Gridlock (26 page)

'You done good, kid,' gasped Sam. 'Makes me proud to be an American.'

'You make me sick, asshole,' replied Deborah, helpless on the ground.

Sam turned on his heel and began a leisurely jog down the hill.

For a moment, Toss and Deborah were alone. She on the pavement, he on the bonnet. Then one or two people from nearby cars who understood that something had happened nervously wandered up.

'That guy!' shouted Deborah. 'That guy down the hill, he has stolen my stuff. It's very important! You have to stop him.'

It was a futile request, people were fairly happy to assist the wounded but there was no way they were going chasing gunmen to retrieve somebody's purse. Besides, how could they leave their cars?

'Can I give you a lift somewhere?' enquired one woman sympathetically, forgetting for a moment that she had now been stationary for forty-five minutes.

'I've called the police and an ambulance on my car phone,' said a man who was clearly extremely pleased with himself for having done this.

'Get me up,' said Deborah, calmly, 'please get me up and into my chair.'

'Well . . . uhm . . . how . . . ?' they all dithered, not really knowing how to manhandle a paraplegic.

'Just stand up the chair,' instructed Deborah firmly. 'Grab me by the shoulders, and haul me into it, OK?'

'OK,' they said. There was a pause.

'NOW, PLEASE!' shouted Deborah. It is difficult to be intimidating and authoritative whilst lying helpless on a pavement with a dog turd only inches from your head, but Deborah managed it. The onlookers had her back in her chair in an instant.

'Thank you,' said Deborah. 'So long, Toss,' and she pushed herself off down the hill.

'Deborah,' shouted Toss, who was just coming round, but she was gone. The last chase was on.

Deborah's hands burned as she attempted to restrain the chair for the first part of the chase; she had a corner to turn to get back onto the main hill and she could not afford to topple over in the process. By putting her brakes on and off she traversed the thirty or so yards back to the junction with Church Row without mishap and, pushing her left hand down, as she swung round into the hill she could see the figure of Sam Turk jogging away a hundred yards or so below her. He was already halfway back down Finchley Road. Once he was down, she would have lost him for she had no speed on the flat.

It takes a pretty large measure of courage to launch yourself down a hill in a wheelchair, particularly when you will be rolling over treacherous, broken paving stones and having to negotiate terrifying kerbs, more so, even, when your final objective is a deliberate crash with an armed murderer. But Deborah was not short of courage, so she hit the wheel arches on her machine and prepared to burn rubber.

'Well, Geoffrey, you wanted your engine to make me fly,' she muttered. 'Here goes.'

She gathered speed quickly, and was forced to hang heavy on the anchors as she sped past, bumping over and occasionally even managing to avoid, the great wedges of broken pavement that hurtled towards her, every one a potential gravestone with her name on it. Sometimes a jet of water would shoot up as Deborah rolled over one of the pivoted pavements which had puddles hidden underneath. People watched amazed as Deborah sped past their windows with a grim look on her face, smoke rising from where she gripped. the wheel rims. Deborah had gathered up the ends of the sleeves of her jumper in her hands in an effort to protect them, but these were quickly burning away.

There were two side streets that joined the hill down which Deborah was hurtling. The first kerb she had to negotiate was passable, the council having kindly provided a sloped stone on both sides of the road. Unfortunately, there was a car in the way. It had not been there on the way up with Toss, both the side streets had been pretty loosely packed, and it had been fairly simple to find a way between the cars. Even as Deborah started her downhill dash to catch Turk she had seen a gap still available, but at that point frustration got the better of some prat in a Mazda. The sleeping snake shivered, and even as Deborah headed for the precious gap, Mr Brand New Mazda rolled forward pointlessly to fill it. Deborah was by now doing about ten miles an hour, the car was only yards away, there was no way she could stop if she wanted to stay upright. It was teeth-gritting time. She shot down the kerb and slammed smash into the side of the car. With great good fortune her foot rests were high enough not to go under the Mazda, they hit it just beneath the door, thus protecting her knees. The chair tipped forward and the arm rests bashed into the car just at the level of the door handle, followed by Deborah who took the impact of the passenger window on her chest. Fortunately, the foot rests and the arm rests had taken up most of the force and, although very winded, Deborah was unhurt. She saw immediately that the Mazda had only edged forward to the stop line, there was just room in front of the car to get round between it and the stationary traffic pointing up the hill.

With a huge effort Deborah pushed herself away from the side of the Mazda, wheeled her right hand down and turned sharp left to get round the front of the car, squeezing between it and the side of a Cortina, trying, by sheer lung power, to suck in the sides of her chair. As she was doing this a furious Mazda driver was jumping out of the other side.

