Fiona pulled the Charger up beside me and I slid into the passenger seat. I didn't really like the idea of Fiona driving my car. She didn't have a great respect for things like black-flecked paint on recently restored muscle cars from the 1970s.
"Sam just texted," she said. "He's hiding under one of the Hummers next to his Cadillac."
"What is he doing?" From our vantage point, we could see the Hummers but not Sam. I trusted that he was where he said he was.
"He apparently had to escape from the building but didn't want to leave his car behind," Fiona said. "He indicated there was an aggressively violent woman involved who he would prefer I not kill."
A woman who looked aggressively violent burst out the front door of the facility. She had a lightning bolt running the length of her neck. She also had a shotgun and two aggressively violent-looking men trailing behind her. There was a barbed-wire fence between them and us still, but not for long.
"I guess that would be her," I said. Sam popped out from under one of the Hummers and started running toward the gate. The men surrounding his Caddie hadn't noticed him yet, but I had a good feeling that would change momentarily when the woman with the shotgun rounded the bend, spotted us and spotted Sam running toward us. "Shit," I said. "Go."
"Where?" Fiona said.
"Get Sam," I said. "Go." Fiona beamed. "And try to avoid destroying my car."
Fiona punched the gas and the Charger shot through the gate, splintering the plywood arm across the bumper. Which hurt me. Not physically. But it hurt me.
The three men surrounding Sam's Cadillac whipped around at the sound of the Charger growling toward them, but seemed unsure what to do. This wasn't Fal-lujah, after all. And they didn't look armed.
And this was Miami. A 'seventy-four Charger pounding over the pavement could justifiably be driven by an octogenarian with a poor sense of direction.
Regardless, I rolled down my window and started shooting at the Hummers to give Sam some protection. Not surprisingly, my bullets pinged right off of them. Armor-plated. Nice. These guys were pros. Which also meant that at the first sound of gunfire, they did the right thing: They got down flat.
Behind us, the woman with the lightning bolt had no such compunction.
"You lying son of a bitch!" she shouted and then she fired a shot at Sam, who was now about ten yards from my car. She then screamed a few more things that were hard to accurately parse over the cocking and firing. Oddly, the woman didn't seem to want to hit Sam. She was firing way over everyone's heads.
And Sam wasn't shooting back.
Something weird was going on here.
Still. There were bullets.
And the guys by the Caddie had snapped alert and were now chasing after Sam.
"Cover me," I said to Fiona. I jumped out of the Charger and fired three times at the woman with the shotgun. And since she didn't seem to be actually shooting at Sam, I didn't actually shoot at her, either. Instead I destroyed the rack of cameras I saw lining Longstreet's fencing-cameras that were literally swiveling to capture all of the action.
At the same time, Fiona took care of the men chasing after Sam, except her method was to shoot at Sam's Cadillac, taking out all the windows, all the tires, and both mirrors. All in the course of about fifteen seconds.
She's a very good shot.
It was enough to get everyone on the ground, at least for a moment, and for Sam to dive into the backseat of my car.
When the woman started to rise, I put the gun on her again. "I'm not trying to kill you," I said. I swung around and made sure the men behind the Charger saw me, and heard me, too. "But I will."
"That asshole stole something from my office," the woman said. That didn't seem to be the thing that was bothering her, though. She honestly looked heartbroken.
"I'm sorry about that," I said. "But it's no reason to come out here with a shotgun." I motioned for Fiona to get into the car. In the distance, I could hear sirens. Did these people actually call the police? Who calls the police anymore? What kind of paramilitary unit were they? "Whatever he took, he'll return it when we're done with it. As a token of trust, we're going to leave his car here." I pointed at the Cadillac, which wasn't exactly in driveable condition now anyway. "I'm going to get into my car. You'll have about three to five seconds where it will be possible for you to stand up and shoot me. That's a choice you can make. But understand that my friend behind the wheel will run you over and then she'll come back and kill everyone you know. That's just how she is."
This seemed to get everyone's attention.
"Do you know who we are?" the woman asked. "We will hunt you down through every corner of the universe."
I opted not to point out that the universe was unlikely to have actual corners, that it was likely more of a fluid concern. "I am well aware of who you are," I said. "You have a very comprehensive Web site." I started back toward the car. "But, honestly, your security? It's terrible. You might consider outsourcing." I slid into the Charger then, figuring, you know, they probably didn't have a witty rejoinder to bounce back off of me.
Fiona showed great restraint by only spinning the tires once before shooting back through the gate.
A 1974 Dodge Charger seats two comfortably, three if the person sitting in the rear seat happens to be an Olympic gymnast with tremendous flexibility or was unfortunately born without knees. If you want comfort, buy yourself a 1974 four-door Dodge Coronet. It has the same body type and plenty of police departments across the land found them to be excellent for ferrying passengers to prison.
If you intend to have a whining and complaining Sam Axe in your backseat, the Coronet also came with an optional eight-track tape stereo system that one could use to drown out Sam's voice. Three Dog Night or Mac Davis would be great choices. Mott the Hoople would work. Foghat. Anything to dampen the din.
"You did not need to do that to my car," Sam kept saying. At first, he just said it under his breath, I presume because he didn't want to sound like he was complaining, since we'd just saved his ass. And judging from his split upper lip and the way the tip of his nose was turned just slightly to the right, there was some validity to that presumption.
"What happened to your face?" I asked. We were already back on River Drive, crossing behind the airport and back toward my place. We could still hear the sirens in the distance.
"That woman with the shotgun," Sam said. Then: "Fiona, you didn't have to do that to my car."
"I know," Fiona said, "but I was happy to."
"No," Sam said, "I mean…"
"I know what you mean, Sam," Fiona said. "Your utmost gratitude is appreciated and duly noted."
"You didn't have to do that to my car," Sam said again. "Maybe you'd like to tell Veronica? Maybe just drop me off at a bar and you go back to Veronica's and explain that while she was kindly watching Cricket, you were blowing up my car."
Sam was shouting now.
He kept sputtering about loyalty and the durability of American cars and how he'd always wanted a car like that and now, now, where was he?
"Sam," I said. "About your face."
"I should have ducked," Sam said. He explained the particulars that led to his eventual holing up in the ladies' room.
"Bolts?" I said.
"It's got a certain allure, doesn't it?" Sam said. "I mean, even after she hit me with her phone, I still felt, in a different situation, maybe five, ten years down the line… who knows?"
"She has a real pate de fois gras," Fiona said.
"You don't find a woman who can take a knife to the carotid every day," Sam said. There was wist-fulness in his voice that I chalked up to the high likelihood he had a concussion. He explained then that after he called us, he tried to sneak out of the bathroom and out the emergency exit, but that Bolts met him in the hallway. He decided that the best option then would be to confess his blooming attraction for her, which she admitted to having as well, and just when he thought he'd able to woo her enough to get the hell out of her office alive..