Serpents Rising (31 page)

But not for long.

Cobb cranked the wheel back as we came out of the intersection and slammed the accelerator to the floor. We spun some, although the road was better in the intersection than almost anywhere else, and we rocketed back to our side of the road, this time narrowly missing a furniture van.
That
driver gave us the finger as we roared in front of him.

“You okay?” he yelled.

“Yeah,” I yelled back at him.

“Was it her?”

“It was her.”

“Hang on,” he shouted again, I figured more from adrenalin than the need to make himself heard over the noise.

We were several car lengths behind her but she must have seen what had happened in her rearview mirror. She sped up and began changing lanes and swerving around and between cars to try to lose us.

As good as Cobb was at driving at high speed in close quarters — and I found out that he was very good — Delores Bain was proving to be
as
good. I had a flashback to a picture on the wall of her office. The photo of someone standing helmeted next to a race car, face difficult to see in the helmet. I had assumed a former student. Maybe I was wrong.

We gained ground slowly. Both vehicles careened through the snow-covered streets with a couple of near misses for each of us and one that wasn't a miss at all as Cobb swerved around a cab only to come face to face with a Dodge Caravan that had pulled onto Memorial from 4a Street directly in front of us.

Cobb braked and threw the steering wheel to the right this time, sending us into a sideways slide toward the van, then at the last second, with a hard crash seeming inevitable, he released the brake, hit the gas, and spun the wheel hard back left. The Jeep brushed the van but we avoided the worst of what had the makings of a bad wreck. It was Cobb's side of the Jeep that made contact with the right rear of the van, but again he was able to keep us on the road and for the moment at least we were once more travelling in a straight line.

I looked back and the van seemed okay.

I don't know how long the chase lasted. It seemed, I'm sure, much longer than it actually was. At Edmonton Trail, Cobb ran a light that had just turned red. Had anyone been entering the intersection even a second or two early, we'd have hit them at high speed.

“Let her go!” I screamed. “Either she's going to kill someone or we will.”

Cobb didn't answer but seemed to bear down even harder. I focused again on the road. At least for the section immediately ahead of us, there didn't appear to be anyone but us and the truck ahead of us with the woman who had killed my wife at the wheel.

And though I knew that, I also knew that the police abandon high speed chases when they pose a danger to the public. This chase was clearly a danger to the public.

“Let her go, Cobb,” I said again. “I'll call the cops. Let them handle this.” I reached for my cell phone.

Cobb eased off on the gas pedal and we slowed. I looked up to watch the taillights of the pickup disappear from view.

Except that they
didn't
disappear from view. I calculated that Delores Bain was maybe a kilometre ahead of us. But the distance between us wasn't increasing, even as Cobb slowed. It was just seconds until I realized why.

The pickup was slowing too, at the turnoff to the zoo. She started to the right, then spun into a U-turn.

And suddenly was coming back down Memorial Drive, now racing back to the west.

Straight at us.

There could be only one reason for her to do what she was doing. She clearly intended to hit us head-on — to kill herself and us. The hunters were once again the hunted.

“Jesus Christ,” I said in not much more than a whisper.

Cobb did the one thing I hadn't thought possible. He floored the Jeep and propelled us ahead, at greater and greater speed straight at the oncoming pickup, two vehicles racing headlong at one another. If this was chicken I hoped Cobb was prepared to lose the game.

“Cobb,” I said and looked over at him expecting to see someone who had lost his mind.

Instead what I saw was concentration and all­consuming anger but not someone who was, even temporarily, out of his mind. And there was something else — control. Whatever was happening, it was clear that Cobb was acting, not out of desperation, but in a calculating and unnervingly calm way.

Or was I delusional? Desperate and hoping, praying that the crash that was only seconds away could somehow not happen.

“Hang on!” Cobb yelled for the second time.

I was already doing that with every ounce of strength I possessed. Cobb ripped the steering wheel hard right and we careened off the pavement of Memorial Drive and onto the boulevard that ran along the south side of the road. We were travelling fast when we hit the curb, flew up, then back down with a crunch that brought my jaws together in a jarring flash of pain.

The Memorial Drive trees were now an obstacle course with Cobb trying to somehow slalom us between them. A massive poplar loomed up in front of us, but it looked like we might get by it.
But what then
?
Beyond that a steel street light pole, just as deadly.

I looked left past Cobb and my stomach lurched as I saw the headlights of the pickup coming at us, blinding in their intensity.

Like a mirror image the truck and its deadly driver were careening toward us on the boulevard at the perfect angle, in fact, aimed at a spot just a little ahead of us. And somewhere inside me there was a tiny appreciation for this woman who even now had been able to realize that she'd have to lead us by just a bit to guarantee the impact that was now inevitable.

That impact came.

The massive pickup hit the light pole with a force that I thought would snap it off like a dead tree branch and allow the truck to continue its missile-like mission into the driver's side of the Jeep.

