Up to that point I hadn’t really been thinking, just reacting, but I suppose with that first hit some thought such as “That clown’s an idiot!” would have crossed my mind, and even with the second one I still would have been more inclined to call it coincidence — “Just my luck, two meatballs the same day!” — but when I finally had the Volvo under control and looked out at the world around me, and when I saw the golden Impala ease into my rearview mirror just as the green one was sliding into position again on my right flank, I knew I was in trouble.
This was a Monday in February, a pleasant, sunny day after January’s rains, about eleven in the morning. Traffic was moderate, and moving fast. And two Chevy Impalas, with a pair of swarthy men in each, had me boxed into the left lane of the San Diego Freeway, behind a fast-receding moving van, where they absolutely intended to give me a fatal accident, and no substitutions accepted.
One thing I’ve always had, and I’m glad of it, and that’s good reaction time. The instant I realized what was happening, I leaned forward against the pressure of the shoulder strap of my seat belt, rested my brow on my crossed forearms on the steering wheel, and kicked down onto the brake pedal as hard as I knew how.
The Volvo didn’t exactly stop on a dime, but it slowed abruptly, and a lot sooner than the guy behind me, who came climbing up my tailpipe, jolting me, giving me a rabbit punch in the back of the neck. But I’d known what was happening and the other driver hadn’t, so when I accelerated again, the golden Impala got smaller and smaller in my rearview mirror, wobbling over to thump itself into the center divider.
I didn’t have time to see what happened next back there, because I still had number two, Captain Green. He was staring at me open-mouthed, no longer pretending he didn’t know I was there, while his passenger craned back over the seat, looking for their other team. I put on a spurt, Captain Green did, too, and then I slammed on the brakes again for just a second, accelerated, and steered over into him.
What he’d done, he’d braked when I’d braked, but he was still braking when I accelerated and rammed him, coming up from his left, hitting his left front wheel obliquely with my right front fender, driving hard, turning into him so that he went bouncing off into the lane to his right amid a blare of horns from the other traffic in the vicinity, while I spun back to the left, found my opening, and shot through it.
But not to freedom, not yet. Captain Green was still after me in a car that was bigger and heavier than mine, and on the open highway like this he would also be faster.
But Mulholland Drive was just ahead. I gave no hint to what I planned, staying in the third lane while he came roaring up in my mirror in lane two, and I only moved over to lane two myself at the last second to keep him from passing me.
That’s what he thought. He feinted as though he’d go to lane one, then shot off at an angle into lane three, committing himself to the move, halfway into it when I peeled off, ran across the road at an almost dead right angle, and shot out the Mulholland Drive exit.
What he managed to do to follow me off that major road I have no idea, though I could hear it causing a whole lot of angry horn-blowing. Whatever it was — did he make a U-turn on the San Diego Freeway? — just as I was heading up onto Mulholland, here the son of a bitch came again.
Well, that’s why I’d wanted Mulholland. A ridge of hills runs east and west here, separating Los Angeles on the south from the San Fernando Valley on the north, and little-used Mulholland Drive is the mostly two-lane winding road that runs along the top of that ridge. My friend’s size and weight and speed meant a lot less up here; what counted was my Volvo’s maneuverability.
Parts of Mulholland are very dusty when it isn’t raining. I ran through a stretch like that, chalky white clouds rising behind me as I sawed the wheel back and forth through the sharp and twisty curves, and when I came out the other side, my rearview mirror was empty. Feeling very shaky, I slowed just a bit, and headed toward home.
3
We didn’t do a lot of car chases on PACKARD — he was a criminologist, more cerebral, a kind of dry-cleaned Columbo — but we did do some. What the heck, it’s television, you have to do some car crashes. I’d helped out with the stunt driving, and I’d sat back to watch the professionals do the rollovers and the arroyo leaps, and I’d thought I knew pretty much what it was all about. But now I understood that the difference between all of that and actually having four guys in two big heavy Chevy Impalas try to pound you and your little Volvo into the concrete on the San Diego Freeway is the difference, as Mark Twain said, between the lightning and the lightning bug. My nerves were shot all the way home, my reaction time was terrible, and now that the emergency was over, my driving skills had gone all to hell; if a cop had seen me then, he’d have had reasonable cause to search the car for little packets of white powder.
There are two main entrances into Bel-Air from Sunset Boulevard, both featuring great white arches; no embarrassment or shyness about money around here. Coming out westward from Los Angeles through Beverly Hills, you come to the first and more grandiose entrance at Stone Canyon, but if it’s me you’re visiting, you continue on to what my friend Brett Burgess calls Bel Air’s servants’ entrance; a somewhat more modest white arch at Bellagio, across the way from the west gate to UCLA. Turning north through this arch, you follow Bellagio as it twists and turns, being at different intervals Bellagio Way, Bellagio Place, Bellagio Road, and even Bellagio Terrace, before you turn off on San Miguel Way, which is labeled DEAD END and at the very conclusion of which I live. San Miguel is a continuous curve to the left from its beginning at Bellagio to its finish at my house, so you can’t see one end from the other.
Normally, that’s the route I take home, but when people are out and about with ideas of committing murder on me, I think twice about entering a street where I can’t see who’s parked in front of my house until after I’ve made the dead-end turn. Fortunately, I have a back way in.
Behind my house, my property extends southwest down a steep scrub-covered slope. Beyond my land are a few large houses facing the other way, onto Thurston Circle, from which, via Thurston Avenue, you can drive down to Sunset Boulevard just east of the San Diego Freeway. Between two of those large houses I have an easement, and a one-lane blacktop road that looks like a driveway for a house down there, but which actually curves up onto my land, where it meets a fence, an electronically controlled gate, and a call box. I use that entrance only if I’m trying to avoid somebody, and at the moment I would say I was definitely trying to avoid somebody.
The same little box on my visor controls both front and back gates. Driving up from Thurston Circle, my own dear land ahead of me, I buzzed the gate open, drove through, and went on up as the gate automatically swung shut behind me. The blacktop stream continued up and around the left side of my house, where it joined the lake of blacktop in front of my garage, where Sugar Ray and Max, my two palomino-colored boxer dogs, came frolicking out of the shade to see if I wanted to play. “Not today, guys,” I muttered as I stopped the Volvo and with some difficulty opened my door.
Max immediately presented her head for me to pat, which I did, while Sugar Ray stood happily and alertly in the background, waiting to be told to do something interesting. “Yeah, yeah,” I said, and elbowed myself out of the car. I had to lean against it for a second until my dizziness waned, and then I walked around the Volvo, Sugar Ray and Max strolling with me, to assess the damage.
Jesus. And I walked away from that? The right side of the Volvo, formerly red, looked as though several people had been whamming away at it with sledgehammers, to the extent that sheet metal was scraping the sides of both tires — I could see white threads in the bottom of those new grooves — and that passenger door would never open again. The rear, where I’d encouraged the first Impala to cream himself, now looked like a caricature of the front end of Sugar Ray, and the front, where I’d nicked the moving van, was a crumpled Kleenex of red metal around a shattered headlight.