Tom snapped his head forward and back, taking a quick look out the windshield. The patrol car was stopped, cyclists were streaming by on both sides of it. They couldn’t stay here. “Try another one,” Tom said. “We can’t get through there.”
“I know, I know.” Joe was twisting the wheel, tapping the accelerator, leaning on the horn. They slid away from that exit and headed south again, hurrying through the cyclists.
Both of them — Tom by looking out the back window and Joe by looking at the rear-view mirror — saw the three men who’d been standing by the Chevvy suddenly run around the end of the sawhorses and come trotting after the patrol car. They couldn’t catch up, obviously, but that didn’t mean much; they acted as though they knew what they were doing. Tom remembered the walkie-talkie one of them had carried back by the picnickers, and the army imagery seemed stronger than ever all of a sudden; they must have a central-command post somewhere, with men reporting in from all around the park.
If there’d been a way to call the whole thing off, Tom would have done it right then and there. Just give it up, forget it, make believe none of it had ever happened. As far as he was concerned, they’d had it, they were defeated already, and only going on because there wasn’t anything else to do.
But not Joe. His sense of combat had been aroused, he was feeling nothing but the warring instinct. As a little kid, his comic-book hero had been Captain America; shield and fist against entire swarming armies of the enemy, and he won out every time. Joe hunched over the steering wheel, weaving the car through all the people with small taps on the accelerator, tiny shifts of the wheel, steady pushing at the horn, feeling himself the master of his machine in a slow-motion Indy 500.
It was almost no time at all to the next exit at 72nd Street, even at these slow speeds. Joe felt no surprise, only a sense of grim determination, when he saw the two cars parked broadside beyond the sawhorses. “That one, too,” he said, and swung away, still heading south.
Tom turned his head to the left and saw the blocked exit. Grimacing, staring at the guy in the back seat again, he said to Joe, “Then they’re all blocked.”
“I know,” Joe said.
The guy in the back seat grinned a little, nodding. “That’s right,” he said. “Give it up. What’s the point?”
Tom’s mind was scrambling. He was sure they were going down in defeat, but he’d keep bobbing and weaving all the way to the bottom. “We can’t just drive around,” he said. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
Frustration was making Joe angry; things were supposed to work differently from this. Thumping a fist against the steering wheel, he said, “What the hell do we do now?”
The guy in the back seat finally reached into the other basket, and pulled out a handful of phony stock certificates and pieces of newspaper. He looked surprised for just a second, then held the papers up, gave Tom a pitying grin, and said, “You two are really stupid. I just can’t believe how stupid you are.”
“You shut your face,” Tom said.
Joe abruptly slammed on the brakes. “Get him out,” he said. “Get him out or shoot him.”
Tom gestured with the gun. “Out.”
The guy pushed open the door, making a passing cyclist wobble onto the grass to avoid an accident. “You’re all through,” the guy told them, and slid out of the car, and Joe hit the accelerator while he was still departing. The door, snapping shut, nicked him on the left elbow, and Tom saw him wince and grab the elbow and trot away toward Central Park West.
Tom faced front. Fifty-ninth Street was just ahead of them, with the spur road angling off toward Columbus Circle. Cars there, too.
“There’s got to be a way out,” Joe said. He was clutching the steering wheel hard enough to bend it. He was enraged and bewildered because he was the hero of his life, and the hero always has a way out.
“Keep rolling,” Tom said. He expected nothing anymore, but as long as they were moving it hadn’t ended yet.
They swept around the curve at the southern tip of the park, the car moving through the cyclists like a whale through trout. They passed the Seventh Avenue turn-off and there were cars out there, too, but they expected that by now.
The Sixth Avenue entrance was ahead of them, on the right. Sixth Avenue is one-way, leading uptown toward the park, so there’s no automobile exit there, just an entrance. It was blocked anyway, with two cars parked across it.
The Drive was curving again, leftward, starting up the other side of the park. The Sixth Avenue entrance angled in ahead of them on the right. Farther along, up by the bridge, they both suddenly saw maybe fifteen or twenty men, standing around in the roadway.
Just standing around. Some with bicycles, some not. Talking together, in little groups. Leaving enough room between them for bicycles to get through, but not enough for a car.
“God damn it,” Joe said.
“They blocked—” Tom stopped, and just stared.
It wasn’t any good. Run those people down and it wouldn’t be the mob they had to worry about anymore, it would be their own kind that would get them. The park would fill up with law in nothing flat.
But they couldn’t stop.
Joe hunched lower over the wheel. “Hold tight,” he said.
Tom stared at him. He wasn’t going to plow through those guys anyway, was he? “What are you going to do?”
“Just hold tight.”
The Sixth Avenue entrance was right there, the long approach road curving back southward to the edge of the park. Suddenly Joe yanked the wheel hard right; they climbed a curb, cut across grass, bounced down over another curb, and were headed toward Sixth Avenue, due south, with Joe’s foot flat on the accelerator.
Tom yelled, “Jesus Christ!”
“Siren,” Joe shouted. “Siren and light.”
Pop-eyed, staring out the windshield, Tom felt on the dashboard for the familiar switches, hit them, and heard the growl of the siren start to build.
The patrol car lunged at the sawhorses, and at the two cars parked sideways beyond them. They blocked the road from curb to curb.
But they didn’t block the sidewalk. Siren howling, red light flashing, the car raced at the roadblock, and at the last second Joe spun the wheel leftward and they vaulted over the curb, slicing through between the blockage and the stone park wall.
“Move!” Joe yelled at the people running every which way on the sidewalk. Even Tom couldn’t hear him, with the siren screaming, but the people moved, diving left and right, yanking themselves out of the way by their own shirt collars. Traffic going east and west on 59th Street abruptly jammed up as though they’d hit a wall, opening a line across like the path through the Red Sea. The hoods at the roadblock were clambering into their cars to give chase, and the patrol car wasn’t even past them yet.
Lamp post. They shot across the sidewalk, Joe nudged the wheel a bit to the right, and they flicked by between the post and one of the parked cars. They both felt the jolt when the right rear of their car kissed off the bumper of the other; and then they were through.
And Joe headed straight south. Tom threw his hands up in the air and screamed at the top of his voice, “Holy jumping Jesus!”
Sixth Avenue is one-way north, and five lanes wide. The patrol car was heading south, and three blocks ahead was a phalanx of traffic spread completely across the avenue, coming this way, moving along at about twenty-five miles an hour, following the sequence of the staggered green lights. They covered the road from left to right, they were coming in a tight mass like a cattle drive, and Tom and Joe were tearing toward them at about sixty, and accelerating every second.
Joe was driving one-handed, waving the other hand at the oncoming traffic, yelling at them under the siren, while Tom pressed against the seatback and braced the heels of his hands against the dashboard, and just stared.