Already the brake lights were vanishing in the fog. His hand trembled at the ignition. Once, twice, then the engine turned over and he slammed the thing into reverse, lurched out of the spot and forced it into drive even as he jerked at the wheel and reached for the lights-but her hand was there, her face looming into his field of vision: “No, no-no lights, no lights!”
There wasn't any traffic, and that was a good thing, because he was so intent on the taillights ahead of him he didn't even give a glance as he swung out of the drive and onto the blacktop road. He hit the gas. The wheels spun and grabbed with a chirp, and there was that familiar feeling of the headlong rush, the g-forces, the sudden heaviness in the flesh. Two red spots. He was chasing two red spots. The fog parted, jumped and swayed and gave up its substance, and then it closed in again, and he was having trouble gauging where the road gave way to the shoulder, to the ditch running alongside it, and that would be something, wouldn't it, to veer off the road and blow a tire, break an axle, ram a tree-a whole forest? She was saying something, the words garbled with her excitement, and her hands were moving in frantic semaphore, but it was all he could do to keep going, no lights, no lights, the two red spots his only means of orientation.
The road swept round to the right, then a hairpin to the left, and the lights vanished and came back again. “Stay back!” Dana was saying. That was what it was: “Stay back!”
His own voice was strangled with the tension, and his tone-the abruptness of it, the quick snap and release-startled him. “I am, for shit's sake. What do you think I'm doing?” And then, the wheel riding through the clench of his fingers: “I can't see. Shit. Fuck. You want to wind up in a ditch?”
But then the taillights dilated suddenly, right there, right there ahead of him, and his foot slammed at the brake-it was a stop sign, a stop sign emerging fuzzily from the mist, and the man in the Mercedes was observing the law, full stop, though there wasn't another car on the road-and here was Dana, unbelted and lurching forward like a loose sack of groceries. The sound of her head striking the windshield was like a thunderclap, an explosion. He heard himself curse even as the wheels locked on the fog-slick pavement and the car spun across the road, the taillights of the Mercedes moving away now, dwindling, and he wanted to say “Are you all right?” but she wouldn't have heard him, anyway.
The car was running. They were on the road-in the wrong lane, maybe, but on the road. His eyes swiped at her and he saw the blood there, just beneath her hairline, a fresh wet shock of it, but his foot was on the accelerator-he couldn't help himself-and she, clapping both palms to her head so he couldn't see anything of her eyes or the wound either, let her voice jerk free: “Just go!”
There were other cars now, dragged forward on chains of light, moving like submarines in a reconfigured sea. The wheel felt heavy in his hands. There was the muffled hiss of the tires, his heart in high gear still, a pair of yellow fog lights glowing in the rearview, the Mercedes just ahead. He must have asked Dana twenty times if she was all right-did she need a doctor, should he take her to the hospital-but she wasn't looking at him. Her eyes were fixed straight ahead, on the back end of the Mercedes. She was belted in now and she'd dug a T-shirt out of her bag and pressed it to the wound at her hairline; when he glanced at her, all he could see was that shirt, and it wasn't white any longer. On the inside of the windshield, where her head had hit, a crystal star had formed, a thin tracery of lines radiating from its center in rays of prismatic light. He took one hand from the wheel and tugged at her knee till she turned her face to him. “You're bleeding,” he said. “The shirt is full of blood.”
Her voice wafted to him as if from a great distance, the tires hissing, the wipers beating time: “It's nothing. A bump, that's all.”
“A bump? Didn't you hear me? You're bleeding.”
“We can't stop now,” she said, turning away from him, and that was that. Discussion over. For a moment they went on in silence, cars emerging out of the gloom, a Safeway truck humping along in the opposite lane, its hazard lights flashing. And then suddenly she was doing something with her hands, something manic, and the shirt dropped away from the wound, a raw spot there, a slit like a mouth, red and raw. “But look, look,” she was saying, and his eyes jerked back to the road, “his blinker. He's heading for the freeway.”
The wheel was concrete, it was lead, it weighed more than the car itself, but Bridger managed to crank it round and follow the Mercedes up the ramp and onto 101, headed north, the roadway opening up across its lanes to a jerking unsteady convoy of trucks and the sleek shot arrows of pickups and cars homing in on some unseen target in the distance. “Eureka,” she said, her voice charged with excitement. “He's going to Eureka. Or Oregon.”
He said, “Yeah, maybe,” and fell back to allow a battered blue pickup to insert itself between him and the Mercedes.
“He's leaving town. He's running.”
Was he? Had they got to him? Had they put a scare in him?
Suddenly he felt exhilarated, felt as if he could do anything-he was The Kade and this guy, this bad guy, was an extra in a lizard mask, a walk-on, nothing. He gritted his teeth, bore down on the wheel. “This time, brother,” he said to himself, “you're the one going to jail, and we'll just see how you like it.” But then what was the plan? Should they call 911? His mind was racing. What would they say? That there was a criminal loose, that he'd stolen someone's identity-Dana's identity, a young woman's, a deaf woman's-and he was right ahead of them on 101 in a red Mercedes with dealer plates? That he was running. That he was getting away. But where was the proof? They would have to be there when he was pulled over, because if they weren't the cops would just let him go-he wasn't even speeding. This guy-and Bridger could just make him out in silhouette through the back window of the pickup and the intervening lenses of the pickup's windshield and the slanted rear window of the Mercedes-was driving as if he was on his way to church. And maybe he was. Maybe he'd pull off the freeway and amble up to some big glass and stucco cathedral and they'd roll in behind him and have the cops nail him right there when he was down on his knees cleansing his soul. Wouldn't that be ironic? Because that was him, definitely him, and as long as they stayed with him there was no way he was going to get out of this.
“Yeah,” he said, but he was saying it to himself because she wasn't looking, “maybe.”
Before he could think, before he could put together two consecutive thoughts, the Mercedes swung onto Sir Francis Drake and merged onto the 580, heading for the Richmond Bridge. The blue pickup veered off and Bridger fell back as the fog began to dissipate and the Mercedes picked up speed. “Call the cops,” Dana said, “call the cops,” but he flicked his turn signal and moved out a lane, accelerating to keep pace and yet careful not to attract notice-if it came to it the Mercedes would leave them in the dust. “Not yet,” he said. “We have to see where he's going, we have to be there.”
It was only after they'd followed him onto I-80, going east toward Sacramento, that Bridger thought to glance down at the fuel gauge-there it was, right there in front of him, a simple continuum from empty to full, from go to no-go, and at first it didn't register on him. He was dull, he was unfocused, he wasn't thinking of gas-gas was a given. And so it took him a moment, his adrenaline surging, to understand that the needle was pinned all the way to the left; even as he watched, the warning light blinked to life. Empty. He was incredulous. Outraged. And his first thought was to blame someone, to blame her-“Who'd been driving last? Out of gas? He never let his car dip below half a tank, never”-but he put his foot down instead, his heart rattling, and heard himself say, “Quick, give me your phone!”