"Did what, exactly?" Smith probed.
The stainless-steel cable snapped apart like button thread when Remo yanked on it, then he hung up the receiver and left the restaurant, sputtering obscenities like an inconvenienced Teamster.
NATIONAL PARK RANGER Ricardo Wegman hated traffic detail. As far as he was concerned, catching speeders was the state's job. Not the National Park Service. But up here on the Blue Ridge Parkway the access was limited. North Carolina ended and Tennessee began halfway through the park. All this made it difficult to persuade the troopers to come in for an occasional look-see.
Tourists in the Smoky Mountains ignored the warning signs as a matter of course. They thought they could get all the way to the bottom riding their brakes, never mind the burning smell. Some flatland geniuses even turned off their engines and tried to coast all the way down, just for yuks. The real laughs started when their heat-stressed brake rotors and pads disintegrated, then there would be a bunch of frantic swerving and grinding of gears as the panicking motorists struggled to bring the car to a halt with a mixture of low-gearing and hard praying. Neither worked too well when you were on a steep downhill grade that wound from an elevation of four thousand feet down to an elevation of two thousand feet in a matter of a couple of miles.
Wegman had to admit that there was something amusing about the speeders-the idiots who got going as fast as they could at the top of the hill before the long slalom down.
When the radar beeped, Wegman was lounging in his seat with his eyes closed. By the time he opened his eyes the speeder had disappeared around the curve. The radar display said fifty-three miles per hour. It took a special machine to get going that fast on this short stretch of mountain blacktop. Of course, the guy had probably gone straight over the lip at the next curve.
Ranger Wegman drove down the road to the guardrail, which was unmangled. The speeder had managed to make the curve. Had to have hit the brakes hard, although there were no skid marks.
He accelerated his Jeep until he was pushing his own safety limits, and only then did he spot the speeder. The speeder wasn't a car.
It was a man.
Ranger Wegman brought his jeep up behind the running man, then pulled alongside him.
"What the hell are you doing?" he asked as he paced the runner.
"Jogging," said the runner. "Nice day for it, but the altitude slows me down a little."
Wegman tried to make sense of what he was seeing and decided there was no sense to be made of it. "Son, you're going fifty-three miles per hour."
"Well, I gotta admit the incline makes up for the thin air."
Wegman steered himself around a curve in the road, tires squealing in protest, and tried to figure out what he was missing in this little scenario. The man looked awfully normal. Maybe thirty-something or maybe not. No stringy marathon-runner muscles. No bulging weight-lifter muscles. Nothing abnormal about the guy except a pair of extrathick wrists.
"You bionic or something like that?" Wegman asked.
"Something like that. Sharp curve ahead." Wegman knew this road like the back of his hand and of course he knew there was a sharp curve ahead, but the world wasn't real to him right now. He slowed just enough to take the curve with his tires sliding on stones. Somewhere in the back of his head he was thinking that he was driving like the idiot flatlander tourists who didn't quite understand that a slide onto the shoulder at this height meant a slide into oblivion.
Of course, the running guy had no troubles at all navigating the curve.
"You stop now, son," Ranger Wegman called, head protruding from the window as he floored his vehicle to catch up again. "You're speeding and breaking the law!"
"Better reread your rule books, Ranger Rick," the running man said. "I'm not operating a vehicle, and I can run as fast as I want."
"Son, I don't know if that's true or not, but I'm telling you to pull yourself over and stop, now."
"This next curve's a doozy, Ranger," said the running man.
"Son, you- Shit!"
Ranger Ricardo Wegman suddenly felt the strong strands of reality take hold when he found himself barreling headlong into the Two-Mile Hairpin at better than fifty miles per hour.
Just the kind of fool stunt one of those idiot flatlanders would pull.
Wegman stood on the brakes and steered the Jeep into a sideways skid, maximizing the friction on all four tires in a desperate attempt to slow the car before it hit the retaining wall. It was a hopeless gesture, and he knew it. He also knew they would be shaking their heads and calling him a damn fool for pulling a flatlander stunt like this. They'd be saying it even while they were dragging his broken car and his banged-up remains off the mountainside.
The rubber screamed for a lifetime, and the stench of scorched radials was the smell of humiliation in his nostrils. The big Jeep didn't feel like it had slowed at all before it slammed broadside into the safety barrier. The SUV flipped neatly over the barrier and plummeted into the underbrush that clung to the steep-sided mountain.
The crashing went on and on as if it would never stop, like it would go on for an eternity.
Then it faded away.
Ranger Ricardo Wegman opened his eyes. He was floating in thin air, looking down on the path of ruin created by the tumbling SUV. Then he knew-he was dead. His soul had left his body, which had to still be inside the jeep getting pounded to pulp.
"I'm discorporated!" Wegman gasped.
"You're a dipshit," the skinny guy said. Wegman craned his neck back and down and up, and found that he was in actuality hanging over the sheer mountainside drop. The skinny running man held him by his belt, in one hand.
"What happened?" Wegman asked.
"You drove off the road. Like fifteen seconds ago. Remember-squealing tires, crunching body panels and all that? I pulled you out through the window when your National Park-issue transport went on its gravity-verifying fit."
Wegman looked flabbergasted-then stricken. "You should have let me go with the car!"
"Huh?"
"Go ahead!" he pleaded. "Throw me in! I'll never live down the humiliation!" Wegman didn't even feel the fantastic agony of his shorts and trousers practically splitting his crotch in what had to be a world-record wedgie. All he felt was the disdain that was yet to come. "You don't understand! It was the kind of thing a flatlander would do!"
"It's just a car. So what. You should see some of the stuff I've wrecked. Whole villages and shit."
"Please! End it for me! I'm begging you!" Wegman started twisting and clawing at the iron-hard fist that clung to his trousers, but it was like scratching his fingernails on steel girders. To his mortification, the skinny young man carried him to the shoulder of the road and put him safely on his own two feet.
"If the department of agriculture makes a higher moron classification than Grade A, then you rate it," Remo Williams said. "Listen, just tell everybody you were chasing some guy who was running fifty miles per hour and you got so caught up in it you didn't pay attention to the road."
Ranger Ricardo Wegman gave Remo a disdainful look. "They'll think I'm crazy on top of being stupid. I'd rather be dead."
"Fine. You want to end it, you go ahead. I've got a bus to catch."
Remo ran off. In a matter of seconds Wegman was alone. If it weren't for the obvious signs of the crash, he would have doubted the entire event had really even happened.
Now that the shock was wearing off, he started thinking-who was that guy and how the hell had he managed to pace a jeep at fifty miles per hour anyway?
The enigma was so distracting he entirely forgot about throwing himself off the mountainside before the first emergency vehicle arrived on the scene-and by then it was too late. Killing yourself right there, in front of your peers? It just wasn't done.