Francey pushed her sandaled foot down on the brake, but instead of slowing down the Jeep seemed to move even faster, and she glanced down, wondering if by some odd chance she was pressing the accelerator instead.
The brake was all the way to the floor. Pumping was utterly useless—the speedometer was climbing past its well-bred thirty-five to something beyond fifty. Suicide, on roads like these.
Don't panic, she told herself, still pumping the useless brake pedal. Keep steering and try to downshift.
The gears ground noisily as she tried to push the stick shift into third, and the speedometer climbed to fifty-five. Her passenger turned his face toward her, opened his sleepy eyes and said in a tone of complete unconcern, "Brakes failed?"
She couldn't help it—his mundane tone made her want to laugh. "It seems so."
"You've tried pumping them, you've tried shifting down," he observed casually. "What about the emergency brake?"
"It never worked." She allowed herself a quick glance over at him. She would have expected him to look even worse, paler, now that death stared them in the face. Instead his color had improved, and his eyes had something that might almost be called a sparkle in another man, another situation.
"Then you're simply going to have to drive like hell," he said. "Or we're going to die."
The speedometer had reached sixty. They were only halfway down the hill, and coming up was a series of S-curves worthy of the Grand Prix of Monte Carlo. "Maybe in a Ferrari," she muttered, "with decent tires. We have maybe a snowball's chance in hell of making it."
Michael Dowd laughed. "Well then, Francey, it's been nice knowing you."
"Nice knowing you, Michael," she muttered, concentrating on the steering. The speedometer was edging toward seventy, the S-curves were approaching, and Francey Neeley didn't want to die. Patrick Dugan was dead, cut down in a hail of bullets, and she didn't want to run the risk of ever seeing him again, even in some nebulous afterlife.
She took one last glimpse at her passenger before they headed into the curves. At least he didn't seem to mind dying. That should have made two of them. But she didn't want to die. She didn't want to take the easy way out, the coward's way out. There was too much left to do, to accomplish.
"For heaven's sake put your seat belt on!" she shrieked at her passenger, just noticing he hadn't bothered to fasten himself in.
"Will it make a difference?"
"Humor me. We just might make it. If we get through the next section there's a stretch of rocky beach. I might be able to steer this thing into the water."
"I don't fancy drowning any more than I do crashing."
"Shut up and let me drive."
She almost made it. Not by slowing down, something that was beyond the Jeep's capabilities, but by speeding up just at the curve of each turn. She was cursing beneath her breath, a steady litany that had to take the place of the prayers she'd forsaken months ago, and by the time they entered the final S-curve she knew she was going to make it. The curve was ending, the beach was up ahead, all she had to do was steer across the stretch of rocky beach…
She hadn't counted on the moped with the teenager on board, driving too fast and blithely ignoring her oncoming Jeep. She stared in horror at the accident about to happen, momentarily paralyzed, and then Michael reached over and yanked the wheel sharply.
They went sailing past the teenager, past the stone abutment, past the rocky beach. Gripping the steering wheel, Francey closed her eyes and prepared to die.
Chapter 2
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The Jeep banged down on the rock-strewn beach, its deadly momentum slightly blunted as it hurtled toward the water. Francey was beyond fear, beyond rational thought, as the water loomed ahead. Bracing herself for the impact, she was astonished when the Jeep came to a stop almost immediately once it hit the ocean. Water sprayed up around them, drenching her, and for a moment she didn't move, letting the water settle around them in the sudden, deafening silence.
Then she reached over and turned off the engine that had already stopped, pulled out the key and turned to her passenger.
Michael Dowd was looking a great deal healthier than he had less than an hour ago when she'd picked him up at the airport. He'd fastened his seat belt sometime during those last frenzied moments, and his baggy white suit was drenched. "You're one hell of a driver, you know that?" he said in a conversational tone. "Where'd you learn to handle a car like that?"
The water was lapping over the side of the Jeep, over her sandaled feet. "I had lessons from a bootlegger." She smiled at the almost forgotten memory.
"Bootlegger?"