“If whoever’s following us doesn’t catch us first.”
She looks at him sharply.
Niko points out the window. “You can see their light on the walls. Behind our headlights. It’s him, isn’t it?”
She scowls at the rearview. “It’s a pair of headlights.”
“It’s him.” That goddamn cold spot creeping back between his shoulderblades. “He waited for the car to heal itself and then he came after us.” Niko looks out the window at light from the headlamps shining far behind them. “How far back is he?”
“Hard to say.” She chews her lower lip.
Niko senses more bad news. “What now?”
“Black Taxi driver’s kind of an independent contractor. He follows company rules but he doesn’t really work for the company.” She glances again at the rearview. “His rules let him go past the gate. And he’s not mortal on the world. Otherwise what use would he be?”
“So he’ll try to distract us all the way back up.”
“At the very least.”
“Well, we’ll just try to outdrive him until we’re out. What else can we do?”
“I don’t think it’ll stop there.” She indicates the jar.
“But they gave Jemma back. It ends when we’re back, when we’re out of here.”
“They really like technicalities. Loopholes. She’s not back until her soul’s back where it belongs. He’ll try to get her before that.”
“What, does he work on commission? He already did his job.”
“You stole his car and wrecked it.”
Niko stops. The rushing dark ahead looks exactly the way he feels inside. “So now it’s personal.”
“I’d be pretty pissed off if I was him. I’m sure he’ll win employee of the month if he brings your lady back too. But I doubt there’s anything he can do if you can put her back where she belongs.”
“And Nikodemus?”
“That’s his name?” She seems amused. “I think someone will have to come up after him. He doesn’t belong where we’re going.”
The tunnel walls are growing smooth and pale gray. In the distance floats a faint green dot. The first of the rail signals.
Niko puts his hands over his scabbed and bearded face. “So I’ve at least got to get Nikodemus somewhere safe or drop him off before we come out in case he goes all mortal on us and his injuries kill him. I’ve got to get Jemma back into… Jemma, before the Driver catches up to us.”
“That pretty much covers it.”
Niko lowers his hands. “The jar’s broken. I think she’s… leaking out.”
The cabbie shakes her head.
“Do you know anything about that?” Niko holds up the jar. “About putting these back where they belong?”
The headshake continues. “I drive a cab. I take people where they’re going. I don’t know how to do that.”
Niko and the cabbie both jump when Niko’s own voice comes from the back seat.
“I do,” says Nikodemus.
XXX.
CAN’T FIND MY WAY HOME
THE TUNNEL IS modern again, three steel rails, prestressed concrete walls, equidistant lights. The distant cries of Red Line cars call out across an unknown distance, ghosts of dinosaurs haunting the chthonic world.
“Two hundred yards,” calls Nikodemus. Hunched in the back of the Checker Cab he stares out the rear window at the Black Taxi eating up rails and steadily gaining on them. The demon’s shredded wings flutter in the constant rush of wind into the car.
Niko and the cabbie told Nikodemus what they fear may happen to him when they cross over but the demon insisted on coming with them all the way. “In for a penny, in for a pounding.” His tone had brooked no argument.
The cabbie squints intently at the lights unspooling from the dark. “Hundred fifty yards,” calls Nikodemus.
Up ahead the tunnel splits. The cabbie’s going to try to cut over to the righthand tunnel at the last possible moment. “One twenty.” If she cuts over too soon the Black Taxi will easily follow her. “One hundred.” Too late and they’ll miss the tunnel and the Black Taxi will be right on them.
Niko sees the switchoff now a thousand yards ahead. A faint curve of wall, another set of rectangular lights branching out to the right.
The tunnel walls grow bright around them. “Train,” yells Nikodemus. “Train behind us. Two hundred yards and gaining fast.”
“Where the hell did that come from?” says Niko.
“It’s running down the—no wait, the black car’s going faster.”
“Shit.” The wind blows harder as the Checker Cab speeds up. “I keep thinking it’s you talking back there,” the cabbie tells Niko. “He sounds just like you.”
The cab fills with an eerie lamentation. The siren song of the pursuing Blue Line train reverberating down the rails and through the passenger compartment.
“Don’t look back,” chants Niko. “Don’t look back. Don’t—” A blast of the trainhorn fills the tunnel.
Nikodemus yells from the back seat but Niko barely hears him. The branchoff is dead ahead. His peripheral vision picks up bright lights from the passenger side mirror. The trainhorn’s about to powder his skull.
The Checker Cab veers off the tracks too soon. Niko slams against the restraint as the car bounces over crossties. He tucks the jar against his stomach and hears the cabbie yelling and Nikodemus yelling and ricocheting all over the back of the cab and the trainhorn’s liquefying his brains and he can feel the awful closing pressure of the Black Taxi practically being pushed into them by the speeding Blue Line train and the tunnel switchoff gapes before them now too late to turn into it but the cabbie yanks the wheel regardless and Niko’s thrown against her and Nikodemus is hurled against the side as the Checker Cab bounces off the crossties and rumbles onto the adjoining track and as it leaves the first track bygod something smacks the rear bumper and the back end slides and the left rear scrapes yellow paint onto the tunnel wall and then they’re jouncing along the crossties of the adjoining track and the cabbie jerks the wheel right-left and the cab leaps onto the new set of rails.
The bumping stops. The vibration stops. The worldfilling apocalypse of trainhorn diminishes down the tunnel they have left behind.
And the Black Taxi?
Once again the cabbie checks the rearview. This time she grins. “Nothin to it,” she says. Already fishing the cigarillo pack from her shirt pocket.
Niko doesn’t realize he’s pulled something in his back until the muscles unclench painfully and all at once. The relief throughout the cab is palpable.
Niko quickly checks the mason jar. The same, the same. The glow barely perceptible, the perfume a faint memory on a garment.
The cabbie taps his leg and points and Niko squints into the wind against his face. Length of tunnel stretching out ahead of them and now a bright amber light set in its middle. Jesus christ another train. There’s nowhere to go this time. No convenient switchoff or nick-of-time escape hatch. They’re about to meet their fate headon without a prayer.
But the cabbie seems amused and waves her cigarillo at the hovering amber light. “It’s okay. It’s a streetlight.”
Niko gapes while she slouches on the bench seat and loosens her thin tie another inch and drives on the rails with one-handed confidence.
Nikodemus pokes his huge and one-eyed head between them to stare with eager trepidation through the open windshield.
The cabbie grins. “Sometimes,” she says, “the light at the end of the tunnel really isn’t an oncoming train.”
AT 8:23 P.M. on no special Friday night in late summer a battered Checker Cab ferrying its battleweary passengers emerged into the open air and crowded light of the Blue Line platform at Flower and Seventh Streets beside the purple lighted Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles, California, home to ten million working sweating fucking eating driving laughing sleeping struggling human beings in homes slapped onto hillsides or gridded into the Valley or cobbled together from duct taped cardboard boxes, and not a soul among them saw the tired yellow metal creature lumber from its subterranean lair, saw it swerve and bump off rails and onto smooth paved road, watched it glide to a stop, observed the brakelights flash, heard the gargle of its idle as the passenger door opened, witnessed the terribly thin man sore abused and homeless looking in his filthy ragged clothes who cautiously backed out of the phlegmatic beast like some old arthritic. Watched him straighten slowly, one hand going to his back as if it pained him while the other held some kind of moonshine jar that could hardly be seen to be glowing in the everpresent city light.