It was easier said than done. What with the bucket seats and the stick shift and the hump for the driveshaft, there wasn’t a helluva lot of room down there. But somehow Domino folded herself up like a pretzel and squinched down.
The result was that her dress fell completely away from her long, intriguing legs. Depending on how the moonlight hit her, it was quite a view I had from the corner of my eye. One moment it was oscillating and gynecological, the next quivering and cheeky. Quite a view!
But I had no time to appreciate it. That sharp curve in the road was almost upon us. No car manufactured corners like a Porsche, but at 100 mph I knew I’d have to brake hard and pray to make it on even two wheels. I’d have to hug the mountain on one side and ignore the sharp drop into an abyss on the other.
The Mercedes was closing the gap as I hit the brake and leaned my weight on the steering wheel. The bullets were zeroing in on us, and I could hear their little pings now as they ricocheted off the body of the Porsche. I was damn grateful to the manufacturers for providing the Porsche with an all-steel body. The rear engine would definitely have been shot out of commission without it.
I screeched into the curve without down-shifting. My right foot bounced back and forth between the brake pedal and the gas pedal as I tried to maintain a delicate balance between safety and escape. Domino was thrown over to my side of the car, and for a moment she was all tangled up with my feet. When I went to slam down on the gas pedal for good as we came out of the curve, I stomped on her breast by accident. It had the same effect, anyway, for it crushed her to the fioorboard so that her shoulder blade depressed the gas pedal all the way. I pulled out the throttle and kept my hand on it so I could shove it back in quickly when we hit the next fast-approaching curve.
A glance in the rear-view mirror revealed two things. It showed Lagula grabbing wildly and managing to pull himself back into the car after having almost bounced out. The effect was almost of the little Pigmy waving in the wind like some unfurled trophy pennant. And the mirror also showed that the heavier Mercedes was hugging the curve and closing the gap between us even more as it came out of it.
Lagula was game as ever. Bouncing around like a ping-pong ball, he still managed to snap a shot at the Mercedes as we two-wheeled it into the second curve. The shot connected, but it didn’t do much damage. The windshield must have been bulletproof. It shattered without actually breaking.
We leaped out of the second curve and were on a straightaway again. But it was a mountainous straight-away. Up one hill, down another, then up again and down again. The Porsche roared, and the Mercedes purred behind it. They were an even match for speed. The six-cylinder Porsche with its six carbs was whining up towards the 140-mph mark, but the heavier, eight-cylinder Mercedes was sticking like glue. They couldn’t close the distance, but I couldn’t put much more between us, either.
Lagula was shooting for their tires, but the driver of the other car was following my lead and zigzagging erratically so he wouldn’t present a clear target. Logic told me that the only way it could end was if either a stray bullet connected or one of us made a snap-second misjudgment and slammed into the mountain or over the cliff. But logic—-as if often the case—didn’t dictate the ending.
Gas did. Fuel—petrol, that is. I ran out of it.
The motor started sputtering. I looked at the gas gauge. The needle was hovering about halfway below the quarter-tank mark. I thought fast. I remembered that on the Porsche this was a warning signal. It meant it was time to switch over to the auxiliary tank, in which there were always three or four extra gallons. My right hand shot down for the handle to open it.
I grabbed Domino’s right breast and twisted mightily.
“Ouch!” she exclaimed.
“Get the hell out of the way!”
“I can’t.”
“Then turn the—” I didn’t bother finishing the sentence. The motor was already coughing and losing speed. The rear-view mirror told me that the Mercedes was almost on us. I changed tactics quickly.
I twisted the wheel to the left, toward the mountain, and stomped the brake hard. The Mercedes shot past, bullets flying from it wildly. I spun the wheel hard back to the right and slammed into the rear of the coupe with the front of the Porsche.
I had to take my hat off to that driver. If his reflexes had been a split second slower, the Mercedes would have gone hurtling over the side of the cliff. As it was, he managed to skid it into a spin that ended with him slamming into a tree about fifty feet past where I’d managed to stop the Porsche.
By that time the three of us were out of the car and scrambling up the mountainside to the shelter of a copse of scraggly trees. I was in the lead with Domino behind and Lagula bringing up the rear. He was still covering us with the gun; we were still his prisoners.
Once we got in among the trees, though, the situation changed instantly. Some clouds blotted out the moon, and Domino took advantage of the sudden darkness to dart away into the shadows of the trees. Lagula cursed and tried to follow her, which left me all alone. He realized very quickly that he’d lost her, and so he turned his attention back to me. But by that time I had done some realizing myself. Considering Lagula’s skeptical attitude toward me, I could see no advantage to remaining his prisoner. So I picked myself a handy tree and swung up into the concealment of its branches. From there I watched Lagula moving from tree to tree in an effort to find either Domino or me.
Meanwhile the occupants of the Mercedes were following our path up the hillside. There were five of them, all men. The moon was out again now, and their gun-carrying silhouettes looked very ominous as they approached the fringe of the woods where we were hiding. I had a ringside seat for what followed after their shadows merged with the trees.
One of them spotted Lagula, and there was a lightning gunflash as he loosed a shot at him. The little man sprawled, gathered himself up, and bounced like a piece of Silly Putty. At first I thought he might have been hit, hut if he was, it sure didn’t slow him down. He was a white blur moving from tree to tree until he had gotten behind the man who shot at him. Only then did he fire in return. His opponent crashed to the ground with a will-less thud that marked him a corpse.
Two of the others whirled around and opened fire in the direction where Lagula had been. But it was a case of the little man who wasn’t there. By the time their bullets were desecrating the scenery, he was back behind the tree I was hiding in again and reloading.
It was about this time that Domino made contact with the hunters. I was too far away to hear, but I saw her approach one pair of them cautiously. They must have heard her coming, for they whirled and almost fired before they saw who it was. When they did, however, they seemed to readily accept her as an ally. I saw the glint of a gun handed to her, and a moment later she joined them in the cautious search for their quarry.
The quarry-—Lagula—was as elusive as the wiliest fox. I suppose I too might have been considered fair prey, but I was strictly a noncombatant perched safely in my tree-haven. Lagula, however, was playing the game with a vengeance.
Having reloaded the gun, he again tried to make a wide circle to get behind his opponents. This time he didn’t quite make it. They spotted him darting across a rather wide space between ‘two trees and opened fire. I almost laughed aloud at the bloody idiocy of what happened.
Seemingly, they had him in a crossfire, trapped between three of them on one side of the clearing and two on the other. They’d realized by then that this was a very short man indeed, and so they were aiming low. But Lagula fooled them with a series of—-so help me!—-gazelle-like leaps that carried him over the first barrage of shots. He grabbed an overhanging vine and swung safely over the barrage that followed.