Gabriel Hunt - Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear

He ran after the car, chasing it out into the street as more gunshots exploded behind him. The car swung around the corner onto Park, where for once—this being a weekend morning in New York City in the middle of August—traffic was practically nonexistent. There’d be no catching it on foot. Gabriel looked back the other way, saw a yellow cab speeding downtown, and stepped into its path. The car screeched to a stop just inches from his legs.

The cabbie, a turbaned and bearded Sikh, stuck his head out the driver-side window and shouted, “You wish to be killed? Is this what you desire?”

Gabriel threw open the door to the backseat, piled inside. “You see that car,” he said to the driver in Punjabi, “the black one, there? Follow it. Don’t let it out of your sight. A woman’s life depends on it.”

Through the rear window, Gabriel saw the men from the roof round the corner. One of them kicked Sheba’s shoes into the gutter as he ran. The other raised his gun.

“Now!” Gabriel said, ducking.

The cabbie glanced in the rearview mirror just in time to see the rear windshield of his car shatter. He put the gas pedal to the floor and, swerving around a double-parked delivery van, roared off.

Chapter 4

They made it three blocks before a sedan pulled in behind them, a silver Audi with smoked-glass windows and a dent the size of a melon in the hood. The four silver circles across the car’s grill made Gabriel think of the ring in the nose of a bull, particularly when the driver revved the engine angrily and the car surged forward. The Audi came within a few feet of the cab’s rear bumper before the taxi driver—Rajiv Narindra, according to the ID displayed on the back of his seat—swerved again, nearly sideswiping a street-corner hotdog cart in his haste to change lanes.

Above the next intersection, the traffic light changed from green to yellow. Narindra sped through it. It turned red before the Audi reached it, but they sped through as well. A chorus of honking erupted behind them.

“Who are these men?” Narindra shouted back at Gabriel.

“They are hired killers, abductors,” Gabriel said, testing the limits of his Punjabi vocabulary. “They have taken a friend of mine and…mean to…” Damn it, what was the word? “Harm her.”

“Why?”

“If I could tell you that,” Gabriel muttered, in English this time, “I wouldn’t be here in the first place.” He bent forward over the front seat, thankful to have gotten into one of the minority of cabs in New York that didn’t have a wall of bulletproof Plexiglas between the driver and the passengers. He rifled through the pile of odds and ends cluttering the passenger seat: a thick, spiral-bound book of maps, a handful of ballpoint pens, half a sandwich, an unopened bottle of Snapple. Narindra turned the wheel sharply to the left, throwing Gabriel against his shoulder, and then swung it back to the right.

“Do you have anything we could use as…” Gabriel’s language skills petered out again. Desperately he resorted to English. “A weapon—a gun…a, a, a jack, something heavy—anything you could use as a weapon?”

Narindra shook his head. “A weapon? This I do not have.”

Up ahead, Gabriel saw the black car speeding up, pulling away. A glance at their own speedometer showed they were doing close to fifty themselves.

From behind, meanwhile, came the crack-crack-crack of gunfire. Narindra cut across two lanes and then back.

Beggars can’t be choosers. Gabriel grabbed the Snapple bottle and, turning in one swift movement, cocked his arm and launched the bottle through the open space where the rear windshield had been. The driver of the Audi pulled to one side to avoid it, but the bottle struck, leaving a spiderweb of cracks in the glass.

That was something—but hardly enough. And now he was out of projectiles completely.

An arm holding a gun emerged from the Audi’s passenger-side window and fire erupted from the barrel. Gabriel dropped to his knees in the cab’s footwell. A line of bullet holes stitched across the back of the front seat, throwing puffs of padding into the air. That it was only shreds of foam rubber raining down on him and not blood was just dumb luck, Gabriel knew—two feet to the left and he’d have been hurtling down Park Avenue in a cab with a corpse at the wheel.

He peeked over the front seat again, looked at the dashboard. There had to be something —

The meter.

Mounted on a metal bar, tallying up his fare in 40-cent increments, a curl of cash register tape trailing from the receipt slot at the top—it was a compact unit but looked heavy, the perfect combination. It also looked firmly attached, but what had once been mounted had to be removable. It would be easier with the proper tools, of course, but—

Gabriel lunged forward, took hold of the meter with one hand on either side, and wrenched it violently.

“What are you doing?” Narindra cried. “I am responsible for that!”

“I’ll—” Gabriel wrenched at it again. “I’ll pay—” One more time. Come on. “I’ll pay for it,” he shouted, pulling and twisting till with a snap of breaking plastic and metal the unit came free. It made a sad little grinding noise as it lost power. “And the windshield,” Gabriel said breathlessly. “I’ll cover it all, just keep driving.”

“Crazy, you are crazy,” Narindra said, and Gabriel didn’t bother to argue. Instead, he turned back, crawled halfway out onto the trunk of the cab and, anchoring his feet against the back of the rear seat, rose up on his knees, hefted the taxi meter in both hands, took aim, and hurled it directly at the Audi’s windshield.

A direct hit would smash the glass this time—it was already cracked. And whatever smashed the glass would continue on through the glass into the driver’s face at a relative velocity of somewhere north of fifty miles per hour. Realizing this, the driver pulled the wheel violently to the right, and this time he succeeded in avoiding the missile, though only by inches. What he didn’t succeed in avoiding was the curb, which vanished under his right front tire as the Audi leapt onto the sidewalk; or the fire hydrant by the curb, which crumpled the front of the car like it was made of tinfoil. The driver and his passenger were both hurled forward and would have collided painfully—maybe fatally—with the steering wheel in one case and the windshield in the other, had it not been for the car’s airbags, which deployed with showroom precision.

Safe cars, Audis.

Gabriel carefully crawled backwards, ducking back into the cab and collapsing in the backseat. He saw Narindra eyeing him in the mirror.

This was the moment of truth—would he stop the car and insist that Gabriel get out, which in practice would mean losing the other car, and Sheba, possibly permanently? Or would Narindra keep going, to help save a young woman’s life?

“You say you will pay?” Narindra said.

“Anything,” Gabriel said. “Name your price.”

“A thousand dollars?”

“Five thousand,” Gabriel said.

“You are crazy,” Narindra said. But he kept driving.

The black car was half a mile ahead by then, but they made up some distance when it turned crosstown and began plowing through the slightly denser traffic on the way to the Lincoln Tunnel. They reached the tunnel entrance just a few hundred yards behind the other car and spotted it again the instant they emerged.

They were on the highway now, barreling through the wilds of northern New Jersey, and could really put on some speed, but at Gabriel’s request Narindra hung back, leaving several car lengths and at least one lane between them and the black car at all times. From the rear they presented an unusual sight, with the missing windshield and the trunk riddled with bullet holes, but from the front there was nothing out of the ordinary—just a New York cab taking someone on a short hop outside the city—and Gabriel was counting on their being able to go unnoticed, as long as they didn’t get too close.