“How’s the car we hit?” I asked.
“Still moving.”
Ahead, the lay of the land again dictated my choices. To my front, all that open ground turned out to be hemmed in by trees, leaving only the right and left as possible escape routes.
“Go left,” Rarig yelled, as if reading my mind. “Head for South Street.”
That much was obvious. Speeding across the almost flat grassy surface, the second car was already closing in fast from the right. Sammie seemed to realize our predicament. She peeled away like a sheepdog, cut across behind me, and prepared to run interference between me and the first car, which was rallying to shut me off on the left.
The terrain, as we all swerved away from the edge of the golf course, began to roughen, making control that much more difficult. I was now paralleling the edge of a wooded outcropping. To my rear, I could see the second car closing in; to my left, Sammie and the first car were jockeying for room, occasionally colliding as Sammie fought to keep my narrow slot open. Ahead, since we’d now almost completed a full loop, lay the lower access road off the art center parking lot, and beyond it a grouping of houses, fences, and more trees. Whichever route I chose, I realized, the end result was going to be a mess-possibly a terminal one.
Sammie was losing ground. All of us were leaping and skidding badly by now, hitting small depressions in the ground, rocks, and hillocks. My seatbelt was cutting into my lap every few seconds. But Sammie’s car was lighter than her opponent’s, and I could see her profile, tense and focused, as she struggled to maintain both position and control.
It was becoming a simple matter of time-and Sam’s suddenly ran out.
The second car sideswiped her just as all three of us catapulted up and over the access road, sending her into a pirouette and yanking her from my sight as if she’d been attached to a cable that had suddenly played out.
Keeping my eyes front, I shouted, “How is she? She okay?”
Rarig twisted around in his seat. “She’s over on her side, but I think she’s all right. The spinning took most of the steam out of it.”
He turned back and looked at me, speaking surprisingly calmly, and added, “I think we’re in trouble, though.”
That, I already knew. With one car tailing me by only a few feet, and the other one so close I could see the expressions of its occupants, I saw my only hope was to negotiate a path through the houses ahead and to the street beyond, losing both escorts along the way. I didn’t hold out much hope of success.
“There’s the cavalry,” Rarig suddenly yelled, pointing to the right.
Through the side window, I could see the bright flickering of blue lights approaching from the south-out of town-presumably from backup units called in for mutual aid.
We’d run out of open ground. Our speed abruptly magnified by the proximity of trees, bushes, and outbuildings, we all three smashed through a fence, flew off some carefully landscaped terracing, skidded across the broad backyard of an enormous house, ricocheting off a shed and a swing set, and finally exploded onto the street between another house and its garage.
It was too much for the Ford. My steering wheel was wrenched from my hands as the car’s front end plowed into the opposite curb, we spun around in a dizzying, weightless circle, surrounded by a medley of breaking metal and glass, and finally came to rest up against a tree, covered with icicle-like shards, enveloped in a sudden, deadening silence.
Not an absolute silence, however, since approaching at a fast rate was a screaming siren, bolstering what shred of hope I had left.
I should have known better.
Shaking my head to clear my vision, I saw men already clustering around our car, guns out, pulling open the doors, giving orders I couldn’t understand. Beyond them, down the street, as I, too, was jerked clear by the scruff of my neck, I saw a state police cruiser come slithering to a stop, acrid smoke curling from under its shuddering tires.
The two officers inside never had a chance. Before their vehicle had even come to a complete stop, its surface began to implode under a torrent of bullets, its windshield becoming snowy white, its lights disintegrating and dying, its tires sagging onto the rims like horses shot in battle. In the deafening staccato of automatic gunfire, I reached for my own pistol, felt a shattering blow to the back of my head, and saw the Ford’s seat come sailing toward me as my knees buckled.
Dazed and numb, my feet stumbling as if asleep, I was stripped of my weapons, hauled by my armpits to one of the pursuit cars, and thrown into the back next to Rarig and Lew. Without further fanfare, and with the south end of the street now blocked by the destroyed cruiser, both cars took off, tires screaming, toward the heart of the village.
South Street, broad and flat, is aimed at downtown like the straightest tine of a crooked, three-pronged fork, the other two extensions being Route 30 and College Street. Since Middlebury is like the hub of a wheel, however, with roads heading out of it to every cardinal point, logic dictated our doubling back on either one of those alternatives to avoid the village center.
But logic didn’t entail Willy Kunkle. Screaming down Route 30, his blue dash-light flashing, Willy bore down on us like vengeance personified, forcing both our cars to swing right onto Main Street.
Swerving, cutting, driving up onto the sidewalk and scattering pedestrians, the three of us raced in a chaotic caravan, with Willy and our vehicle dueling like bumper cars. Through it all, the Russians were yelling at the top of their lungs and jumping in their seats like kids at a fair. Semiconscious, my hands still tingling and slow to move, I watched it all with a dreamy combination of clarity and distance, my brain shouting to do something-anything-but my body failing to act.
Across the Otter Creek bridge, where the town opens up beyond Merchants’ Row to form an oddly shaped, tilted commons, Willy, like Sam before him, ran out of luck. Bouncing off one parked car, he hit another and was stopped dead in his tracks. Uphill, just shy of the inn, was the spaghetti-like intersection Rarig and I had entered earlier. Only this time, traveling in the wrong lane at terrifying speed, it seemed less a tangle of roads and more a lethal obstacle course. From every approach, there were cars, trucks, and RVs, all pressing in on us, their angry horn blasts floating on a growing distant chorus of emergency sirens.
We took the easiest way out, steeply up and to the left, free of downtown’s clinging frenzy, onto the more open embrace of Route 7, heading north. From being surrounded by traffic and serried buildings, we were suddenly wedged between the forested slope of Chipman Hill to the right and the broad expanse of the Otter Creek valley to the left.
As soon as we’d broken loose, I felt my body press into the back cushion, the car’s engine digging deeper as we abruptly picked up speed. Captive and without the slightest idea of what awaited me, I nevertheless shared the sense of relief expressed by the three cheering men in the front seat.
All of which ceased as we topped the rise just beyond town. Ahead of us, clearly visible in the fading daylight, sputtering red flares lined the sides of the road like the approach to an airfield. But instead of a landing path, they led directly to two parked cruisers, engine blocks facing us at a forty-five-degree angle. I instantly recognized a “deadly force” roadblock, set up to stop us at all costs. The cruisers would be empty, officers stationed at a safe distance to either side, weapons locked and loaded. In those scant few seconds, my eyes also found the standard “out”-a narrow avenue, crossed with tire-deflating spikes, that fleeing cars were visually encouraged to take to lessen the overall mayhem.