Perpetual Motion (26 page)

Whipping off her sunglasses, she cast a
sidelong glance toward the back of the SUV. The old mechanic wasn’t
there. She’d been so focused on watching the office; she had
completely lost him.

Leaning over to the other back window, she
looked around the pumps. The gas nozzle was sticking out of the
tank, but the gallons and dollars were still stuck on zero.

“I have to do everything myself,” she
muttered as she opened the back door and took the long step down to
the gravel below.

Still behind the safety of her big armor
plated SUV, she checked to make sure she had extra clips; then
narrowed her eyes on the garage.

When she had been given the assignment, it
seemed like an easy draw. Take out an unprotected hunk of spinning
metal, along with a juicy bonus for scrubbing one super nerd.
Sounded like a cinch. That was before she’d gone through six
men…Three dead, one in critical condition, and two MIA. The body
count was bad enough; even worse was all the unwanted attention
they were stirring up. And her employer despised attention.

It was time to finish this up, once and for
all.

Leading with her gun, she came around the
back of the SUV and, with surprising speed in high heels, crossed
over the driveway, slamming her back into the wall to the side of
the office door. Crouching low, she was getting ready to spin into
the opening when she heard a loud clanking sound to her left.

The second garage door was opening. A moment
later, the Chevy Nova pulled forward out of the garage’s bay.
Recognizing the car as Dexter’s, she fired three successive shots –
shattering the passenger and rear windows.

To her surprise, the car was moving so slowly
she had plenty of time to put two more slugs in each back tire. For
a moment, she thought the bullets had done their job. The Nova was
sluggish, but didn’t completely stop either. The tires were still
turning as the car crawled away from the service station, making
its get-away in slow motion.

Running back to her SUV, she yanked the
nozzle out of her tank and jumped into the driver’s seat. As she
cranked the engine, she looked ahead at her wounded prey. The Nova
was moving so slow, there wouldn’t be any trouble catching it.

Her bonus was one bullet away.

Crouching low in the seat, Cynical was
relieved to have survived the opening volley of bullets. He was
also grateful for the run-flat tires Michael had added to the car;
he just wished they would turn a little faster. With his right foot
smashed into the floorboard, the speedometer showed thirty mph, but
it felt like ten.

Michael had hastily presented him with a
trade in the garage and it had seemed like a good arrangement at
the time. In return for the super-charged, magnet-powered Nova,
Cynical had agreed to play the part of the decoy, while Michael and
Karen took his fuel-injected Impala to whereabouts unknown.

Now, it seemed like he’d gotten the bad end
of the deal; he’d certainly gotten the slow end of the stick. At
this rate, Amanda would be on top of him any second. As he
continued to mash the “gas” pedal, he resisted the urge to curse
Michael for setting him up.

All the while, the magnetized pistons pumped
away and the speedometer calmly climbed - one mile at a time. At
forty mph, Cynical felt like getting out and pushing.

“For crying out loud!” he cried, looking back
at the SUV; it was close enough to make out Amanda behind the
wheel. Readying his gun, he turned and fired back through the
already broken out rear window.

Unfazed, the Escalade kept charging; ramming
him so hard it whiplashed his forehead into the top of the steering
wheel. With an eye almost pressed into the speedometer, he noticed
he was up to fifty-five. Maybe the push had helped.

Looking back, he watched as the chrome grill
receded and the driver took aim with her gun. Cynical swerved hard
to the right, just as he heard the crack of shots. Second later, he
was still breathing. She had missed, at least any vital organs.

Without bothering to aim, he stuck his pistol
out the window and fired off a couple of rounds; at least one
bullet pinging off the black hood. The SUV was still right on his
tail, coming on strong and making its move to get around him.

At almost sixty-five miles an hour, the
Escalade slid up beside him like he was standing still. Looking
over, Cynical could see the top of Amanda’s head in her elevated
position. It gave him a small amount of satisfaction to catch her
expression when she realized she’d been duped and that it was him,
not Michael, in the Nova.

