The same subdued industry I’d interrupted last week was taking place on the work floor. A couple of men overhead were steadying a load on a gantry while another couple stood at the open back of a trailer to receive it.
I sprinted past them out onto the bay and jumped to the ground. I couldn’t hear anything over the truck engines, to know whether the Hulk was close at hand or not, and I didn’t stop to look. I could feel the gravel under the thin soles of my Tigers, could feel my toes wet with sweat or blood. It was still raining. I didn’t waste energy wiping water from my eyes, just kept running until I reached the Impala.
“Don’t flood now,” I gasped at it, turning the key while I slammed the door shut. The engine caught and I reversed with a great squeal of rubber. A bullet tore through one of the back windows. I shoved the car into drive without braking. The gears ground, but Luke’s magic fingers on die transmission kept it running smoothly and we leaped forward.
I careened down the drive toward Thirty-first Place. I was almost at the intersection when I saw the lights of one of the semis bearing down on me from behind. I turned right, sharply, so sharply that the car skidded on the wet road. I spun around in a circle, my arms cold with fear, chanting to myself my father’s lessons for managing a skid. I straightened out without flipping over, but the truck was now right behind me, almost touching the back of the Impala. I accelerated hard, but he was bearing down on me too fast.
We were running on an access road to the expressway, next to the stilts of the exit ramp to Damen, where pylons lowered the road notch by notch. I could just make out a fence through the rain.
Another semi was coming toward us, its lights flashing, its horn blaring. At the last second I pulled off the road into the prairie grass. I had the door open before I left the road. Just before the Impala hit the cyclone fence I jumped free and rolled onto the grass.
There was a terrible scream of metal on metal as the truck behind me drove through the Impala, knocking it from its path. I scrambled up the cyclone fence, did a belly flop across its pointed top that raked open my shirt and my stomach, and landed on the cement floor beyond.
I made myself get up and start moving again, but red pain was searing my lungs and I was starting to black out. I stumbled over a hubcap and fell down. Lying on my back I watched the semi plow through the fence, heading straight toward me, its headlights pinning me.
I staggered upright. My right foot caught in a discarded tire and I started to fall back to the concrete. I seemed to be dropping in free-fall: I was landing slowly enough to watch the tractor rush toward me.
Just as I hit the pavement sparks erupted from the cab top. A cannon exploded, making my head vibrate against the concrete. The engine ruptured the cab’s grille and a geyser of antifreeze sprayed the night. As I wrenched my ankle free of the tire and dove away I heard a heart-shattering scream. A starburst the color of blood decorated the truck’s windshield.
I lay behind a pylon, panting. The exit ramp notched down too low here for a truck to clear, but Simon had been so intent on killing me that he hadn’t noticed. The top of the truck had caught the edge of the ramp.
I looked up at the cracked concrete. In the dim night air I could just make out pieces of exposed rebars. Traffic roared overhead. It seemed so queer that people rushed to and fro above me, utterly oblivious of the violence down here. The world should have paused a moment to catch its breath, make some acknowledgment. The expressway itself should have shuddered. But the pylons towered over me, unmoved.
Chapter 45 - Just Desserts—or Whatever—for the Guilty
I ended up in my own bed that night, although for a while it didn’t look as though I’d get there. The trucker who’d been heading toward me had called the cops on his CB once he’d extricated himself from his cab. He had slammed into the side of Simon’s trailer as it jackknifed across the road. His own cab had flipped over, but he’d been wearing a seat belt and mercifully walked away from the accident with minor bruises. By later accounts he’d been threatening to sue everyone involved until he saw Simon’s pulpy head.
I’d stayed on the pavement under the Stevenson until the cops came looking for me—not me specifically, of course, but the driver of the Impala. I’d been too exhausted by then to move, or to care much what happened next. Shivering in the back of the squad car, I tried giving a coherent story about the evening’s events.
The patrolmen gave me a clearer picture of what had happened to Simon. His momentum had been so great that when he rammed the expressway roof it drove the back tires into the ground, exploding them. That explained the cannon shot which was still ringing in my head. The same force expelled the engine from its blocks, propelling it through the radiator. The cab perched rakishly on its hind wheels while firefighters extricated Simon’s remains from the windshield.