Paul was still gaining. “All set?”
“Yes. Just tell me when.”
“I’ll get him to pull into the right lane to let me pass. As soon as we’re beside their car, fire into Till’s head.”
“Okay.” She pushed the button on the door’s armrest to lower her window. The wind that came in was incredibly strong, brushing her right cheek and making it hard to keep her eyes open. She kept blinking, then held her left forearm up to divert its direct force. She turned to see how it was affecting Paul.
His hair was only a couple of inches long, but it was fluttering wildly, as though he were in a hurricane. She could still see his jaw set, see both his hands gripping the wheel, and feel the car accelerating.
Paul flashed his high-beam headlights at the other car, signaling that he wanted to pass, but Till hugged the left side of the road. “He knows,” Paul said.
“What?”
“He knows. He’s not letting me pass. He would let me pass him, like any normal person, if he didn’t know we were trying to get them.”
“Are you going to back off?”
“We’re committed. He’s seen this car. We’d have to ditch it, and we’re a long way from home. I’ll try to get closer, but you’ll just have to take the shots you have, and hope he’s hit or makes a mistake.”
Sylvie held the gun out the window and rested her arm on the door to fire, but at this speed every tiny bump in the road bounced her arm upward. Twice when her arm came down, the door was on the way up to hit her elbow. The jolt almost made her drop the gun. As she tried to sight the pistol, it bobbed and slid over Till’s image, and she couldn’t seem to hold it steady on target. “A little closer,” she said.
Paul kept the car accelerating, and it seemed to Sylvie that he was testing it, bringing the speed up an increment at a time and then holding it there for a few seconds to see if the wheels wobbled or the engine overheated. Paul moved to the left into the oncoming lane to give Sylvie a better angle. She extended her arm, held the sight on the speeding car ahead of them, and fired. The shot kicked her arm upward, but she fought it back down against the wind and fired again.
This time the rear window of the car ahead of them turned milky and then blew out of its frame, falling like a curtain of ice onto the trunk and sliding off onto the road. Some of the pieces, glittering in the glare of Paul’s headlights, blew into the air and ticked against the windshield and grille of Paul and Sylvie’s car. Sylvie ducked back inside to avoid being hit.
“Keep firing.”
Sylvie leaned out again and aimed, and this time she could see the two headrests clearly. She aimed at the one on the left where Jack Till’s head was, and fired twice, then a rapid volley of four shots. She had no way of knowing how many of her shots had missed Till’s car entirely, but she could see two holes in the trunk, and the safety glass of the windshield had a white impact splash of pulverized glass in the upper-left corner.
Sylvie released the gun’s empty magazine and dropped it in her purse while Paul pulled back into the right lane. A car, then two more, flashed past in the oncoming lane. Sylvie fished in her purse for the spare magazine.
Jack Till’s car made an unexpected move to the left as though he were unable to keep it straight. It drifted to the left into the oncoming lane. Paul said, “Look! You must have hit him.”
Till’s car veered across the left lane, off the pavement at an angle. As it crossed the shoulder, it kicked up gravel and a cloud of dust that made it hard for Sylvie to see. She listened for a crash, then looked for red taillights. When she found them, they were off the road in the field beside it, bouncing up and down wildly in the darkness.
Paul turned his car and crossed the road to the left shoulder, and Sylvie said, “No, you’re not—” But he was already on the shoulder by then and following Till’s car. As they left the road, Sylvie could hear the steady swish of weeds on the underside and rocker panels. The car hit a rut and bounced, aiming the headlights up into the sky, then down again. She could see that Paul was driving into a field of weeds that had probably belonged to a farm long ago. Everything on both sides was night-black emptiness, but ahead under the headlights she could see the dry yellow-brown weeds, and the swath that Jack Till had marked, pressed down flat where the tires had touched, and only half-down in the middle where the undercarriage had passed and bent them over.
She said, “I’m not sure I even hit him. Maybe I didn’t. He can still drive.”
“Keep trying.”
With difficulty, she braced herself against the car’s bouncing, drew the full magazine from her purse and inserted it into the pistol. She pushed it home with the heel of her hand, and tugged back the slide to cycle the first round into the chamber. She held the gun out the window, gripped her elbow with her left hand to steady it, and fired again.
This time she was sure her shot had gone high. She tried again, but her correction looked low. It was much harder to aim now than it had been on the road. The two cars were bucking and rocking as they crossed the field, but they were still going at least forty miles an hour. “Get him. Get closer,” she said. “We’ve got to be closer.”
Paul was wrestling with the steering wheel. When the tires hit uneven ground, he had to wrench the wheel back to correct it, then wrench it the other way. But he didn’t argue with her, and she felt the car speeding up a bit. The next jolt brought her up off her seat, so the seat belt tightened painfully across her chest and shoulders.
Till’s car reached the end of the flat field and bobbed down an incline, then went up a hill on the far side. Sylvie could see that this was pastureland, where the native short bushes, live oaks and dry grass reasserted themselves. She could see rocky outcroppings in a few places, and then Till’s car climbed a ridge and disappeared over the top.
Paul coasted to the edge of the field and stopped.
“What’s wrong?”
“We can’t drive up there.”
“He did.”
“He’s taking us off into the woods where there’s cover, and I can’t see a damned thing. It’s an ambush. He’s going to lie down in the right place, aim his gun, and wait for us to come creeping along at five miles an hour. Besides, if we wreck a wheel or something and get stuck out here, we’re finished.”
She was relieved. She sensed that she would be in a stronger position if she didn’t exactly agree, but only acquiesced. “Okay.” Men didn’t really want consensus. They wanted to be obeyed.
Paul turned the car in a slow, wide circle until the headlights illuminated the path of flattened weeds he had followed to get here. Sylvie could look up the path to the end of the headlights’ beam where the weeds faded into the dark. Till had led them far from the road.
“ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?”
“Yes.”
Till’s rental car was tilted to one side in a creek bed. The only sound was a trickle of water a few inches wide that ran out from under the car and meandered among the stones into the dark. After a few seconds, Ann Donnelly realized the water was probably from a puncture in the car’s radiator.
Jack Till switched off the headlights, pushed his door open against gravity until it stayed, and pulled himself up and out. Then he held on to the side of the car and walked around to Ann Donnelly’s door. “Come on. We’ve got to get away from the car.” He opened her door, reached across her and released her seat belt, then held her to keep her from sliding out too quickly. She put her feet down and found her footing.