Pete rocked his head toward the back seat. “Imagine the scene in here if I don’t. Anyway it’s gonna work.”
Angelica was nodding, and biting her knuckle again. She took her bloody hand away from her face long enough to say, “I can see you’re going to do it. If you die—listen to me!—if you die here I will not forgive you.”
Pete dragged his knees up until he was crouching on the seat. “I’m not gonna die.” He threw a bright glance at Cochran and said, “Watch me, and the truck. Compensate.”
Cochran was dizzy with the realization that there was no way out of this. “Get it over with,” he said tightly, gripping the wheel and gently fluttering the gas pedal to keep the car’s bumper close to the truck’s. He didn’t dare glance away from the truck’s horribly close back window to look at the speedometer, but the lane markers were hurtling past and he knew the two vehicles must be doing sixty miles per hour.
Pete hiked himself up to sit on the windowsill, with his whole upper body out of the car, out in the battering rain; then he raised his left knee outside and braced the sole of his shoe against the doorpost. He leaned forward against the headwind, and peripherally through the windshield Cochran saw his right hand grip the base of the radio antenna; then Cochran was aware of the fingertips of Pete’s left hand pressed against the top edge of the windshield glass.
“Fucking lunatic,” Cochran whispered absently. The steering wheel and the gas pedal seemed to be living extensions of himself, aching with muscular tension, and he felt that he was using the car to reach out and hold the speeding truck.
And he was balanced in the driver’s seat, ready for it, when Pete jackknifed forward and slammed prone against the outside of the windshield; Cochran just raised his head to be able to see over the blur of Pete’s shoulder against the glass, and the speeding car didn’t wobble in the lane.
Angelica was muttering syllables in which Cochran heard the name Ogun several times; and in one corner of his mind he realized that the words droning in his own head were the Lord’s Prayer.
Outside the glass, Pete’s hands were braced out to the sides and in front of him as he slowly drew in his feet and edged forward across the car’s hood on his knees. His weight was on his fingertips, and it seemed to be his hands that were maintaining his balance.
Houdini’s hands, Cochran thought.
Now the fingers of Pete’s right hand were curled over the front edge of the car hood, and the left hand slowly lifted in the rushing headwind…and beckoned.
Cochran increased the pressure of his foot on the gas pedal by an infinitesimal degree; and he felt a nevertheless solid clang shake the car as its bumper touched the truck’s.
And in that instant Pete’s hands had both lifted away from the hood, and his legs had straightened as he lunged forward in a dive.
Angelica exhaled sharply, and Cochran could only guess at the control it had taken for her to make no greater sound.
But now Pete’s shoes were clearly visible kicking in dark gap under the raised back window of the truck. He had gone into the truck rather than under the car’s wheels.
Cochran was shouting with hysterical laughter as he snatched his foot off the gas pedal and trod on the brake, and Angelica was laughing too, though the sudden deceleration had thrown her against the dashboard.
“He must have landed right on Crane’s skeleton!” Cochran yelled delightedly.
“He’ll come up wearing the skull like a hat!” agreed Angelica.
“A skullcap!” crowed Cochran, and then he and Angelica were both laughing so hard that he had to slow down still more to keep from weaving in the lane.
“A kamikaze yarmulke,” choked Angelica. “Catch up, catch up, you don’t want to lose ’em now. And turn the windshield wipers back on.”
Cochran’s hands were shaking on the wheel now., and the tires thumped over the lane markers as the car drifted back and forth. When he switched the windshield wipers back on, he could see the dim silhouette of Pete Sullivan inside the truck, clambering over the seats.
When Pete seemed to have got up to the driver’s seat the truck wobbled visibly and then backfired like a cannonshot, with two flashes of bright yellow flame at the exhaust pipes by the back wheels.
Then Cochran saw Pete Sullivan’s hand wave out of the driver’s-side window, and the truck swayed smoothly back and forth in a clearly deliberate S-pattern.
Angelica exhaled. “He’s got control,” she said softly. “He’ll be pulling over real quick.”
“Not here,” said Cochran, “there’s no shoulder.” He let himself finally take his eyes off the truck and look around at the landscape. The gray surf still streaked the sea beyond the fence to the right, but at some point they had passed the green forest wall of Golden Gate Park, and now it was low pastel-colored apartment buildings and bungalows that fretted the gray sky to the left. “He’ll want to turn inland to find some place we can park,” he said, and he clicked his left-turn indicator to give Pete the idea.
PETE STEERED the blue truck in a careful left turn onto Sloat Boulevard, and then drove slowly through half a dozen residential blocks of old white-stucco houses to the parking lot at the South Sunset Playground. There were no other cars in the lot as Cochran swung the Granada into the parking space next to the truck, and Angelica was out of the car before he had even come to a full stop. When Cochran turned off the ignition and got out, she was already standing at the opened passenger-side door of the truck. The rain had stopped and the clouds were breaking up in the east, and the mirror lenses of Angelica’s sunglasses flashed as she leaned into the truck cab over Mavranos.
“Can you push against Pete’s hands with your feet?” she was saying to Mavranos. “Both feet? Good! Open your eyes, Arky, I want to check your pupils.” She looked up toward Pete, who was still behind the wheel of the truck. “We’ll need to get him to a hospital, stat. He’s conscious, with no bleeding from the ears or nostrils, and this isn’t a bullet wound, but…he was knocked out, it is a concussion.”
She doesn’t want to say possible subdural hematoma, thought Cochran nervously. Mavranos is probably in shock, and doesn’t need to hear that there might be blood leaking inside his skull, lethally pressing against the brain.
Plumtree had climbed out of the back of the car now, and she was leaning on the front fender, blinking around at the lawns and swing sets and the two vehicles. “Did it work?” she asked hoarsely.
“Not a bullet wound?” said Cochran, reluctant to answer Plumtree. He could see that the truck’s windshield was starred with cracks radiating from a hole low down on the passenger side. “What is it then?”
Angelica turned her mirror lenses toward him, then held out a fragment of polished white stone. “A bullet hit this statue he had on his dashboard—some kind of Buddha—and part of it hit him, to judge by the fragments in his scalp. A glancing blow to the back of the head, above the occipital region.” She turned back to Mavranos, whose head Cochran could just see on the truck seat. “Arky,” she said. “Open your eyes for me.”
“Did it fucking work?” Plumtree demanded. “Is Scott Crane alive now?”
Cochran bared his teeth in irritation and pity. “No, Cody. It—failed, I’m sorry.”
“I think the truck was heading back to Leucadia,” said Pete, who had opened the driver’s-side door and had one foot down on the pavement. “I think it would have driven all the way back there, like a horse that knows the way home—if somebody would have filled the gas tank every hour.”