I handed it over. He was still steering with both hands, but there was little more than the thumb of his right hand around the wheel, his fingers gripped around the gun.
“You ever hear about how to get away from a crocodile?” he asked. He was shouting now. With the back window gone, it was a lot noisier in the car, especially with the Annihilator bearing down on us.
“No,” I said.
“Well, they’re bigger and stronger and faster than people, but they can’t corner worth shit. So if you’ve got one coming after you, you keep running in circles. They can’t navigate the turns. Right now, we’re being followed by a crocodile, and we’re coming up on the perfect place to lead him in circles.”
Up ahead, a sign for the Midtown Center. The largest mall in this part of the city. As the mall’s west-end anchor store, a Sears, came into view, so did the massive, entirely empty, parking lot.
Our Buick screeched around the entrance into the lot. Again, the black Annihilator missed the turn, but rode right up over the curbs, its fat wheels rolling over them like they were Kit Kat bars. “Here comes the fun part,” Lawrence said, using the wide-open spaces of the mall lot to do huge circles. “What I’m gonna do,” he shouted, “is come up around behind him, and then we’ll give him a taste of his own medicine.”
“What do you mean, own medicine?”
“He took a few shots at us, now we’ll return the favor.”
“How are you going to shoot and drive at the same time?”
“If you can’t handle a gun, surely you can handle a fucking steering wheel.”
“You gotta be kidding.”
“Does steering compromise your journalistic integrity, too?”
So I leaned over in the seat, ready to grip the wheel whenever Lawrence wanted me to.
The Annihilator was trying hard to keep up with us, but the SUV was leaning precariously. I wondered if maybe this was Lawrence’s real plan, to trick our pursuer into flipping his own vehicle over. If it was, I approved.
But the driver seemed to know what he was doing. He wasn’t pushing the truck to extremes. I glanced back and saw a leather-jacketed arm hanging out the window. The hand was clutching a weapon that looked a lot bigger than the gun I’d handed to Lawrence.
The Buick lurched and its tires squealed. A hubcap went flying off, spinning across the pavement toward the Sears. But Lawrence seemed to know what he was doing, too. We were now actually coming up around behind the Annihilator.
“Okay,” he said. “Hold the wheel.”
I gripped it like I was holding on for dear life, allowing Lawrence to switch the gun to his left hand, get his arm and shoulder out the window, and start firing.
He got off two shots, but the Annihilator was bearing to the right, so he wrested the wheel back from me and changed course.
“Again!” he said, and I grabbed the wheel as he leaned out the window, firing the gun twice more. “Shit!” he shouted, wind blowing into his face.
“Did you hit him?” I asked as he took control of the steering wheel again.
“I don’t think so. And even if I did, the thing’s a fucking elephant.”
Ahead, the Annihilator abruptly turned, but where it was headed didn’t make any sense. The SUV was speeding to the far end of the lot where the ground sloped steeply upward to a road that was actually a ramp that led from a city street that circled the mall, and on to the highway.
“What’s he doing?” I said. “He’s got nowhere to go.”
The Annihilator’s brake lights came on only briefly, as if the driver had lightly tapped the pedal, and then the truck drove off the end of the parking lot and up the embankment, all four tires kicking up sod and dirt, its headlight beams dancing in the night sky like a searchlight. The vehicle bucked and jerked as it climbed, the embankment clearly a challenge even for an Annihilator.
“He’s going for the highway,” Lawrence said. “He’s creating his own shortcut, the son of a bitch.”
The Annihilator crested the embankment and hung a right onto the ramp, then, with another roar of its massive engine, sped off in the direction of the highway. There was no way Lawrence’s old, two-wheel-drive Buick could even begin to scale the hill. And by the time we’d wound our way out of the mall lot, onto the street, and found that ramp, our friends in the Annihilator would be home, tucked into their beds.
Lawrence brought the car to a stop, and neither of us spoke for a moment as we listened to the motor idle and tick, as though trying to catch its breath.
“Fuck me,” said Lawrence.
“I take it that’s not an actual invitation,” I said.
6