'Now look, miss, what's the game?' he said trying to be calm. 'I hope you're insured because that was quite a thud and I'm afraid . . .'

The driver was walking around the other side of the car to meet Deborah, he intended to block her way and get the details of her vehicle. The man was in for a shock.

'Aaaaaarrrrghhh!' screamed Deborah, holding up the hatchet in classic psycho-killer pose. 'Aaaaarggghh!!'

Her hair was wild, her eyes were wild, everything about her was wild, the backs of her knees were probably wild. Understandably, the Mazda driver leapt out of the way and Deborah, slamming her arms into first gear, pushed off again, curving round the front of the Mazda, remounting the pavement on the sloped stone and powering on down.

She was closer to Turk now. Unaware that he was being followed, he had slowed to an exhausted walk. Bumping and jumping, concentrating desperately, Deborah slid down the hill. She veered along hedges as a way of slowing down, throwing her torso this way and that to guide the accelerating chair past the hazards. So concentrated was she on the ground immediately in front of her, that it was nearly all over shortly after she left the Mazda. Fortunately, Deborah suddenly remembered from her trip up the hill with Toss that there had been a British Telecom obstruction on the pavement, Toss had had to squeeze her past on the road. Looking up, Deborah realized that it was almost upon her, the pavement was blocked, the kerb at that point was a good nine inches high. She was hurtling along, there was absolutely no way she could get down onto the road without a crash, Deborah had seconds to make a decision . . .

People who saw what Deborah did cheered and beeped their horns and, for once, the beeps were meant kindly: it was a magnificent manoeuvre. There was a lamp post on the pavement right by the little Telecom tent, between the lamp post and the nine-inch precipice was a further foot or so of pavement. As Deborah plunged towards the Telecom tent, she hit hard down on her right-hand wheel, incinerating the last of her jumper sleeve and most of the skin on her right hand. The chair spun left and headed straight out off the kerb and into the road, but just as it appeared that Deborah and her chair would fly head first into the nearest bonnet, Deborah flung out her right arm and hooked it around the lamp post, nearly dislocating her shoulder in the process. The left wheel and most of the chair sailed out over the cliff edge, the chrome flashing in the watery sunlight, but the right wheel remained on the kerb and Deborah managed to haul the chair round with scarcely a drop in speed.

Looking down the hill, it seemed to Deborah that Sam was nearly on the Finchley Road and that all her efforts would end fruitlessly in her shooting out at the bottom and decapitating herself under a stationary articulated lorry that spanned the junction. However, Deborah could not have stopped herself at this point if she'd wanted to, so instead she spurred her chair on, removing any remaining skin on her hands in the process. The second of the two side roads loomed up before her. The gap was still there, just. With careful aiming, she could get between the cars. Unfortunately the gap was not adjacent to the ramp, if she wanted to get between the cars she would have to go off the kerb at a high point and, what is more, mount the other side at a high point too.

Deborah was now rocketing along, there was no way that she could risk a repeat of the Mazda performance. At the speed she was now doing, slamming into the side of a car could well kill her.

Deborah wiggled her body, touched the wheels and headed for the gap. As she left the kerb, flying into thin air, she leant back in order to avoid landing on her face. Even as she did this she was planning her assault on the opposite kerb, always presuming her aim was true, and she landed between the cars and managed to roll between them.

The aim was good, and it certainly was a shock to the lady in the Range Rover when a girl in a wheelchair crashed down in front of her. Deborah and the chair bounced forward under the momentum and again Deborah threw herself backwards. It was a tricky equation, she had to get her front wheels up high enough so that she would hit the far kerb with her large rear wheels and, hopefully, roll onto it, but not so far that she would topple over backwards. The kerb was not high and Deborah was on the final sprint, she had Turk in her sights and to her delight and astonishment he seemed to have stopped.

By a small irony Sam had actually stopped at the point where Deborah and Toss had been forced to abandon the car. The reason for this was that even the pavement was blocked. It was blocked by the van owned by the man with the bald tyres. The frustration of the gridlock had got to the point where uptightness had completely conquered sanity and it was pavement-mounting time. In the centre, where the gridlock was two or three hours older, they had already started to try and drive through shops.

The man in the van, faced with Deborah's empty car in front of him, became more and more agitated about the fact that when the jam finally cleared in his lane, if the opposing lane remained jammed, he would still be unable to move. This had weighed ever more heavily on him until it had become an obsession.

Eventually, in the jammed driver's mad desire to take some action, any action, he mounted the kerb. There was never any way he was going to get round, but at least he was doing something. Of course, the space the van vacated was instantly filled from behind, creating an endless, rippling knock-on effect as car after car shuffled forward to fill the couple of feet of tarmac that the van's partial occupation of the pavement had provided. Hours and hours later, miles away on the other side of the river, cars which had been stationary all day would suddenly find themselves with an extra few inches to travel because of that van.

