T-junction just below. Docker came to a full stop, lights out, just as an olive green MP sedan whipped by unseeing on Lincoln. Intentionally or not, Docker had come in a circle. Lights still out, he wrenched the wheel over, shot into line behind the MP vehicle, using their lights. Crissi angled in again like a bad summer rerun.
“This is Control. Where is subject vehicle?”
“Unit Four. Vehicle left Lincoln at Hoffman Street.”
“Hoffman Street has a temporary wooden barricade across it. Block access...”
“What the hell!”
“Receiving your transmission poorly, Unit Four. 10–9 your message.”
“Subject vehicle riding your lights, Unit One.”
The olive green sedan with Docker tight behind had swung around Lincoln and back toward the view area access again. The sedan began bucking and sliding as it tried to stop where it could block the bridge access road. Instead, it slid right by and into the side of Unit Four, which was backing out of Hoffman Road like a frustrated foxhound from a blocked lair. No way by for Docker now, on Lincoln, to get out to Twenty-Fifth Avenue.
Hard right, his lights transfixing gaping neckers, fish-mouthed in the glare as he slewed by them. Across the access to the northbound bridge lanes was parked a CHP black-and-white, meticulously observing the Military Police’s jurisdictional sway.
Docker didn’t even try. Instead, he whipped a vicious left between concrete traffic islands, stuffed her straight into the underpass which led beneath the toll plaza’s multilanes.
Beyond the open square of tunnel, T-junction. Left again.
This put the fleeing Montego on a sunken access road that rose quickly up to highway level. Left again would put him on the return lanes to the city, inbound on US 101.
But right...
Gunning forty, forty-five, fifty, right through the Bridge Employees Only parking lot. This was enclosed by a ten-foot high hurricane fence but at the far end was a wide double gate with a green sign reading “25th Ave Exit.”
Twenty-Fifth Avenue was where Sea Cliff began — Sea Cliff, where Walter Hariss lived.
A jeep was beside the gate, two uniformed MPs were in the act of running the two sides shut.
“Hai!” yelled Docker as if he were delivering a karate blow.
His lights pinned them to the mesh. They leaped, for the instant movie stuntmen caught up with by real life, then they were tumbling away, skun-up but unhurt, as with a terrible spronging impact Docker’s car hit the place where the two gates met.
Through, gates wide and drunkenly bent behind him, instantly gone in the fog. Lights probing great shadowy cypresses bent back away from the road, from the sea, by the incessant ocean winds.
By breasting the hill, Docker would find an intersection with Lincoln Boulevard which still might be able to carry him out of the Presidio at Twenty-Fifth Avenue.
But the big yellow car just kept going straight after it had gone through the gate. Off the reddish shoulder of the road, crash, thump, metal dragging the ground but still moving. Docker not decelerating, roaring along a narrow, rutted gravel and dirt road full of potholes that struck the springs like cannon fire. High beams here, where the fog was made patchy by crumbling concrete gun emplacements from World War II on the right, the backs of weathered clerical buildings of the same vintage with old-fashioned screen windows on the left.
For the moment Docker was totally lost to the pursuers behind. Fog like smoke, close-set cypresses, the gravel road suddenly three gravel roads, each of them also branching...
Hard shuddering turn to the right, gravel thundering on the car’s underbody. Toward the ocean, losing options, trapped in a narrow strip of wild wasteland between sea-cliffs and Lincoln Boulevard. Scrub brush. Gnarled, wind-tortured cypresses. Somewhere behind, faint as baying hounds, the lights and sirens of pursuit.
Here, dripping fog. Brush. Then an opening out, a sense of breadth and distance. On his right, the immense grey bulk of an abandoned gun emplacement and bunkers pitted by the shell-fire of time.
Swirling fog sent his lights reflecting whitely back, but Docker could see he was on a huge flat gravel area nearly as large as a football field. He drove on, slowly now as if feeling his way.
The breadth narrowed. Great flat brow of bunker on the right, unbroken as a prison wall, pinching him left, left. Until ahead the wall ended in densely tangled brush no car could get through.
Wall on the right, impenetrable brush ahead, pursuit somewhere behind. And to the left, the gravel expanse just... ended.
Dead ended. The only way out was the way by which he had come in.
Docker backed the sleek, battered car away from the brush fifteen, twenty feet, paused, then turned left and drove very slowly forward toward the abrupt lip his lights showed him despite the great ropes of fog flowing up over the cliff face. He stopped a dozen feet from the edge of oblivion.
Docker left the lights on, the motor running, got out almost leisurely. He seemed to have all the time there was. Behind, somewhere, the ineluctable keen of sirens, but it was as if these had lost all meaning and importance now.
He walked out beyond his headlights, stood with his feet on the crumbly edge of California. From directly in front and far below, three hundred feet below, came the startling blunt thud of breakers on jagged rock and hard wet sand. Thud, thunder of withdrawal, like distant, outmoded trains, thud again. Since the million years of rain which had cooled a spinning mass to make it the planet earth, it had been like that. And would be till the planet ceased to turn.
Darkness, death and thunder down below, pursuit and capture and another sort of death behind.
Docker walked almost idly back to the car, sat behind the wheel, leaving his door open for the moment. It could have been that the sirens were fractionally closer through the muffling fog. But sound plays tricks on dripping, misted nights.
Docker picked up the attaché case from the seat, got out, limped over to the brush with it. He opened it by the glow of his parking lights stuffed into it his few small personal things; he would never need them again. Then he set the case in behind the twisted bushes where only someone with an idea of where to look would be likely to find it.
He went back to the car, got into it again. The sirens were definitely louder. There might have been a vague ghost of light cast momentarily up against the bottom of the fog somewhere behind him.
“Docker, baby, you’ve run out of time,” he said aloud.
He picked up the lug wrench he had placed on the seat earlier, hefted it in his still-gloved hands as if momentarily considering it as a weapon.
But the lug wrench was not a weapon. The time for weapons was past. Docker snorted through his nose as if at his own hesitation.
He looked back once again. Aura of light, definite now. The sirens moaning closer, perhaps only seconds away. He turned and looked to his front, through the windshield that could show him only pouring fog. Docker’s hands convulsed around the wheel.
Docker shifted his weight, and the accelerator was depressed, stayed down, the motor rose to a whine, a roar like a jet’s run-up. Finally his hand hovered over the gear shift. The fingers flexed. The hand, with a convulsive movement, rammed it into low.
The Montego shot forward, Docker’s final shout lost in the rattling spray of gravel against the undersides of the fenders as the rear wheels spun for traction. Slightly fishtailing, the car shot out into the void. Its lights glared for a moment at the lip of gravel, then looked at only vertical fog as it dropped into space.
The first pursuing jeep, whippet-aerial slashing like a rider’s crop, burst out onto the gravel field just as the Montego, somersaulting lazily in mid-air, struck the sharp granite shoulder which thrust far out into the sea three hundred feet below. The jeep slowed to a stop with its lights on the drag-strip wheel marks leading to infinity.