The car bucked backward, picked up speed and began to yaw; I had a death grip on the wheel with my left hand. Through the rear window I saw Mrs. Cappellani scurry out of the way, waving one arm up and down in a gesture that seemed to have no meaning. Then I was past her and through the gate, onto the road in a sliding right-angle turn.
I hit the brakes and got the wheel straightened out and the transmission into Drive. The tires spun in place, smoking, before they caught traction and sent me lurching ahead. I left the headlights off; the last thing I wanted was for Rosten to know right away that I was coming.
When I was abreast of the cellar, still driving too fast and too recklessly, I could see up the secondary road to the line of eucalyptus trees. Empty. No sign of the pick-up.
Where was he taking Alex? His cottage, possibly — but that made no sense; you don’t for God’s sake bring somebody to your house to kill him. For that matter, why hadn’t Rosten just finished him off in the cellar? Questions, questions. And one more, the most important one: what was I going to do to help Alex when I caught up with them?
Cross that bridge when you come to it, I told myself grimly. Find them first, take it one step at a time.
I made a skidding turn onto the secondary road, and I had no choice then but to slow down. The car jounced on the rutted dirt-and-gravel surface, its old springs shrieking in protest; there was the danger of a tire blowing, of losing control. And the night’s heavy blackness shrouded the vineyards, moonless and starless because of the running mass of clouds, so that I could not see more than two hundred feet ahead of me with any clarity.
Working the brakes, I cut my speed to thirty as I climbed to the top of the hill. Once I got into the eucalyptus trees I had to chop it all the way down to ten miles per hour: I could barely make out the roadbed in the dark and almost missed negotiating the curve there as it was. On the far side, where I had a clear look down to the cottages, I gave her more gas and hunched forward to scan the area.
There was no activity around any of the cottages, no automobile lights anywhere in the valley; the road was empty all the way to the next hill. But beyond there I could see a suggestion of light against the inky sky. I had no idea what lay in that direction, where the road went or how far it went — but that was where they were.
The slope on the far side of the second hill turned out to be gradual and to blend into a long rumpled terrain full of little hillocks, all of them coated with grape vines. The road curled away to the left and skirted a narrow but longish section ribbed with outcroppings of limestone. I thought I saw the blood-colored flicker of a taillight over there, just as I topped the hill, but then it was gone; the long rocky section hid the path of the road beyond.
I resisted the impulse for more speed — I was not going to do Alex any good at all if I pushed myself into an accident. The tension had tightened up my chest again, making my breath come in short coughing pants. I sleeved sweat out of my eyes, worked saliva through my dry mouth and into the back of my throat.
It took me a full minute to get to where I could see past the wall of outcroppings. The vineyards ended over there and the land was dry, brown, uncultivated, patterned with bunches of trees growing on hillocks and scattered boulders and rock formations. The road dipped down into a hollow, dipped back up again, and went across another rise. Behind the rise light shimmered again, the kind of up-and-down shimmering that an automobile’s headlamps make on badly eroded road surfaces. The light kept on dancing that way until I cleared the hollow and started up the slope; but then the wavering lessened, became steadier, became just a reflected glow.
The pick-up had slowed and come to a stop.
Instinctively I took my foot off the accelerator and let it rest on the brake pedal. A muscle on my right cheekbone began to jump; I took one hand off the wheel and wiped it dry on my pantleg, did the same with the other hand. Twenty yards to the top of the rise. I realized I was trying to hold my breath and let it out noisily between locked teeth. Fifteen yards, ten — and I was onto the crown, looking down the far side.
At the foot of a hundred yards of gradual slope, the road leveled off for twenty yards and then came to a dead end in front of a sheer, thirty-foot-high limestone bluff. To the left there was a small stream, flowing north to south, and where it passed along the base of the bluff it filled a kind of geological bowl and became a pool. The pool and the bluff were ringed on three sides by madrone and oak and pine, creating one of those backhill spots that families use for picnics and kids use for gameplaying and beer busts. The pick-up was parked twenty feet from the edge of the pool, and its lights reflected off the wrinkled surface of the limestone formation, giving it an eerie look of frozen, rust-colored water.
I saw all of that in the time it took me to bring the car across the short flat top of the rise, nose it down the other side — three or four seconds. And I saw, too, that neither Rosten nor Alex had yet gotten out of the truck. I had a brief mental image of Alex down there inside, arguing, pleading for explanations, begging for his life, and that kept me from hesitating, wasting time. There was no way I could stop the car and get to them on foot; I had no weapon to use anyway against Rosten’s gun. My only option, my only chance, was to use the one thing in my favor: the element of surprise.
I braced myself, held tight to the wheel, and came down hard on the accelerator.
The uneven, chuckholed roadbed made the car bounce crazily up and down as it gathered speed. Through the windshield I watched the pick-up seem to expand in size, watched the doors on both sides because when they heard me coming their first reaction would be to get out of there. When less than thirty yards remained to the bottom of the slope I took my left hand off the wheel long enough to pull the headlight knob. An instant after the lights came on and began throwing weird patterns across the landscape, the passenger door burst open and Rosten started to scramble out with the gun in his hand. The light-glare seemed to blind him; he lost his balance and threw his free hand out to the door to keep himself from falling.
I stood on the brakes.
The car sailed across the bottom of the slope, bounced onto and across the short level stretch. Rosten was just starting to shove away from the passenger door, and Alex had the driver’s door halfway open, when I skidded into the back of the pick-up.
Even though I was braced for it, the impact slammed me forward into the wheel and sent daggers of pain through both arms, through my chest. Metal crumpled with an explosive crunching noise, both headlights shattered, the pick-up’s rear glass shattered; the force of the collision drove the truck forward to the edge of the pool, rocking it like a hobby horse. I had a confused impression of Rosten down on his hands and knees to one side, where the impact must have thrown him, and of Alex’s head and arm thrust through the pick-up’s open side window. Then the fusion of twisted metal separated on the right side, and the Ford’s rear end slewed around to the right and the rear end of my car came around to the left — the same effect as when you snap a stick in the middle. The truck tilted up on two wheels at the edge of the pool, but the rocks there kept it from falling all the way over into the water. The left front tire on my car jolted up against those same rocks; the engine rattled and died.
I had my left hand on the door handle, and soon as the car came to a shuddering rest I threw the door open and staggered out. Alex was struggling free of the pick-up; I heard him yell something at me. But I was already turned and looking across the hood, looking for and then at Rosten.