The light pole buckled and its light exploded like the detonation of an aerial firework. The noise of the crash was a sound I'll never forget — the scream of metal on metal with a jarring of the senses and obliteration of the night in a way that could surely only be duplicated by the weapons of war. If there was another scream — the human kind — it was lost in the noise that for those few seconds was everywhere.

Cobb was able to finally get the Jeep stopped. He wheeled it around, without speaking, and took us back to the scene at the light pole. Our lights illuminated the horror that was the end of the chase. The front of the truck was unrecognizable, the rest of it a twisted, terrible distortion of what it had been.

It was over.

The silence was as intense and eerie, and somehow as frightening as the noise that had preceded it.

And eeriest of all, one shard of metal, I couldn't tell if it was from the truck or the light standard, pointed in the air, a single arm extended skyward like a cobra stretching ever higher to the sound of the charmer's notes.

Delores Bain was pronounced dead at 11:57 p.m., three minutes before December 14.

“W
hy didn't she just shoot us? When she came up alongside us, it would have been easy.” I ran my finger around the lip of a faded blue porcelain coffee mug.

Cobb and I were sitting in an all-night pizza place in Forest Lawn.

We'd ordered a pizza, but between the two of us we'd eaten half a slice. Appetites dulled from being frontline players in a bizarre special effects clip.

A twenty-something waitress with big, dark eyes and what sounded like a level four cold came by every few minutes to fill our coffee cups and eye the pizza as if to determine what was wrong with it.

“It's not the pizza,” I finally told her. “It's been a tough night and we don't have much of an appetite.”

The waitress smiled, apparently reassured that neither she nor the cook had screwed up, and filled our cups one more time.

When she'd gone Cobb nodded. “I thought about that too. A few reasons, I think. First of all, it isn't as easy to shoot a moving target, in this case two moving targets, as they make it look in the movies. Especially when the shooter is trying to drive and shoot at the same time. Second, until that moment she still had a chance of getting away with it. Two guys get bumped into a fatal head-on with a sanding truck, the driver of the bumping vehicle is distraught, blames road conditions, and even though there are some connections to other questionable events, there isn't much for evidence. Had she been successful with getting us out of the way, she stood a good chance of getting away with all of it.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” I said.

“And third, not everybody's a shooter. She'd succeeded once before with the sideswipe thing — why abandon a winning strategy? She'd been waiting for the right moment and the gravel truck was the right moment.”

I told him about the picture on the wall of her office at the school. “Maybe she drove race cars or demolition derby cars back in her youth.”

“That would explain some things. Using vehicles as weapons. The killing of Elaine Yu. How well she handled that truck on a slick road. Guess it doesn't much matter now.”

I wondered if I looked as tired as he did. Guessed that I did. I drank some of the coffee, trying to make sense of all that had happened.

After the wreck on Memorial Drive Cobb and I had been grilled yet again by the cops — first from the traffic side, then by two homicide detectives named Weller and Twistleman. The nature of the crash that killed Delores Bain had taken it out of the realm of a traffic investigation.

I'd got the impression Weller didn't like Cobb or me very much. Or maybe it was the good cop–bad cop routine and Weller was the bad cop. If that's what it was, he was good at it.

He was pencil-thin with dark, dull hair that lay against his skull like a bandana. Weller had eyes the same colour as his hair. And about as friendly.

I wouldn't have called Twistleman
good
so much as just
less bad
. He was the size and approximate shape of a cube van and red-faced in a brown wrinkled suit and shoes that hadn't seen polish in a long time. If I'd been the casting director I'd have put him in the role of bad cop.

Cobb and I had talked about it while we'd waited for the ambulance and cops to arrive at Memorial Drive. We agreed we'd be as truthful and forthcoming as possible but that the word “follow” might be preferable to “chase” or “pursue” when we described our efforts to stay close to Delores Bain.

Weller was a little smaller than me, and though his tan dress pants and corduroy jacket probably looked fine on Dustin Hoffman in
The Graduate
, the ensemble didn't say
retro
so much as
out of style
. Weller was also a hardass, like the cops in the old movies who hated all private detectives and lived to make gumshoes' lives miserable.

But maybe I'm not being fair to Detective Weller. I have to admit that from the moment I first heard his name, I had a visual of Pickwick's man, Samuel Weller, firmly Photoshopped into my mind. Probably didn't help foster a relationship based on respect.

Weller made it clear that he'd like to nail Cobb's “vigilante ass” for reckless driving and leaving the scene of an accident. He'd flipped open his notebook to inform us that “Doris Pahk had called in a complaint to the effect that a Jeep Cherokee had, while driving erratically, struck her vehicle, a 2005 Dodge Caravan, and fled the scene at about 9:50 p.m. the previous evening.”

Cobb stayed silent and so did I.

“Is that about what happened?” Weller flipped the notebook shut. He seemed to enjoy the act of flipping — maybe for dramatic effect.

“A vehicle like the one you described pulled out in front of me as I was trying to recover from being struck from the side by the pickup driven by the deceased woman as I've already described,” Cobb said. “But, to be honest, things were happening rather quickly and I may have missed the secondary contact after the violence of the first one and my desire to follow the person who had struck us.”

