“This.” The wooden heel of her shoe. She was hopping on one foot trying to get it back on. Anders clambered to his feet and steadied her; then he made a dive for the knife and got it in his hand before the assailant rolled over. The man was groggy but not out. Anders waved the knife in his face and hissed at him: “Hold still, you bastard.”
Something screeched up at the head of the passage. Rosalia said: “Glenn—”
“I see it. Come on.”
Up there a car had slewed across the opening and the driver was getting out and Anders suspected the dark shiny thing in his hand was a gun. Together they ran down the passage, bouncing off walls. Anders risked a glance over his shoulder.
Blind luck: The big assailant was lurching back and forth on his feet trying to clear his head and blocking the sight lines of the man above.
Anders knew the second man had run back down to the bottom, got in the car and driven around to the head of the passage to cut off escape; the man up there with the car and the gun was the same man who’d come after them on foot, the assailant’s partner. That meant there were two men and one car. It should be possible to elude them.
Steering Rosalia by the elbow he skidded around the building corner at the foot of the passage and ran her catty-corner up the street.
Dimly he heard the slam of a car door and the race of an engine: It meant the gunman hadn’t waited for his partner but was coming after them with the car but he had to get around several corners and hope not to encounter traffic in the narrow one-way streets of Old Town. The chances were getting better every moment. There was a drugstore half a block farther, lights splashing out onto the sidewalk — Anders made for that, hauling Rosalia by the arm.
Tires screeched not far away. They ran full tilt toward the doorway.
“Oh shit,” she said. “It’s closed.” A lattice gate was padlocked across the drugstore; the lights had fooled him.
He led the way on toward the head of the street: a sharp left into another passage — blank walls, locked doors, poor light. But he could hear the car again and there wasn’t time to turn back. At least this one wasn’t cobbled. They ran fast and hard, the shirt pasted to him by sweat.
At the corner he pulled her around the edge and they flattened back against the wall. Fighting for breath Rosalia said, “Why don’t they go crawl back under their rock? Those are the most persistent muggers I’ve ever—”
“I guess they’re not muggers. Come on.” He moved out slowly, looking for the shadow that shouldn’t be there.
Rosalia said, “Who are they?”
“Rodriguez or his friends.”
“But how did they know?”
“Either they followed us or they followed Crobey. Come on, keep moving.” An L turn, no choice which way to go — and the passage was leading them back toward the street they’d left. The crime rate here was on a par with that of Spanish Harlem and as a result everything was locked and bolted; no way to get out of the street.
A sign under a tall hooded whip-lamp on a silvered stalk: Calle Del Cristo. Street of Christ. He tugged her out of the pool of lamplight.
He wished he’d paid more attention to the field courses that trained you how to get out of places; he wished he’d had more aptitude for this sort of thing.
Above them was the veranda of El Convento. A quartet of tourists was getting into a taxi. He rushed her forward, waving, shouting to the taxi — and then a garish baroque automobile, some dinosaur of the fifties, came down Sol Street like a seed squeezed from an orange, horn-honking the length of the passage, sliding maniacally around the bend and slamming with a tremendous racket into the taxi. The old Buick bounced off and kept coming like a juggernaut, leaving the hard-hit left side of the taxi destroyed, the sheet metal looking like a crumpled paper napkin. On the sidewalk the taxi driver and the four tourists flung themselves belatedly against the wall in terror.
The Buick was bearing down on Anders and Rosalia, its right-side wheels climbing the curb — above the sidewalk was an iron fence six feet high and Anders flung Rosalia toward it. They leaped off the ground, clenched the wrought iron overhead, drew their legs up — and the car cannoned past, the driver at the last minute lacking the nerve to crash the fence.
The car lost a hubcap — it went rattling away bouncing off things — and the Buick slewed toward the intersection below, the driver trying to control it, fishtailing for a U turn and another try.
Anders dropped off the fence, helped Rosalia to her feet — “You all right? Jesus!” — then they were racing for it again, heading for the battered taxi. The five people had fled into El Convento but the veranda was too long, the door too far away — the man in the Buick had a gun. Running past the taxi Rosalia said, “They don’t build those things the way they used to,” and giggled, on the near edge of hysteria. “I bet you haven’t had this much fun since World War Two.”
“I’m not that old—” and he never finished it because the Buick had stopped and the gun started shooting and Rosalia dropped like a stone beside the taxi’s fender.
Something plucked at Anders’ sleeve. He dived for the pavement, rolled, heard something whine away, got an elbow under him and flung himself toward Rosalia. “Querida — querida?”
“Shit, I think he’s shot me. Jesus Cristo — I’m bleeding!”
He crouched over her, lifting her with an arm behind her shoulders.
“Get up, Rosalia, we can’t stay here.”
She cried out when he touched her and he felt the sticky warmth of her blood; he couldn’t see where she was injured.
Over the hood of the taxi he saw the Buick start to move.
Rosalia had her feet under her after a fashion. He slid backwards into the taxi on his rump — the tourists had left both doors wide open — dragging Rosalia into the cab with him. She slumped, head lolling back, and he had to reach across her to pull her right leg into the car.
The Buick at the foot of the street was maneuvering back and forth trying to get turned around, its wide turning radius incompatible with the narrowness of the intersection. But the taxi’s engine was reluctant and Anders could hear every turn of the starter inflict its drain on the weak battery and if it didn’t start soon it would be dead and they were trapped in the thing now and the Buick was starting to accelerate, coming up the hill right at them.
Nearly twisting the key to breaking point Anders stared ruefully at the approaching juggernaut, yelling at the top of his lungs a strained litany of oaths — then it caught, coughed roughly, revved screaming high: Anders jammed the lever into drive and the taxi roared forward, jerking his head back, making Rosalia cry out.
He spun the wheel left to get out from the curb and almost took the skin off his knuckles — the Buick had smashed the door in too close to the steering wheel.
The only way through was to bluff the Buick out: a deadly game of chicken and Anders had the rage for it now, he wanted nothing except to kill the son of a bitch in the Buick and he aimed straight down the steep narrow street, knowing just the point where he’d thrust the wheel left and drive his front bumper right into the driver’s door.
The taxi’s rear wheels scrabbled for purchase, the tail sliding a bit from side to side as it gathered speed and settled in. He had the pedal on the floor and that prevented the transmission from shifting up; the engine whined painfully to its highest revs. Collision course and he had the momentum for it now; he clenched the wheel and only then did it penetrate his awareness that the girl sagging beside him was injured and not strapped in and that the impact would crush her against the dashboard: At the last minute, with the Buick slowing and hugging the far wall, Anders straightened the wheel and shot past.