His moment of triumph was short-lived as she
went from confusion to anger in a flash. Because of the height
advantage her vehicle gave her, Amanda was lining up a relatively
easy shot. Just then, there was a long piercing honk, causing her
to face the road. Braking, she yanked the steering wheel to the
left as an eighteen-wheeler hurled by in the opposite
direction.

Once again, Cynical had been granted a brief
reprieve.

Seconds later, the SUV was creeping back up
on the Nova. This time, Amanda wasted no time firing, her bullets
piercing the metal along the back side panel. Cynical knew she was
aiming for his gas tank, probably the least vulnerable spot on the
car.

This time, however, he was not quite so easy
to catch. With the speedometer in the eighties, Cynical felt as if
he was rolling downhill, the wind at his back. Amanda’s vehicle
still had the edge though and was incrementally closing the
gap.

Both vehicles were flying in tandem through
the dry wastelands of the Borrego Salton Seaway that engulfed
Highway 22. A few feet behind him, Amanda switched to the opposite
lane and adjusted her angle before firing successive rounds.

Instantly, Cynical felt a bullet pierce his
left shoulder, burning like an ember just above his shoulder blade.
That was no graze, but there was no time to think about it. The
next shot whizzed through his open window, splintering his
dashboard and nearly startling him into a heart-attack. The
gunshots continued as his side mirror exploded in a burst of glass
and metal and something sharp slashed him over the left eye.

It took all his strength to keep the steering
wheel steady. With shrapnel above his eye and in his shoulder, he
felt like a madman driving through a tunnel of roaring pain.
Pouring all his energy and concentration into the road, all he
could do was hope the next bullet would not be his last.

When he glanced to his left again, he
half-expected to be looking down Amanda’s barrel as she blew him a
final kiss good-bye. To his relief, the big black Caddie was no
longer there. His pursuer had drifted back, probably to reload, he
thought.

Turning back to the road, everything seemed
to be blurring around him as if he was in some sort of time warp.
Palm trees morphed into a long hedge of exotic shrubs; telephone
poles resembled giant fence posts. His head throbbed and his eyes
were losing touch with the wavy yellow streak that he clung to for
dear life.

Stealing a split-second glimpse at the
speedometer, he found the needle buried on the far side of the
maximum 135. MARI was firing on all cylinders.

Even if the super charged Nova could sustain
these speeds, Cynical knew he couldn’t. He wasn’t capable of
keeping the low-flying machine on the road, especially in his
condition. With a quick check to his rearview mirror, he saw the
SUV had fallen at least fifty yards back. Taking his foot off the
“gas” and tapping the brakes allowed him to begin to slow down.

Once he was under a hundred mph, he was able
to steal another look in his rearview. Despite his falling speed,
his would-be pursuer was falling further behind, until she seemed
to be pulling into the emergency lane. Riding his brakes to keep
her in view, Cynical watched with a mixture of relief and curiosity
as Amanda stopped on the side of the road, apparently giving up the
chase.

Still motoring at a mere sixty mph, he picked
up his phone and tapped the recent call from the 301 area code. As
it rang, the big vehicle became reduced to an insignificant dot. To
his surprise, a live voice actually picked up.

“Hello,” Amanda said as calmly as if she was
spending the day at the spa.

“What’s the matter?” Cynical asked. “Are you
having car trouble?”

“Actually, I’m out of gas,” she replied
crisply.

“You should have filled up at Ed’s.” He could
imagine the fake smile plastered on her pretty face; the sadistic
anger seething just below the placid surface.

When she spoke again, her voice was icy cold.
“I will find Michael Dexter.”

“Oh, I don’t think you will,” Cynical said
dismissively. “He’s a lot smarter than you or me. The only reason I
found him was because he left one thing he cared about. Now that he
has her, he’ll disappear for good.”

“No one disappears for good; not unless
they’re dead,” she said with a bitter little chuckle that sounded
like a hollow bluff.

“I guess we’ll see,” Cynical said, keeping
his eyes on the road ahead. “But I don’t think you’ll find him. I
can’t imagine Black Starr will keep you on the job - not after this
fiasco.”

There was no reply. It couldn’t be too
surprising to her that he knew who her employer was. Still, it was
one less piece of armor for her to hide behind.