It was quite the oration from a man who wasn't known for long speeches. Weller turned to me. “What about you? You being a newspaper man and all and trained to observe what's going on around you — were you aware of contact between
Mr.
(he emphasized the mister) Cobb's vehicle and the Dodge Caravan?”

“No, sir.”

“But you saw the van.”

“Yes I did.”

“But you don't know if your vehicle hit Ms. Pahk's.”

“As Mr. Cobb mentioned, things were a little chaotic just as that moment.”

“So you
don't
know if your vehicle hit Ms. Pahk's,” he said again.

“No, sir.”

Another cop had come into the room. I didn't pay much attention to him at first. After a few minutes he spoke to Weller.

“Is the central issue here a traffic violation, Detective?” We learned later the newcomer's name was Hannigan. He was senior to Twistleman and Weller and a harder ass than either of them.

“Sir?” Weller said.

“We have what appears to be a deliberate attempt to cause bodily harm with a vehicle, arguably attempted homicide; we have the person who is alleged to be the perpetrator of the attempted homicide now deceased as the result of a violent collision, perhaps of her own doing, and you appear to be focusing on a possible traffic infraction.”

I'm betting cops hate to be humiliated in front of guys they are trying to impress with their toughness, and since they can't really take out their frustrations on the superior doing the humiliating, I'm pretty sure Weller filed away Cobb's name and mine on his I'll-get-these-bastards-one-day list.

There was more, but after Hannigan's comments it was pretty smooth sailing. We were finally cleared to leave with the warning that follow-up questioning might take place.

“There's a lot about this I don't understand,” I said.

“Me too.” Cobb poured milk into his coffee.

“She had to have been following us.”

Cobb nodded slowly. “Maybe I'm getting too old for this. That's two tails I haven't made in the last few days.”

“There was a blizzard out there. How could you have seen her?”

“She saw us.” He drank some coffee. “Thing is, I did see the truck and I ruled out a one-ton dually. Shouldn't have.”

“That last part — trying to ram us head-on — that was pretty much suicide.”

“The only person who could tell us what was going on inside her head at that moment is dead, but maybe she thought her luck had run out and she had nothing to lose. Or maybe her hate was so great that she was willing to do whatever it took to kill you.”

“Suicide,” I said again.

Cobb nodded. “Whatever it took.”

“It doesn't make sense. How could the reputation of her school be enough to make her want to kill people?”

“People kill for a lot of reasons that don't make sense. Nutso sports fans have tried to kill players on opposing teams. Mothers have tried to murder girls that were going to beat out their daughters for spots on the cheerleading team. There are a whole lot of crazy people out there who've never seen the inside of a psychologist's or psychiatrist's office.”

“Yeah,” I said, but it still wasn't clear to me, none of it.

Cobb looked at me. “If she was obsessed with her school and it was all she had in her life and she saw first Donna, then you, as a threat, then clearly this was a woman sick enough go to any extreme to punish — or eliminate — that threat.”

“And for that … obsession, Donna died.”

“Yes.”

I stared at my coffee cup for a long time. Finally I looked up at Cobb.

“You were pretty damn good out there yourself, you know.”

Cobb sipped his coffee, looked at me, and smiled.

“Maybe. But we were lucky too. If that light pole wasn't there …”

“Yeah.”

“What was your plan when she turned and came at us? You couldn't have calculated that she'd hit the light pole.”

“You're right, but I knew we had no chance at all as long as we stayed on the road. I figured if I got off Memorial and onto that boulevard at the last possible second maybe she'd miss us.”

“And if she'd missed us
and
the lamppost? What then?”

Cobb shrugged. “Maybe the river. I can't say I'd thought that far ahead.”

“I need sleep,” I said. “What do you say we get out of here?”

“Why don't you take the pizza home,” Cobb said. “Shame to waste it.”

I shook my head. “You've got kids. You take it.”

Cobb nodded. I waved at our waitress and gestured that we needed a box for the pizza. While we waited, Cobb chuckled.

I looked at him. “Are you overtired or delirious?”

“I was just thinking,” he said. “We're like those duos in the detective novels. Maybe we'll have to team up again in the future. I can sometimes use a good researcher.”

“Hey,” I said. “I've read some of those books. I know what happened to Sam Spade's partner. He was dead by chapter two.”

“Yeah, that was unfortunate.” Cobb chuckled again. “But maybe I'm a better detective than Sam Spade.”

“Yeah, but maybe I'm not as good a partner as Sam's was.”

“I'd say you were pretty damn good.”

“Thanks.”

The waitress came with a box and we packaged up the pizza. Cobb threw twenty dollars on the table and we headed out into the starless night to where Cobb's Jeep sat beneath a street light, a wounded warrior, both sides showing the evidence of what had happened earlier that night.

To be honest, whether Cobb was serious or not about our ever working together again, I was thinking I'd be perfectly happy if my detective days were over.