He would have seen.
I ran for the Jeep, holding the ignition key in front of me like a sword. Jumping in behind the wheel, I fired the engine and ground the gears, shifting loudly into reverse. The Jeep slammed back into a tree, killing the engine.
I spun around to look. The spare tire was pressed too hard against the tree. I jumped out; I had to know. The spare was still solid on its bracket. Back in, I restarted the engine, and shot up the fire lane and onto the gravel of County M. My tires grabbed at the stones, spraying them back into the wheel wells, rat-a-tat, like machine-gun fire that must have been loud a mile away.
Though the rain had slackened, County M was even more blurred now with fog, and Lamm was somewhere close by, in the murk of it, enraged, with a gun. There was no time for caution. I sped into the gray, foot hard on the gas, arms rigid, not daring to use my headlamps for fear of giving him lights to shoot at, wherever he was.
I’d gone only a few hundred yards when headlamps rose up faint out of the mist at the side of the road ahead, like some dim-eyed primordial beast trying to claw itself free from a steaming swamp. I slowed as the car in front teetered up at an angle, its fang-like grill aimed at the sky, shaking and rumbling before its front end dropped, its wheels caught, and it lurched forward, kicking back dark spray like it was venting its own entrails. It fish-tailed for an instant, straightened and took off down the road.
It was a tan car with dark, tinted windows. A Buick.
Lamm, in Wendell’s car. Or Wendell himself.
I pressed down on the accelerator and switched on my headlights. He was going to damned well see my face.
Red brake lights flashed for an instant; he’d spotted my headlamps.
He sped up, surging and sliding on the gravel, fighting to keep the car straight, speeding forward. I pressed down harder on my own accelerator. Jeeps aren’t worth much on highways. They vibrate like blenders, chuck and skitter at the smallest bumps and potholes. But shifted into four-wheel drive, on the loose marbles of County M, the Jeep charged straight forward like it was on rails.
The distance between us closed; three hundred feet, two hundred feet, then a hundred. From somewhere close by, I heard a man yelling. Only in the next second did I realize it was me.
Fifty feet separated us when the Buick’s window powered down. A pistol came out, wavered, then steadied, pointing backward at me. It might have fired, I couldn’t tell. We were speeding through gray mist, and I was deaf to everything except the gravel blasting up beneath the Jeep and the rain beating on my hood and vinyl top.
His tapped his brakes, slowing for a steadier shot. I dropped back a few yards and tucked in directly behind him. The gun recoiled once, and again. No starbursts appeared on my windshield; no glass exploded. I was in his blind spot. He sped up. We raced on.
County M dipped us into low-lying thick fog for an instant, and then the road rose up. And when it did, the black, spindly one-lane wooden bridge filled the soft rain in his headlights. His gun wavered, firing back at me. He wasn’t looking ahead.
His brake lights flashed. He’d turned and seen the frail timbers rushing towards him, but it was too late. He hit the right edge of the bridge at thirty miles an hour. The Buick reared up like a frightened horse, then slammed down hard on the loose planks and inched forward, its still-spinning front wheels tugging him tighter against the right side rail.
Some faint part of my brain shouted to slam on my own brakes: I was charging a one-lane bridge that was already filled with a car. There was no room.
But I, too, had gone insane, at least a little. I needed vengeance. I had to see the eyes of the man who’d trussed me like a pig, the man who’d just tried to shoot me. And he had to see mine.
I aimed for the narrowing space between Wendell’s Buick and the rickety rail to my left. He had to go over the right side, to crash on the boulders below.
I hit him on his left rear fender, sending up a thousand sparks as the Jeep tore into the Buick. I tugged the steering wheel all the way to the right and pressed harder on the accelerator, grinding the Jeep further up into his car. The sagging side rail only a foot to my left was too frail to prevent my own plunge to a wet death on the boulders below.
It was no matter. I fed the Jeep’s engine more gas; he had to die. But my wheels wouldn’t move. The Jeep and the Buick were pinned between the uprights at the entrance to the bridge, trapped together like they were welded.
The Buick groaned as it shifted forward. His right front wheel dropped off the right side of the bridge. He turned to look back over his shoulder at me, wide-eyed and frantic.
It was Herman Canty, and he was seeing the Devil and his own death reflecting off my eyes.
He pulled at his shift lever, struggling to raise it into reverse. Lurching backward would be his only escape.
The whine of my engine was deafening, the stench of my spinning tires acrid in the rain. The Buick slid forward another foot. He let go of his steering wheel, turned for something on the seat.
The gun.
I tugged harder at my steering wheel. Only another foot or two would send him off the bridge, but the Jeep’s wheels were spinning uselessly. I shifted into ultra-low, the mountain-climbing gear, and let out the clutch. The Jeep shuddered for an instant, and then began grinding slowly forward, one inch, then two, pushing the Buick farther off the edge.
Wood snapped, not loud, but almost gently, and the right side rail beyond his windshield fell away.
Canty didn’t see. His hand had come out with the gun. I ducked down below the plastic passenger curtain, keeping my right foot on the gas pedal, my left above the brake, tugging the steering wheel hard to the right to keep grinding into the Buick. A shot ripped through the plastic curtain, another sparked off the roll bar above my head.
And then the Jeep lurched forward several sickening feet. I slammed on the brake and pulled myself up, terrified I was about to plunge over the right side.
The nose of the Buick had slipped all the way off the bridge and was angling slightly downward toward the rocks in the river below. The frail wood uprights to either side of the teetering car were snapping away almost lazily, one after the other, as the Buick was slowly being tugged off the bridge by its own gathering momentum.
Canty had dropped his gun and was scrambling to push himself out of the driver’s side window. His eyes locked on mine, pleading, begging.
A great new scream of ripping wood filled the air and the entire right side of the bridge fell away. The Buick’s nose went down after it, the car’s trunk rising now like the stern of the Titanic, gently, almost beautifully. The Buick creaked, and settled backward, its left rear tire catching between my bumper and my hood, stopping its slide over the edge.
Canty was now halfway out of the open side window, not four feet from my face, kicking at the steering wheel to propel him the rest of the way out before the car fell into the river.
His frenzy shifted the balance of the Buick, and it again began moving slowly over the edge. The Jeep began sliding with it, hooked by the Buick’s rear wheel.
I jabbed hard at the brake, but it was no use. The Jeep was going over the edge, too.
I fumbled open the driver’s door and pushed myself backward out of the Jeep. Fire shot up my left arm as first my shoulders, and then my back hit the planks. I dug my heels into the wood and scrabbled backward, kicking back from the carnage.
Herman Canty was still only halfway out when the car’s trunk rose up to the sky. Gravity had trapped him, pulling him back into the car.
The Buick’s front door disappeared over the side as its rear wheel, rising higher, gave a last tug at the Jeep’s bumper and then broke free. The Buick’s rear bumper vanished over the side of the bridge.