"As soon as I saw it, I didn't even go inside. I came straight back to the car."
I turned the wheel savagely and almost ran over a golf cart ferrying guests to their rooms.
"Where are you going?" Rhonda demanded.
"To the desk. We need to report this."
"No."
"No?" I echoed. "What the hell do you mean, ‘No'?"
"Just what I said. Reporting it could take hours. I want to deliver those pictures first."
God keep me from stubborn women!
Exasperated, I started to argue and then thought better of it. After all, if she didn't feel an urgency to report it right away, why the hell should I?
"Which way do we go?" I asked.
"Right on Lincoln," she said. "Then south on Invergordon."
Following directions, I turned back onto Lincoln eastbound. I was only a block or so away when I saw a set of headlights come up fast behind us. He had his high beams on, so I noticed him right away. At first I didn't think that much about it. I could tell it was one of those big four-wheel-drive jobs driven by somebody with the typical four-by-four attitude-the-world-is-my-ashtray mentality. I expected him to race around us, and he almost did. But then suddenly, for no apparent reason, he dropped back behind us and stayed there.
That worried me. When yahoos like that don't pass, they've got to have a reason. I glanced in the rearview mirror, trying to get a better look at the vehicle, but the bright lights blinded me.
It was early evening on an October Saturday, and traffic was fairly light. I tried speeding up, so did he, maintaining the same distance between the two vehicles.
"What's wrong?" Rhonda asked anxiously.
"Don't look back, but I think we've got a tail. Where do we turn?"
"The next light."
It was just turning green as we approached. There was no chance of catching a red. Abruptly, I stepped on the brakes and almost stopped, forcing the vehicle behind us to come far closer than the driver of the pickup had intended. I could see enough detail then to know it was a dark-colored, late-model Toyota 4-X-4 with huge, outsized tires. In the glow of the headlights from the car behind him, I could see the silhouettes of four round driving lights, "asshole lights" we call them, studding the top of the cab.
Behind us a horn blared.
"What are you going to do?" Rhonda asked.
Without a weapon of any kind, there was no point in forcing a confrontation. "Lose him," I said.
It sounded good, but it didn't mean a goddamned thing. Back home in Seattle, where I know all the streets and their intersecting nooks and crannies, it would have been easy to do, but there in Arizona, in unfamiliar territory driving a car with no guts, it was a bad joke. My only hope was to drive erratically enough to attract the attention of some passing traffic cop. With luck I might manage to offend some poor bloke into reporting me on his cellular phone.
Jamming the accelerator to the floorboard, I fishtailed onto Invergordon with the 4-X-4 right behind me. Far ahead of us the orange light at the next intersection turned red.
"What's that street up there?"
"At the light? Chaparral," she answered. "The one after that is Camelback."
I recognized Camelback as one of the heavily traveled arterials.
"Make sure your shoulder strap's on tight," I warned grimly, snapping my own across my chest. "This could get rough."
Mentally I timed the light as I wound the Subaru up as tight as it would go. I sailed through the first one on green and made a mad dash for the second. I could see the passing headlights of cross traffic as vehicles moved sedately across Invergordon on Camelback. A pair of headlights approached the intersection from the other direction. Desperately I hoped that the light on Invergordon was a demand light set on a short cycle in our direction.
We were three blocks away and still accelerating when the light facing us turned green. It switched back to orange as soon as the oncoming car moved into the intersection.
I'm still not sure if Rhonda knew what I was planning, but she didn't say a word. The light was red as we started through the intersection. Naturally, there was one hotshot who jumped the light. He clipped our back fender and spun into the path of the 4-X-4, which dodged crazily from side to side. There was a chorus of honking horns in our wake, but I was too busy fighting to get the Subaru back under control to see exactly what happened in the intersection behind us.
For a moment or so, it looked like we had gotten clear. In the rearview mirror the pickup seemed to be trapped in a maelstrom of stalled vehicles, while before us Invergordon lay straight and flat and empty.
But before I could breathe a sigh of relief, I saw the DEAD END sign beside the street and knew we were still in trouble.
"Dead end!" I yelped. "What the hell do they mean, dead end?"
"The canal," Rhonda replied through clenched teeth. "The Arizona Canal. It's right up here."
"Shit! So how do we get out of here? Right or left?"
"I don't know."
I wanted to get off Invergordon and duck into a side street before the pickup got loose from Camelback. I figured there was a fifty-fifty chance of making the right choice. I swung left onto a small side street. For a moment I thought it was going to be all right, but then we ran into a T.
People on the run instinctively turn right, so I swung left again, hoping to outfox our pursuer. We came out on a street called Calle Redondo that seemed to run on a diagonal. Behind it was a tall chain link fence.
"What's beyond the fence?" I asked, "The canal?"
"Yes."
"Is there water in it?"
Rhonda craned her neck. "I can't tell. Probably."
"How deep?"
"Seven or eight feet."
"Great."
Beyond the canal was another street, one that appeared to cross the canal, if only we could find a way to get over onto it. The problem was, the guy in the pickup had come to the same conclusion. He must have seen me turn left off Invergordon and realized there was only one way out of the maze. As we came around a blind corner onto Lafayette, I saw him lying in wait, parked inside the fence on the access road that ran next to the canal. He was hanging back, hoping to pounce as soon as we surfaced.
"What are you going to do?" Rhonda asked.
"Something that son of a bitch doesn't expect," I told her. "Brace yourself."
Shoving the accelerator all the way to the floor, I aimed for the 4-X-4's looming front left tire and nailed that sucker head-on, doing a good thirty-five miles an hour.
From what I remember of Doc Ramsey's high school physics class at Ballard High School, when a moving object hits a stationary one, the stationary one shares the momentum of the moving one. During the intervening twenty-eight years, everything else may have changed, but the laws of physics hadn't.
The Subaru stopped dead in its tracks with its nose bent straight into the ground while the pickup started moving. As the shoulder belt cut painfully into my collarbone, I caught only a brief glimpse of the shocked driver's open-mouthed amazement as his behemoth truck went ass-backwards into the canal. With the oversized tires half floating and half bouncing off the bottom, the truck, still right side up, floated out of sight under the bridge.
In this updated, four-wheel-drive version of David and Goliath, the Subaru may have won hands down, but the folks at Alamo sure as hell weren't going to like it.
CHAPTER 16
Whoever said you can never find a cop when you need one was dead wrong. By the time I had helped a dazed but unhurt Rhonda Attwood out of the crippled Subaru, we found a whole wad of cops, or rather they found us, summoned to the scene by an irate jogger who insisted he had seen the whole thing and it was all my fault. The incident left me with a whole lot of explaining to do, although not nearly as much as I would have expected.