However, the immediate result was that, when Sam Turk huffed and puffed his way up to it, the pavement was blocked, as was the road. The cars had shuffled so close together in the excitement caused by the huge leap forward of the van that at this point of Frognal, there was no longer even room to walk between the cars.

Sam shrugged and put his foot on the bonnet of a golden Mercedes, preparing to climb over it.

'How dare you, you filthy tramp!' screamed the posh Hampstead lady. And it has to be said that by this time Sam did look pretty much like a filthy tramp, and what's more a filthy tramp who had been in a punch-up . . . 'Get your filthy feet off my bonnet, my husband is a Justice of the Peace,' the woman continued.

The van driver, delighted for a little diversion, leant out of his cab.

'Oi, shit face! You'd better leave that lady's car alone or I'll have you.'

Sam did not want trouble, he considered waving his gun around, but he knew that waving guns around can lead to big trouble. He was now very near the main road, movement was extremely restricted and there were bound to be police around, better to keep the peace, thought Sam, and look for another way round.

'Sorry,' he said, but no-one was listening any more, they were all staring over Sam's shoulder, hack up the hill, mouths opened, transfixed.

From behind him Sam suddenly heard the long drawn-out cry, 'Baaasssttarrrd!' and he turned around to find out who it was who had so accurately summed him up.

Sam never stood a chance. He managed to raise his gun and even got off a couple of shots, but Deborah was too close. The shots went hopelessly wide and the gun flew out of Sam's hands as he took the full force of a wheelchair containing an axe-swinging woman, hurtling downhill at over twenty miles an hour. The foot rests cut his shins away from under him and a split second later he received Deborah plus her chair in the guts. Over the bonnet of the Mercedes they went, with Sam on the bottom.

All three of them, the wheelchair, Deborah and Sam, landed in different places. The chair went through the windscreen of a Datsun, Deborah landed on the boot of the Mercedes and Sam on the roof of an old VW next to the Merc, pointing downhill.

As she cannoned into Sam's chest, Deborah, resourceful even in this supremely testing moment, had grabbed the plans which he had been clutching to him.

There was a stunned silence, the shot and the action had shut up even the posh Hampstead woman, for the moment. Deborah spoke.

'I got it, Turk! I got it! I got my engine back.' One of her arms was broken, she shoved the plans under it, with her other arm she held up the hatchet which she had managed to hang on to.

'I'm keeping them, Turk,' she shouted through the shocked silence. 'You ain't got no gun now and you come near me and I'll stick this in you! I will, I'll stick it in you.'

There was a general gasp from the observers who were, understandably, finding this dramatic stuff.

'So you could fly after all, kid,' said Sam through clenched teeth. He tried to move, but only gasped in pain, his legs would not function. Deborah's foot rests had done their work and both Sam's legs were busted. Once she understood the situation, Deborah could not resist a cry of triumph.

'My God, you're crippled! You can't walk! Is that a beautiful irony or what! Wait till I get to a phone to tell Momma I believe in God again. We're equal now, Turk, and I've got the plans!'

The captive audience was riveted, this really was top notch Hollywood stuff. So absorbed were they, that they even forgot their fear, in fact many of them had begun to believe that the whole thing wasn't real at all, but some piece of elaborate street theatre laid on by trendy Camden Council to stop rioting during the traffic jam.

'Kid,' whispered Sam. 'In my time I've fought unions, mafia and the United States Senate to name but a few, and you are without doubt the toughest, meanest daughter of a bitch I have ever had the misfortune to tussle with. I don't reckon there's been above fifteen minutes in this whole day when you ain't had the rise on me.'

There was even some small applause at this splendid speech.

Fuck off, creep,' replied Deborah. And the 'tut tuts' were audible towards Deborah, whom most people now considered an ungracious victor.

In fact, Sam did admire Deborah in a way, but that was not why he was treating her to such honeyed words. The reason for this was that he was desirous of keeping her attention, having noticed Bruce Tungsten squeezing round the van behind her.

After Sam had left his office it had been a few minutes before Bruce had noticed that he had gone. Bruce had seen Miss Hodges untie him, whilst Bruce himself tried to douse the three burning hostages and then staunch his own bullet wound, but it was not until after the security guards had arrived that he had realized Sam had gone. Bruce, at heart, was not a bad man and, faced with an office full of human torches and electrocuted secretaries, he tended to deal with the situation at hand. Sam, of course, had kept his mind on the broader issues and gone chasing the plans.