn’t win on pavement. The Mercedes was too fast. Ben peeled past one of the houses being framed-a driveway had already been poured, circling back into a side-entry garage that was nothing but concrete and lumber. He drove off the driveway to flat dirt, veered hard past the skeletal house, tore into the empty, matted ground around the unfinished shells.

The Mercedes closed on him.

Ben leaned into a hard turn, pluming up dust and dirt, praying the tires wouldn’t puncture on a stray nail. A flat tire meant the end. He saw the Mercedes drop back, unable to handle the ridges of dirt at the same speed. Ben roared back onto the main road.

Beyond the edge of the road was flatland, cleared and fenced for future lots, rolling slightly downward to a dip that he guessed was a creek. But beyond that would be another road.

He could make the creek-maybe-but the Mercedes couldn’t.

Ben powered onto the flatland. The Explorer jostled and bounced.

In the rearview the Mercedes rocketed onto the cleared land.

What would Pilgrim do? The thought nearly made him laugh past the nausea of loss of blood and pain. Then he knew: He would think more than one step ahead.

The land began to slope down; there was no creek as he’d imagined but a fence of strung wire. He hit the fence at seventy miles an hour.

The Explorer tore through the wire, pulling posts from the earth, and one of them rammed against the passenger door like a fist. Wire scoured the paint off the hood. A post clobbered the front windshield into a web of shattered glass. The Explorer spun out, and he floored it again, trying to regain speed.

In the rearview the Mercedes glided through the gap in the fencing he’d made.

The land now rose in a gentle incline. Ahead of him he could see a large, heavily trafficked road, two lanes divided by a thick no-man’s-land of construction.

On the road, traffic hummed at a fifty-mile-per-hour clip. He laid on the horn, tried to time the cut across the highway. He swerved a bit to the right, trying to give a minivan room to get ahead of him and open a small break in the traffic.

He nearly made it.

The Explorer exploded across the two westbound lanes, aiming for the no-man’s-land, just ahead of a Lexus SUV. But Ben didn’t see the pickup truck powering past the Lexus on the outside lane, and as he made it across, the pickup clipped the Explorer’s back right bumper.

The Explorer spun; Ben fought for control to keep from spinning back out onto the highway, back into the path of traffic. He wrenched the wheel with both hands, his wounded arm lighting up in agony despite the adrenaline, and managed to right his track, barrel forward. His heart jammed in his mouth; he looked back, saw the pickup complete its own spin, traffic slowing, cars braking. The pickup driver was a fortyish guy and Ben could see his face, frightened but unhurt.

He glanced behind him again. Jackie’s Mercedes had dodged the traffic- well, most of it, he spotted a bad dent on the passenger rear side-and the German sedan tried to regain its speed.

The Explorer rattled like it was shaking apart as he hurtled past the construction markers and barriers. The land here lay rougher and not planed smooth. The rearview showed him the Mercedes wasn’t chasing him in a straight line; Jackie bulleted along the road’s shoulder, then cut across at an angle. Drawing closer, cutting off Ben’s options. Now Ben could only go to the right.

Half a mile shot by, then another mile. He wheeled past idle cranes and two men on a pickup truck bed, staring up from construction plans, at an interloper in their space. He saw a large mall to his right, on the other side of three lanes of traffic.

The construction zone was coming to an end, nothing but turned earth and huge concrete cylinders, machinery jammed into parking slots. Nowhere to run.

The mall was his last hope.

The Mercedes, moving like an express train now, surged toward him.

He veered out onto the road, narrowly missing an Escalade with a silver-haired lady driving-she shot him a diamond-studded finger. He straightened the car, could see the Mercedes swerving, looking for an opening, a few car lengths behind him. He punched the accelerator and the worn, beaten Explorer tried to respond, but the car began to grind and jerk, like a runner hobbling from injuries.

Now the entrance for the mall: a Nordstrom, a twenty-screen movie theater, a massive bookstore chain, a Macy’s, a Home Depot, a couple of other department stores-all the features of the comfortable marketplace of suburbia. Ben shoved his way onto the shoulder, honking a clear path to the right, seeing the Mercedes trying to cut over to nail him, two cars behind the Mercedes colliding and sliding into each other.

He saw Jackie’s face, etched with fury, hatred, determination.

Ben wrenched a right into the mall’s road system and Jackie overshot the turn, standing on brakes, then powering the car into reverse on the shoulder. The Explorer limped up an incline and Ben zoomed through a stop sign, drove over a curb divider. He jetted up a parking row for the front entrance. Suddenly a front tire gave, the rim started to work toward the pavement, and he urged another thirty feet out of the crippled car.

He’d have to lose Jackie in the mall. He nosed into a vacant slot and got out of the car, scanning the lot for a sign of Jackie’s Mercedes. He saw Jackie, four rows over. Driving toward the mall entrance. Hunting him.

Ben stayed low to the ground, wrapping the jacket around his bullet wound. Blood dotted his shirt, the top of his pants, but he thought he could hide most of the stains and damage by holding the jacket close to him. He spotted the Mercedes hovering near the entrance, then turning, three rows over. Jackie would spot the shot-out windows of the Explorer within seconds.