The Cheyenne Nation walked past me. “Looks like a high-five.” I glanced up, and it did. “What now?”
“Well, while we’re waiting for William White Eyes, we look for a note.”
We looked for fifteen minutes. No note. Vic was sitting on the hillside looking at the book of statuary, and Dog had decided to join her. Henry and I were still searching the surrounding trees in hopes that the wind might have caught the note and landed it on a branch but had still found nothing. “It is not here.”
“I’m beginning to think you’re right.”
We walked back over and stood in front of Vic, and Henry asked. “Is this the only Medicine Man?”
She placed a hand across the open page and looked up. “Yes.”
I shrugged. “I guess we might as well head back to the hospital.”
Henry had parked the Thunderbird across Edgely Street. We made our way to the car when I noticed a tricked-out, fully chromed Escalade bristling with oversized wheels, brush guards, and enough off-road lights to illuminate the Miracle Mile. It was stopped at a discreet distance, and I was thinking about William White Eyes when the tinted windowed vehicle made a casual U-turn and thrummed its way back toward the reservoir and the depths of Fairmount Park.
“If you were an Indian in the city, where would you hide?” I held out my hand to Henry as we watched the Escalade disappear behind the sloping green of Athletic Field. “Gimme your keys.”
“Why?”
I started around the car toward the driver’s side and tossed the daypack into the backseat, feeling the weight of my. 45 inside. “You drive too slow.”
He stopped and looked genuinely hurt. “I do not.”
“Give them to me!”
He handed me the gold-colored anniversary keys that he had put on the lucky rabbit’s foot chain. Vic quickly climbed in the back with Dog, and Henry took shotgun. “Do not wreck Lola.”
In the rearview mirror, I watched as Vic put her arm around Dog. “I’ll try not to.”
I fired up the 430-cubic-inch police interceptor and began intercepting. Fortunately, we were parked in the right direction, so I gunned her and quickly motored across the hill, following the only road the Cadillac could have taken. At Fountain Green Drive we had to make a decision. Vic hung over the seat and pointed left. “Stay on the reservoir road. He’ll either double back or continue the loop back up 33rd.”
She was right. We turned the corner in time to see a black Escalade continuing north on the four-lane. I made a turn on a late yellow, drifted to the right, and pulled in behind a delivery van in the slow lane. Back at Dauphin he stopped at the light, and we slowed behind the truck, but the light changed too quickly. “Damn.”
Henry’s eyes stayed on the black SUV. “What?”
“If he’d stopped at the light a little longer, I was going to get out.”
“Yes, that worked so well last time…”
Vic was still hanging between the seats as I pulled around the step-van and accelerated. The Cadillac made a left without hitting the turn signal, then a hard right on Strawberry Drive. “I don’t suppose either of you got the license number yet?”
I hung back at the turn, but it’s hard to go unnoticed when you are a powder blue vintage convertible with a cowboy, an Indian, a brunette, and a dog inside. He had steadily accelerated as we approached the light at Strawberry Mansion Bridge, and by the time he got to the intersection, he was running a straight sixty. Fortunately, the light was green, and we shot onto the ramp of the bridge about ninety feet behind him, barely missing a bicyclist who shook his fist at us.
The fifty-year-old steering on the big Bird felt a little loose as we dropped over the Schuylkill Expressway and watched as the Caddy continued to gain speed but easily make the corner at Greenland Drive. I hit the brakes a little as I turned the wheel, powered through the curve, and flattened the accelerator to the floor as the bulk of the cast-iron engine exploded internally, shooting us up the tree-lined thoroughfare at eighty.
I noticed that Vic had pulled my. 45 from the pack. “There’s a stop sign up here!”
I saw the Escalade blow through the sign with a squealing right and continue up the next street at full throttle. I looked over my left shoulder but couldn’t see anything but the forest for the trees. We were committed, and I only hoped that our luck would hold as I kept the pedal to the classic metal.
I had guessed we’d pushed our luck about as far as it would go when I saw the brand-spanking-new Grand Cherokee pulling the two-bay horse trailer just as we got to Chamounix Drive. I cut the wheel, and we dropped off the road, easily outrunning the laboring Jeep and jumping the street. We missed an oncoming Volvo station wagon in the other lane, slid into the gravel approach to the stables, and clipped the sign as everybody blew their horns. I saw the Jeep turn into the stables as we renegotiated the asphalt and straightened into our lane. I looked down the road ahead of us but could see nothing.
“I cannot believe you just dented Lola.”
I ignored him and slowed, asking over my shoulder. “Where does this go?”
She slid the mechanism back on the semiautomatic. “It connects with Conshohocken Avenue, turning back where we came from, or down Falls Road and the expressway.”
I yelled over the engine and wind noise. “Which way would you go?”
“Expressway!”
We rounded the corner, drove behind a large mansion, and suddenly the point became moot. There were large sawhorses across the road that effectively blocked entry and declared in large black and orange letters, ROAD CLOSED DUE TO CONSTRUCTION.
I hit the brakes, and we all looked at each other. Vic gestured with her chin. “Go on ahead around the circle and back down.”
I followed her directions and continued around and back onto the drive, where we could see straight down Chamounix. There was no Escalade. She gestured to the right, where an unlabeled road disappeared into the trees. “There.”
I made the turn and hit the throttle again. “Where does it go?”
“Nowhere. It dead-ends in about a quarter mile.”
I made a sweeping turn and looked down at a pastoral idyll. I could see the Cadillac backing up with the beginning of a three-point turn at the end of the road. I hit the gas and barreled down the two-lane drive with no name, rapidly coming up on the black Caddy. He finished the turn and whipped the big vehicle straight at us. My nerve stayed steady as we approached each other at a climbing sixty.
Henry grabbed the dash. “What if it is not William White Eyes?”
Almost in answer, I felt and saw two things: the tinted side window on the Caddy was down and something was being thrust between the side-view mirror and the windshield. At the same time, I felt Vic rise and shoot just as the tick-tock compressed fire of a fully automatic weapon blistered the surface of the road in front of us and ripped its way up the front of the Thunderbird.
I veered to the right as the windshield exploded, and I tried to yank Vic down by her leather jacket. The return fire of the big Colt had struck home, and I watched as the heavy slugs bit into the hood, windshield, and door of the Escalade as it rushed by us and glanced off the side of the T-bird.
I hit the brakes and turned the wheel, stretching our momentum into a sliding turn, but at least two of the tires were flat, and we warbled to a stop; the Escalade was about fifty yards back down the road. I threw the door open and pushed off from the side of the car. I’m not sure what I thought I was going to do without a sidearm, but I figured I’d think of something when I got there. I heard Dog barking and coming up fast behind me.