“I don’t guess you’d like to tell me who
Black Starr is actually working for?” He waited for a second, not
expecting an answer. “Oh come on,” he prodded. “Do you even know?
Do you even care?”

“I work for the same person you do,” she said
with a sneer. “The person who pays me.”

Before he could object to being lumped in
with mercenaries and cut-throats like her, a sharp ache in his
shoulder caused him to have to lower the phone for a second. When
he brought it back up to his ear, she was gone. Maybe they had lost
connection; maybe she had hung up. Just as well; there really
wasn’t anything left to say anyway.

He looked back into his rearview one last
time; she was long gone there too. It had never felt so good to
leave a woman behind.

“First class my ass.”

Tossing the cell phone into the passenger
seat, the pain in his shoulder reasserted itself with a ferocity
that surprised him and, for a moment, he thought he might
blackout.

“Finish the job,” he told himself as he
searched his pockets. Once he had the encrypted phone in his shaky
hand, he touched *** and waited.

As if waiting for his call, the voice on the
other end answered almost immediately, “Mancuso.”

“It’s me,” Cynical said. “I have what you
want.”

“You have Michael?”

“No, but I think I have something just as
good,” Cynical said quickly. “I have a prototype of the machine he
built.”

“That was destroyed,” Mancuso said
dismissively.

“It was, but they were working on a second
one; a smaller, more efficient model.”

“It’s portable?”

“Yes,” Cynical said through gritted teeth,
“very portable.”

There was a pause as this new information was
absorbed. “And it works?”

“Yeah, I can personally attest to that,”
Cynical confirmed. “Look, I know this wasn’t our original
agreement. So, will you take the prototype instead of Michael? All
the rest of our terms are exactly the same, including my bonus
payment?”

“What happened to Michael?”

“He got away and I’m not going to look for
him,” Cynical stated with certainty. “So what do you say to this
new deal? If you don’t want it, I’ll put it on E-Bay.
‘Chevy
Nova drives like a champ… Goes 150 miles per hour without breaking
a sweat….Never needs gas.’
I bet that would generate some
interest.”

“All right,” Mancuso said after a momentary
pause. “You have a deal.”

“And I still get the million dollar bonus?”
Cynical clarified.

“I said ‘yes,’” Mancuso insisted, no longer
hesitating. “Where are you now?”

“I’m headed east on Highway 22, just outside
of Borrego Springs,” Cynical said, looking through his window for
any additional road signage. “It’s east of San Diego,
somewhere.”

“I’m on my way to you,” Mancuso said, his
accent growing stronger with his excitement.

Mancuso’s pilot had given Cynical directions
to an airfield near the Mexican border. Following the instructions,
the Nova had left the highway and was traveling down a thin strip
of cactus-lined asphalt. The deserted stretch of road gave him a
chance to enjoy the ride, as much as someone could who had been
shot three times in the last eight hours.

The constant pain was like an obnoxious
hitchhiker that wouldn’t stop yammering. And yet, as bad as it was,
it couldn’t completely eclipse the exhilaration of driving a
revolutionary breakthrough. He was gliding on pure magnetic power,
and he wanted to savor the moment. A classic rock song would have
been a nice addition, but Michael had removed frivolities such as
radio and air-conditioning.

Turning on what was possibly the last road
that was still in the United States, he ran parallel to the border
for a couple of miles. Before him, he saw an abandoned landing
strip that had probably once been used to transport drugs into the
country. Perhaps it still was.

Off in the distance, a huge white jet began
to descend out of the sky. The timing was so perfect he couldn’t
help but wonder if it has been circling like a hawk till he had
been spotted. The thought gave him the creeps for some reason,
maybe because it made him feel small and insignificant, like a
field mouse about to snatched-up for a snack.

Even though the Boeing was much bigger than
the prop planes the airfield was built for, it managed to
touch-down with surprising grace. The behemoth bumped along the
landing strip, which consisted of concrete spider-webbed with weeds
that gave way to a grassy field. The flaps dropped flush with its
wings as the private jet came to a rest in the pasture.