"Good luck," she said. There was blood on her cheek, Tony's blood.
As I started the car, I called back to Eve, on the seat beside Tony. "You sure?" I asked.
"Yes."
I wound up the engine, let the clutch up fast. The front tires spat gravel. The car started to slither across the parking lot. I cursed, stopped, closed my eyes. I breathed deeply, forced my shoulders to relax, my fingers to loosen on the wheel, focused the electric current sizzling on my skin into a thin beam I could draw on, in my gut. I started the car again, accelerated quickly and quietly out onto 30.
30 was easy. I knew every inch of it, the bends, the dips, the places where dirt would have washed onto the road from last night's rain. I knew the turns where I could let the steering go light, where there was room to catch it on the far side. It helped that it was dark. I drove the whole road, dipping my headlights at each curve to check for the swell of oncoming light that would warn me I wasn't alone. The rhythm of the road was bad but my rhythm was good, and I snaked through at seventy, faster in short bursts.
When we hit 145 it got harder. More people lived along it, and I knew it less well. There were hidden driveways, there were potholes I wasn't prepared for. I was deep into turns before I knew they were there. Trees grew thickly, close to the road. I had to come down to sixty, which was still too fast for the road, but not fast enough to keep the adrenaline of anger and frustration from pushing through to my fingertips. My hands began to sweat. The steering wheel, sticky with Tony's blood, now became a slimy, slithery thing on which my grip was not sure. I pressed my fingers into the ridges at the back of the wheel to keep my hands from slipping. I wished for my gloves, but I didn't know where they were. At Antonelli's, on a back table, by a half-finished drink, a half-started conversation.
Ahead, from the right, lights swung onto the road. A hulking truck body followed, filled my vision, my world. I didn't slow because I couldn't have stopped. I flicked the wheel left, flew out past him, and eased right. I felt the left front wheel search for the road, then claw its way back onto it. The rear wheel hung in the soft shoulder another second, then followed. We dug up dirt as we thudded back onto the asphalt. Then we were running smoothly, except for the staccato hammering of my heart. Sounds came from behind me, soft words, but I didn't pay attention. I'd lost my focus, thinking about gloves; we were lucky to have made it through that, and you don't get two of those.
My world became a moving, headlight-lit band and the shadows on either side of it. The texture of the road, the car's banked angle, the sound of the engine as we headed into a curve were all I cared about. My breathing became as regular as a metronome. My heart slowed again, and I had no purpose and there was nothing I wanted but to push this car down this road and onto Route 1 as fast as it was willing to go.
And we made it. There were other cars, other headlights, migrant leaves and branches huddled across the road, but we made it through all that, and burst out onto 1 like a sleeper screaming himself awake from a dream.
1 was a good, four-lane road. It was one of the ones the county had widened and straightened, and it gave me room and a clear view. I pushed up to eighty.
As I hit 1 the insistent flash of circling red and white lights appeared in my mirror. A siren howled. I held my speed steady. The lights moved up close behind me. Then he pulled beside me, in front of me, opened a distance between us, kept it even. I flashed my lights, inched up behind him to show I could match his speed. He accelerated.
A mile and a half of that, running straight and fast, the siren clearing the way for us as we lay each well-banked curve smoothly onto the one before. Sometimes we sped by a car cowering in the right lane; most of the time the road was empty, ours.
The state highway was even better, six lanes, and we took the six miles, on and off, in four minutes. The hospital was only two miles away now, a long, long two miles through residential streets whose posted speed was thirty.
The cop ahead of me, with his screaming siren and flashing light, kept us near sixty. I felt as though I'd come down to pleasure-drive speed, Sunday afternoon meandering. I wanted to pass the cop, to drive the way Tony needed me to drive; I wanted to arrive.
A car skidded to a stop as we ran a light; his screeching brakes faded fast into the night behind me. The cop ahead of me signaled and swung right, taking a turn I didn't know. I followed; we zigzagged through night-sleepy streets whose quiet we ripped apart. The cop darted right again, and we were in the hospital lot.
The medics were waiting as I swung under the canopied emergency entrance. They spoke little to each other, nothing to Eve or me, as they lifted Tony from the back of my car onto a gurney, sped him out of sight through glass doors that opened without help.
I watched them vanish, medics like parentheses bent at the ends of Tony's wordless sentence. Suddenly I had no words either, and no ability to move. I stood in the cold, drained and empty, staring at the door because I was facing that way.
A voice said, "Go inside." I turned, uncomprehending. Eve stood close, her hand warm on my bare arm. "You've got nothing on. I'll park the car. Go inside."
I spread my hands, looked down at myself. I wore a sweat-drenched, blood-streaked undershirt. There was blood on my pants, my hands, my arms. Even the blue snake curling his way up to my left shoulder was smeared with Tony's blood.
Eve took the car keys from my hand. I did what she said, went inside, to a room where a nurse sat behind a cheerful yellow counter beside yellow double doors you couldn't see through. It was warmer inside, but I didn't feel warmer. The smell was cold and the shiny vinyl floors were cold and the deserted silence was very cold.
The nurse asked me some questions about Tony and I filled in some forms. There were a lot of things I didn't know. Eve came in with my jacket. I put it on. She went around a corner, came back with a steaming paper cup, handed it to me. The hand I took it with must have been shaking; hot coffee slopped over my fingers, dripped onto the floor. Eve took the cup back, waited, handed it to me again. I held it in both hands. The coffee was bitter, with oily green droplets floating on the surface, but as I sipped it I finally began to warm.
Eve said, "Do you feel better?"
"I'm all right." My voice sounded loud in the stillness.
"You probably saved his life, driving like that."
I reached a cigarette from my pocket, lit it without answering her, because we both knew that Tony might not live, even so.
The nurse behind the counter glanced up at the sound of the match. She rested a long look on me, on the cigarette, on Eve. Then she went deliberately back to her paperwork as though nothing was amiss. I wondered whether some people were born understanding the true nature of kindness, or if it was something you had to learn.
A state trooper came through the glass doors, knife- sharp creases in his pants smoothing at the knees as he sat.
"You the guy I was following?" I asked him.
"Uh-huh. Donnelly." He had crinkly blue eyes and a wide smile. He stuck out his hand. I reached for it, then saw my hand, dirt, blood, and coffee in equal parts darkening my skin. I withdrew it, said, "Thanks."
"What happened?" he wanted to know.
I finished the coffee. "Drive-by."
"Yeah?" he said. "Like the movies?"
"Yeah."
"You know who it was?"
"No."
"You know why?"
"No."
"Anybody else hurt?"
"No."
"Well," he said, "none of my business. I'm just supposed to keep an eye on you until someone who knows something gets here."