Джеймс Суэйн - The Man Who Cheated Death

“This is an emergency. I need help. Does anyone hear me?”

“Who the hell is this?” barked a radio dispatcher.

“My name is Jan Hardare.” She glanced at the operator’s license on the dash. “I’m driving the cab of Fami El Hassad.”

“Where’s Hassad?”

“He’s dead. The man who killed him has abducted my stepdaughter. I’m driving west on Pico Boulevard just past La Cienga in pursuit of a white van. Please call 911.”

“I’m dialing right now,” the dispatcher said. “Hey lady, please don’t do anything crazy with the cab.”

The screech of brakes drowned him out. She ran a red light and swerved out of the path of an oncoming Mercedes, the passengers cries making her skin crawl. At the next intersection she hit the brakes again, and looked both ways. The van could be hiding in an alley, or parked behind a larger truck, there was no way to know.

“Hey lady,” the radio dispatcher said.

“Yes...” she said, grabbing the microphone.

“The police are coming. I put an emergency call out to my fleet. One of my men just spotted a van on the corner of Fairfax and 18 thStreet, heading west. He said the driver was really hauling.”

“I don’t know where that is,” she shouted, horns blaring around her as she dangerously weaved through traffic. “I’m heading south on Spaulding. Can you get me there?”

“Sure. Make a right and go to Fairfax. Hang a left, and that takes you to 18th Street.”

Jan followed the dispatcher’s while flooring the gas. A block ahead, she saw the spotted the van jockeying between cars.

“I see him! He’s still on Fairfax. I’m going after him.”

“Lady, let the police handle this. Lady... lady!”

It had all happened so quickly.

“Do you have a map?” the driver of the van had asked the cabbie. He wore a gray uniform, a hat, and black wraparound shades. “I’m lost.”

“Oh, yes. I have a wonderful map!” the Iranian cabby said enthusiastically, slipping the driver a spiral-bound street guide through a crack in his window.

“Thanks. I’ll give it right back.”

“Take your time,” the cabby said.

Lifting the front of his shirt, the driver had drawn a gun and stuck its barrel to the window. There had been a loud Pop! and the cabby had lurched forward on the wheel.

Crystal had lost it. Only moments before the cabby had told her about a cereal commercial his six year old daughter was starring in. He wanted her to be on TV, then the movies. The United States was a great country, he proclaimed.

The driver pulled her out of the car at gunpoint. It was the same crazy killer who’d attacked them in the desert.

“Please don’t hurt me,” Crystal begged.

Death dragged her across the street. Opening a sliding door on the side of his van, he shoved her into the darkened interior, where she landed face-first onto an enormous pile of sheets that smelled like paint. Straddling her, he snapped a handcuff around her wrist. He was talking under his breath, whispering obscene things about her breasts and the sweet curvature of her ass, and Crystal thought Please God, Help me.

Death pulled her up and handcuffed her wrists around the top shelf of a metal rack that was bolted to the ceiling. Forced to stand on her tip-toes, Crystal got a good look at him: he was her father’s height, a flat nose, and had the strangest skin she’d ever see on a man, his face smooth and creamy white. He produced a nylon stocking from his pocket and gagged her.

He climbed up to the front and got behind the wheel. Turning the radio on, he burned rubber down the street. At each traffic light, he glanced in his rear view mirror, watching her.

“Having fun, little girl?”

Crystal waited until he was watching the road before she gave the handcuffs pinching her wrists a look. They were standard issue Smith and Wesson, nothing a bobby pin wouldn’t open. Except her pins were in her purse on the floor. When he wasn’t looking, she slipped off both her shoes.

Thank God she rarely wore socks. Working in unison, her two big toes unzipped her purse, then nimbly picked through her stockpile of gum, mints and hair clips. Houdini had taught himself how to untie complicated knots in pieces of rope using his toes. Her father had refined the technique so he could hold lock picks between his toes and open doors. Crystal wasn’t that adept, but she could use her feet as well as most people used their hands.

“Hey — what are you doing!

Death ripped off his shades, his eyes popping wildly in the rear view mirror.

“I’m talking to you, sweetmeat!”

He did not sound like the same person. Like he had a demonic amplifier in his chest.

“Go... hell,” Crystal mumbled through her gag.

With her toes she lifted her open purse a foot off the floor and shook it. A dozen pennies and a single bobby pin tumbled out. Pressing down with her big toe, she made the bobby pin stand on end, clenching it before it fell to the floor.

They were coming to a red light. Crystal saw Death shift in his seat as he slowed the van down. She jammed her right heel against the edge of the sliding metal door that separated them.

Death hit the brakes hard. Throwing the van into park, he jumped out of his seat and came for her. Crystal viciously kicked the sliding door, trying to catch him with it.

The door flew by his face, missing it by a fraction and shutting with a resounding bang! Crystal heard him laughing heinously on the other side and shrieked through her gag.

“I’m going to mutilate you!”

Death tried to open the door. When it did not slide free, he kicked it. Suddenly he was pounding his fists against it, and Crystal realized the door had locked itself.

“Rock and roll!” she screamed through her gag.

Lifting her foot up to her face, her right fingers plucked the bobby pin from her toes.She twisted it into proper lock-picking shape while trying to brush away the grime it had attracted in her purse. If the pick wasn’t clean she could jam the lock and permanently screw herself.

Her shoulders were going numb, and she stuck the pin into the keyhole and wiggled it around the ratchets and steel pins. Finding the sweet spot, she pressed as hard as she could in such an awkward position.

The cuff sprung open, freeing her.

Death’s fist had turned purple from striking the door.

THE KEY! his dark mind screamed, YOU HAVE TO FIND THE KEY!

He turned around, seeing first the green traffic light, then the ring of keys in the ignition. What an idiot he was! He turned the engine off just as traffic started to flow around him.

Immediately he heard horns, and when he did not move the van, some choice profanity from the car behind him. He caught the driver’s face in his side mirror; a big bullet-headed black driving a beat-up Lincoln.

“Nigger,” he shouted without thinking, having suppressed the word for so long in the mental hospital where he’d been part of a white minority that it was now part of his everyday language.

The Lincoln’s driver got out of his car. The man was huge, and looked ready to kill him. Death jumped behind the wheel and threw the van into drive, vaulting ahead.

He could no longer think clearly. Downtown L.A. had turned a muted gray, and he drove as if lost in a fog, his breathing labored and painful.

Death bit down on his lip, tasting blood. The pain brought instant relief and slowly — as the grayness surrounding the van lifted — clarity. He leaned his head out his window, listening for sirens. Hearing none, he told himself everything was fine. A few blocks later, he pulled down a side street, and backed the van into the alley where he’d parked the Firebird.