They settled back and let the Plymouth vanish from sight, then the wheelman turned on the ignition and they followed the signal from the target's locator, pulling the Dodge van back onto the blacktop road, and hoping they wouldn't have to drive through much more water.
56
She first thought of getting a cop to go with her while she forced some sort of showdown with Dr. Royal, but the madder she became the more such a confrontation seemed pointless. He was sneaky smart. In that kind of refereed face-to-face encounter he would be cooly articulate, as mock understanding effused from his Nazi mouth, the filthy, murdering son of a bitch! She would be the wild, violent one. The thought of yet another stereotyped judgment call by the redneck constabulary was sufficient to rekindle the heat of her rage.
She put the Lebensborn book back in the paper it had been wrapped in, took a black marking pen from her purse, noted the time, and quickly printed a note:
I'm going to make “Dr. Royal” (Shtolz) tell what he did with Dad. If anything happens, make sure the police arrest him for murder! Love, S.
In her thirty years on the planet, Sharon had been involved in two acts of violence, but as she printed her initial, it was as if Aaron Kamen's daughter no longer existed. This was someone else, a dark being pulled from Sharon's guts by anguish and anger. This stranger now went back out to the car, opened the trunk, and grabbed the first weapon she saw—a tire iron, tossed it into the front seat, got in, started the car, and sped off into the rain.
She marked the numbers seven-zero-nine on her mental slate, and concentrated on finding the street address and nothing else. No planning. Just do it. She drove through the arc of a sodium lamp, rain splashing hard on the windshield, and the poor visibility parted the curtain of her rage enough to allow her to flip the wipers on.
There it was, 709 West Vine. Her arms prickled as she realized this bastard had been sleeping a few blocks away from her. She stopped, made sure of the house number again, then backed about fifty yards down the street and pulled against the curb, killing the lights and the motor.
Fate always has her way. Another time and the mad-woman who'd taken possession of Sharon Kamen's body might have waited a few hours, given up, cooled, gone home, calmed down, and things might have ended differently. But fate had settled around Sharon, sealing her destiny.
For two hours she waited. First she'd roll the window down on the passenger side when the windshield fogged up, then it would get wet and cold and she'd run the engine. Then she'd turn it off and the windows would fog up again, and she'd roll the window down. It kept on this way as the rain stopped, started, pounded, slackened off, stopped, started.... It was a long, angry, perhaps even insane, two hours.
Eventually, Dr. Solomon Royal chanced to emerge from his home, and it was a grimly determined woman who sat in chilly silence, the tire iron comfortingly close at hand.
He opened an umbrella and spryly moved down the steps from his front porch, unlocked the door of his car, closed the umbrella, placing it on the floorboard of the back seat, got in, and started the motor. When he drove away she was right behind him, letting her fury press down on the accelerator. He turned, with her on top of him, and when he braked at the stop sign in front of Bayou City Episcopalian, she came up behind and gave him a hard smack in the bumper.
“How's that feel, you Nazi son of a bitching shit?” she shouted, inflamed by the rush of adrenaline and power, her beautiful chest heaving. It was consuming her that the man in the car in front of her had murdered her father, and she was about to slam into him again when he pulled out from the four-way stop in a fishtailing squeal of wet rubber, and she floored the gas pedal, coming up on his rear again.
He knew, of course, what the situation was the second he saw the woman's face in the car behind him. It was a stroke of luck that she was stalking him. What lovely timing. Small towns have no secrets, and he'd known about her from the moment she first verbalized her suspicions to the police. Just what one would expect from a family of fucking kikes—like father like daughter.
It was resolving itself so perfectly. The only concern he had now was to make absolutely certain it wasn't some kind of a setup that these bothersome imbeciles had concocted. The odd detective or boyfriend lurking about to witness his reactions.
He wished he could get her to the house, where the options would have been so numerous. First the drugs, chloral hydrate at one end and the most toxic poisons at the other. A coffee cup and drinking glasses that he kept prepared and refreshed in his special kitchen cabinet. There were other nice insurance policies against subjugation by an adversary, such as a relatively benign hypo full of pain-killer or the loose newel post on the stairwell, filled with a lead center, that could swiftly crush a skull.
Then there were the proofs that had overflowed his office and now filled his home with decades of irrefutable history. Dusty photos, awards, framed newspaper stories, magazine covers, full-page pictorials of a young Sol Royal treating GIs. Checkable, impeccable proof that he was who he claimed to be.
He could be infuriatingly calm and logical while she accused him of this and that. Sit in front of the big picture window with a nice cup of tea or coffee, elegant and unruffled in his drawing room. The spider could spin his fine web, talking gently and sympathetically as he poured her cup, his voice a cultured, lilting, hypnotic instrument. She would listen to the rhythmic and measured responses, and perhaps drop her guard at last, acknowledging her awful mistake as she reached for her cup.
He'd continue to placate and convince, his voice soft and well modulated, his demeanor reasonable, his idiomatic grasp facile, with only the slightest accent and hint of gutturalness in his speech.
Bright headlight glare in the rearview was dangerously close and it snapped him out of his brief fantasy. He knew what he had to do and shrugged off the thought of a witness as he headed for the floodwater.
She was right there with him, her lights horrible in the gathering darkness, blinding him. The rain was compounding the hazard. He had no choice.
The instant he got to Andrews Road he slowed automatically and she smacked into him. Hard. His head snapped as if it were on the end of a whip. Twisted Jesus he would make this Jew cunt pay. Just keep calm.
He hit the water too fast, almost flooding his engine, the Jewess twat inches off his bumper, both of them roaring over the road, smoke steaming from the hoods of the cars as he gunned it up the incline of 1140, watching the line of road, concentrating to stay on pavement, the mirror now tilted straight up to deflect the bright lights.
She tried to crash into him again as he came to the shallow part of the water but he was ready this time, and able to absorb the impact better, and he floored it as he hit dry pavement, shooting forward. He tapped the brake. Nothing. The brakes were wet. He trod on the pedal with all his strength and the car almost rolled, swerving wildly back and forth as the steaming vehicle screamed to a stop on the high part of the road.
He lurched from the car just as she plowed into it, hitting his automobile a vicious carom shot. His “knuckles” were under the dashboard, as was a loaded Luger. He started back around the car to get a weapon but as he saw her backing the other car up for another run at him, he moved away as fast as he was able, keeping the solidity of the engine block and chassis between them.