The most wanted by Bagby George & Stein Aaron Marc

Author:Bagby, George & Stein, Aaron Marc [Bagby, George & Stein, Aaron Marc]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery
Publisher: Doubleday & Company
Published: 1983-01-19T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

It had seemed reasonable enough that, once we were off the Turnpike and on to relatively unpoliced country roads, the driving should become less circumspectly lawful. I hadn’t, however, anticipated so abrupt and immediate a shift from the sober to a reckless pace; but, when it did happen, it didn’t occur to me that it could be in any way significant. A man of reckless temperament, disciplined to be professionally cautious, could at the first opportunity be expected to break out into his natural ways.

Professional wisdom dictated that with the passenger he was carrying he could permit himself to do nothing that might get him pulled over for even a mild warning. I could easily imagine that in the city streets and on the Turnpike he had been chafing under the restraints he had been forced to accept. Having at long last reached the place where he could break free from such restraints, might he not quite naturally explode out of them?

We hit a winding road and were careening along it at what had to be suicidal speed. I could sense that from the degree of centrifugal force exerted on me on each turn. My trussed-up body was banging hard against first one car door and then the other. Only if you are flying around turns do you generate that much swing. Also, the turns followed one on the other at too frequent intervals. Roads just aren’t built that way. Even on the spectacular twisters like the Grand Cormiche and the Amalfi Drive there is some interval between turns. I know the state of New Jersey well. For a Manhattanite it’s virtually his back yard. It has no such hazardous spectaculars. This hazard could be arising only from monstrously excessive speed.

I began to think that, whether it had been in the orders or not, I was not going to come out of this ride alive. I couldn’t, however, believe that the orders could have been that in the process of rubbing me out, my kidnappers were to go over the edge with me.

It was only when the shooting started that I began to think I understood. A revolver shot fired a hundred feet away can be mistaken for an automobile exhaust. A shot pulled off less than two feet from your ear makes an unmistakable sound. The man who was not doing the driving had to be kneeling on the front seat and shooting back over my head.

Possibly less easily identifiable was the sound of the return fire. There was a sound and it brought out of memory an experience of many years before, an exercise I had been put through as a part of army training. To give us the experience of moving under hostile fire we were set to crawling across a field under controlled fire, aimed to pass over the heads of the crawling troops. I can remember crossing that field with my buttons digging a trench under me while I prayed that the fire was indeed controlled.

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