His headlight beams caught just enough of Cosmo Betrossian climbing out of the empty drum! Farley had time to step on the accelerator hard, but by the time he got to the gate, Cosmo had swung it closed!
The Corolla slammed into the gate and stopped, its left headlight broken and its front fender driven into the tire. The engine died, and in utter panic Farley turned the key off and on as Cosmo ran up to the car, a pistol in his hand.
“Stop, Farley!” Cosmo yelled. “I shall not hurt you!”
Farley was sobbing when the engine finally kicked over, and he slammed the shift into reverse and backed all the way across the yard, bashing into the door of the office, breaking both taillights and jerking his head back.
Odar was going mad! The dog was snapping and snarling and barking hoarsely, his muzzle white with froth. He was lunging at the car that was crashing and smashing things. Lunging at the running man who had showed up two hours after his master leashed him to the wire and left him. Odar wanted to attack! Anybody! Anything!
Farley dropped the shift into low and gunned it, aiming at Cosmo, who leaped aside and fired a shot through the passenger window behind Farley’s head. Farley drove for the gate and rammed it a second time. The car shuddered and recoiled again but the gate still stood. He looked in his side-view mirror and saw Cosmo running toward the car, gun in one hand, flashlight in the other.
Farley reversed it again and floored the accelerator. The tires spun and burned and smoked and the car jetted in reverse and Cosmo leaped out of the way again and fired a second shot and a third, the recoil taking both rounds over the top of the Corolla’s roof.
The car was hurtling backward with its driver not knowing which way to turn, but turn he did, this time avoiding a rear-end crash into the office building. Then Farley slammed on the brakes and spun to a stop, his head still reeling.
He could see the blur in his headlights and knew it was Cosmo Betrossian coming to kill him, so he dropped it in low and gunned it and jerked the wheel left, uncertain if Cosmo was still there, even though he could hear the gunfire and see muzzle flashes coming at him. Farley’s damaged left front fender just clipped Cosmo on the hip and he flew twenty feet across the asphalt, landing on that same hip, losing his pistol in a jumble of scrap metal and grease rags.
Farley knew he’d hit Cosmo and he floored it again, driving right at the gate, but at the last second he mashed on the brakes, got out, and ran to the gate, expecting to be struck in the back of the head by a bullet. Farley threw back the steel bolt and swung the gate almost open but when he turned he saw Cosmo staggering toward him, without a pistol now but carrying a metal bar that he’d picked up from the scrap heap. Cosmo was limping and cursing in his language. And coming at him.
Farley got the gate all the way open and headed for the driver’s seat but he was too late. Cosmo was on him and the bar smashed the driver’s side window after Farley ducked. Then Farley was running with Cosmo after him, running into the darkness, running toward the rows of stacked cars waiting to be crushed, then toward another row waiting to be stripped and sold for parts.
Odar had had all he could handle. These two intruders running through his yard were too much for him. His canine adrenaline was overflowing and he took a run, a long run at both men, and the leash drew as tight as piano wire and the overhead line that held the leash snapped. And Odar, eyes aflame, fangs bared, his entire face covered in foam, narrowed those demon eyes and came at them.
Farley saw Odar first and scrambled on top of a wrecked Plymouth, pulling himself onto the roof. Cosmo saw Odar too but had no time to swing at him with the bar, and taking a cue from Farley, he leaped onto the deck lid of a wrecked Audi, scuttling up onto the roof with Odar behind him, his black coat glistening in the moonlight.
The dog vaulted up, slipped, fell from the car onto the ground, then tried again and in a few seconds was standing on the Audi roof dragging his leash. But Cosmo had jumped from the roof of the Audi to the hood of a Pontiac and from the Pontiac across to the roof of a nearly stripped Suburban. Suddenly, Odar abandoned the chase of Cosmo and switched his attention to Farley, who was also leapfrogging cars and partially stripped car bodies, until he turned around, horrified to see the goddamn dog doing the same and coming after him!
Cosmo’s injured hip began to freeze up on him now, and Farley caught his breath on the roof of an old Cadillac while the confused dog crouched on the hood of a Mustang between them, looking from one man to the other, uncertain which he should attack.
Cosmo began speaking to the dog in Armenian then, trying to win him over with the language the animal was used to hearing. He began issuing gentle commands in his mother tongue.
Farley, who was not as badly injured as Cosmo but every bit as exhausted, also tried persuading the dog, but when Farley tried to speak, he was blubbering and hysterical and tears ran down into his mouth as he cried, “Don’t listen to him, Odar! You’re like me! I’m an odar, too! Kill him! Kill the fucking Armo!”
Odar started for Farley then and Farley screamed like a woman. The scream of terror triggered something in the attack animal. The dog whirled, hurtled from deck lid to hood to roof, flying at Cosmo like a missile, driving Cosmo off the car onto the ground. The dog’s momentum took him with Cosmo and he landed on the ground at a twisting angle, yelped in pain, and came up limping badly. Within seconds he was unable to walk at all on his left rear leg, and hardly at all on his right.
By then Farley was running for his car, and he made it and jumped in but was unable to start it. Weeping, he flooded the engine, then turned off the ignition and locked the door as Cosmo limped to the scrap heap where he’d lost the pistol. But Cosmo’s flashlight was gone too, and he could only dig his hands into the twisted metal until he found the gun, cutting a finger to the bone in the process.
Farley tried the ignition again and the car started! He dropped it into low and stomped the accelerator at the same instant that Cosmo appeared at the passenger window and fired five rounds through the glass, missing with the first four. The fifth and last round entered through Farley’s right armpit as his hand was cranking the wheel left and the car was digging out and burning rubber.
Out of the fight, the dog sat on his right hip, snarling and howling at Cosmo, who limped to his Cadillac which had been concealed behind the office building, started it up, and tried to drive after Farley. But Cosmo hadn’t driven a quarter of a mile before he had to pull off the road, rip off his T-shirt, and use it to stem the blood that was flowing from a nasty head gash and running into his eyes and blinding him.
Farley is a quarter of a mile down that junkyard road before he knows he’s been shot. He reaches down with his left hand, feels the warm wetness, and begins bawling. Still, he keeps driving, one headlight lighting the road in front, smashed fenders scraping both front tires.
Farley loses track of time but just follows his instincts onto east Sunset Boulevard, where it begins near downtown Los Angeles. Sometimes Farley stops for traffic lights, sometimes not, and he never sees the police car that spots him cruising through a red light at Alvarado as several motorists slam on brakes and blow horns and yell at him.
He is driving leisurely now through all those ethnic neighborhoods where people speak the languages of Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Far East as well as Russian and Armenian and Arabic and a dozen other languages he hates. Heading west, heading toward Hollywood, heading home.
Farley Ramsdale does not hear the police siren either and of course has no knowledge that a Rampart Division unit has broadcast a pursuit of a white Corolla along with his license number and his location and direction, causing Hollywood Division cars to start heading for Sunset Boulevard, everyone convinced that this incredibly reckless drunk will blow at least a.25 on the Breathalyser because he’s weaving along Sunset at only thirty miles an hour, causing oncoming traffic to veer right and stop, and is apparently oblivious to the sirens and the queue of black-and-whites that have joined in behind the pursuit car.