Jeffery Deaver - Triple Threat

“Look!” Pellam shouted again and gestured.

Whether the driver saw the gesture or not Pellam couldn’t say. But the passenger did and pointed.

The pickup swerved to the left. Another squeal of brakes. The camper rode up higher on the hitch. It was like a fishhook. As they raced past the bicyclist, her mouth open in shock, she wove to the side, the far right, and managed to skid to a stop.

That was one tragedy averted. But the other loomed.

They were a thousand feet from the switchback

Pellam felt the vibrations again, from the brakes. They slowed to sixty-five then sixty. Downshift.

Five hundred feet.

They’d slowed to fifty.

Danger Sharp Curve.

Down to forty-five leisurely miles an hour.

The switchback loomed. Straight ahead, past the curve, Pellam could see nothing. No trees. No mountains. Just a huge empty space. The tourist marker at Clement Pass said the area boasted some of the most spectacular vertical drops in Colorado.

Forty miles an hour. Thirty-nine.

Maybe we’ll just bring this one off.

But then the grade dropped, an acute angle, and the wedded vehicles began accelerating. Fifty, fifty-five.

Pellam took off his Ray Bans. Swept the pens and beer bottles off the dash. Knocked the boom box to the floor. Kathy continued to sing. The song “Grand Canyon” was coming up soon.

A hundred feet from the switchback.

With a huge scream the pickup’s nose dropped. The driver had locked the brakes in a last desperate attempt to stop. Blue smoke swirled as the truck fishtailed and the rear of the camper swung to the left. But the driver was good. He turned into the skid far enough to control it but not so much that he lost control. They straightened out and kept slowing.

They were fifty feet from the edge of the switchback. The speed had dropped to fifty.

Forty-five…

But it wasn’t enough.

Pellam threw his arms over his face, sank down into the seat.

The pickup sliced through the pointless wooden guardrail and sailed over the edge of the road, the camper just behind.

There was a loud thump as the undercarriage of the Ford uprooted a skinny tree and then a soft jolt. Pellam opened his eyes to find the vehicles rolling down a gentle ten-foot incline, smooth as a driveway, into the parking lot of the Overlook diner, sitting in the middle of a spacious area on an outcropping of rock high above the valley floor.

With a resounding snap the camper’s front bumper broke loose and fell beneath the front tires, slicing through and flattening them, a hard jolt that launched the boom box and possibly a beer bottle or two into Pellam’s ear and temple.

He winced at the pain. The truck rolled leisurely through the lot and steered out of the way of the Winnebago, which hobbled on, slowing, toward the rear of the diner.

Pellam’s laughter at the peaceful conclusion to the near-tragedy vanished as the camper’s nose headed directly for a large propane tank.

Shit…

Hitting the useless brakes again, couldn’t help himself, he squinted. But the dead tires slowed the camper significantly and the result of the collision was a quiet thonk , not the fireball that was the requisite conclusion of car chases in the sort of movies Pellam preferred not to work on.

He lowered his head and inhaled deeply for a moment. Not praying. Just lowered his head. He climbed out and stretched. John Pellam was lean of face and frame and tall, with not-quite-trimmed dark hair. In his denim jacket, Noconas, well-traveled jeans, and a black wrinkled dress shirt converted to casual wear, he resembled a cowboy, or at least was mistaken for one in places like this, though not in the low-rent district of Beverly Hills—yes, they exist—that was his mailing address. The cowboy aura he tended to perpetuate not for image but for sentiment; the story went that he was actually related to a figure from the Old West, Wild Bill Hickok.

Pellam walked stiffly toward the pickup, noting the damage wasn’t terrible. Scraped paint and hitch, broken brake- and taillight.

The driver, too, shut off the engine and eased the door open.

Pellam approached. “Look, Mister, I’m really sorry. The brakes…”

The Stetson came off swiftly, unleashing a cascade of long chestnut hair. The woman was in her midthirties, petite, about five two or so. With a heart-shaped face, red lips, brows thick and dark, which, for some reason, made them wildly sensual.

The passenger-side door opened and a young man—well-built in a gangly sort of way, with an anemic goatee and short ruddy hair--climbed out. A cautious smile on his face. He looked as if he wanted to apologize for the accident, though passengers were probably not the first suspects traffic officers looked at.

Pellam continued toward the driver.

She took off her own Ray Bans.

He was thinking that her eyes were the palest, most piercing gray he’d ever seen when she drew back and decked him with a solid right to the jaw.

# # #

A cold Colorado desert wind had come up and they were all inside the diner, the cast now including the town sheriff, fiftyish and twice Pellam’s weight. His name was partially H. Werther, according to his name plate. He stood near the counter, talking to the cowgirl.

Pellam was sitting at a table while a medic who smelled of chewing tobacco worked on his jaw. Pellam was mad at himself. He’d been in more fights than he could-- or cared to--count. He’d seen the squint in her eyes as he stepped close and had an idea that it was an about-to-swing squint. And all the while Pellam kept grinning like a freshman on a first date and thinking, Now, those are some extraordinary eyes.

For Christsake, you might’ve ducked at least.

The fist had glanced off bone and hadn’t caused any serious damage, though it loosened a tooth and laid open some skin.

Six other patrons—two older couples and two single Cat-capped workers—watched with straight-faced amusement.

“She got you good,” offered the medic, in a low voice, so the sheriff didn’t hear.

“It was the wreck, stuff flying everywhere.” He looked out the window at the damaged Winnebago. The medic looked, too. And, okay, it didn’t seem all that damaged. “Things flew around.”

“Uhn,” he grunted.

“A boom box.” He decided not to mention the beer bottles.

“We’re trained to look for certain contusions and abrasions. Like, for domestic situations.”

She barely tapped me, Pellam thought and wobbled the tooth again.

The driver stood with her arms crossed. The hat was back on. The brown was set off by a small green feather. She gazed back as she spoke to the sheriff; the beige-uniformed man towered over her and his weight, not insignificant, was a high percentage muscle. Probably the only peace officer in whatever town this was; Pellam had passed a welcome-to sign but that had been just as the emergency brake pad had pungently melted and he hadn’t had the inclination to check out the name and population of the place where he was about to die. He guessed it was maybe a thousand souls.

As the sheriff jotted in a small notebook Pellam studied the woman. She was calm now and he thought again how beautiful she looked.

Pale eyes, dark eyebrows.

Two red knuckles on her right hand.

She and the sheriff stood next to the cash register, an old-time hand-crank model. The diner itself was a real relic, too. Aluminum trim, paint-spatter Formica countertops, black-and-white linoleum diamonds on the floor. Arterial blood red for the vinyl upholstery—booth and stool.

The man who’d been in the passenger seat of the Ford stepped out of the washroom, still wearing a cautious smile. He was dressed in dark, baggy clothes--the sort you’d see in TriBeCa or on Melrose in West Hollywood. Pellam--for whom the line between movies and reality was always a little hazy--thought immediately that he could have stepped right out of a Quentin Tarantino or Robert Rodriguez flick. He wore no-nonsense hiking boots. Clutching his backpack, he laughed nervously again. To Pellam he nodded a rueful glance--the sort soldiers might exchange when they’ve just survived their first firefight. His hair was cut flat on the top, short on the sides--the kind of cut Pellam associated with characters in the comic books of his childhood; he mentally dubbed the man Butch.