A Dangerous Talent (An Alix London Mystery)

by Elkins, Aaron

  “Um…I wouldn’t mind, but why? I thought you were enjoying it.”

  “So did I, but I got up this morning with a screaming neck ache, and I realized it was from the tension of driving this thing yesterday. You know that Camry with the ‘Baby on Board’ sign you mentioned? Well, I’ve come to the reluctant conclusion that that’s more my speed than one of these things. This baby is just too much for me, too…I don’t know, muscular. I guess when it comes to certain things I’m a weenie at heart.”

  She laughed just a little ruefully as they climbed back out to exchange seats. “Besides, I woke up a couple of times during the night thinking about that wiggly section where that old guy went over the edge. I’d rather do that part with my eyes closed, if it’s all the same to you, and if I did, it would probably work out better for all concerned if I wasn’t the one doing the driving at the time. So if you would kindly take all this horsepower off my hands I’d appreciate it. At least I’ll know you know what you’re doing.”

  “You think so? Let’s see how you feel about it by the time we get to Taos.”

  Chris began to laugh again but stopped short. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “I’m kidding,” Alix said, settling gratefully behind the wheel. “Believe me, Gian-Carlo put me through some truly intensive training before he ever let me take one of his precious beauties out alone.”

  For the drive down the dirt access road she restrained herself, maintaining a steady ten or twelve miles an hour. Gravel dings in the flawless, satiny finish would not be looked upon kindly back at the rental agency. So by the time they reached the highway, she was aching to put the car to the test.

  She lived with the ache for two or three miles, but when they rounded a curve and a three-or four-mile stretch of ruler-straight road lay ahead, she glanced at Chris. “What would you think about my putting this baby through its paces? It couldn’t be safer than right here. There isn’t another car in sight.”

  “Sure,” Chris said agreeably, “I’m curious myself, not that I—urk!” Her head jerked back against the headrest as Alix downshifted to build more RPMs and bore down on the gas pedal.

  It was as if the car itself reared back, gave a deafening, Hallelujah-I’m-free-at-last whoop, and accelerated like a 767 roaring down the runway. Alix’s heart soared right along with it. As a rule she was not a reckless driver, not a reckless person, not even particularly given to temptation, but every rule has its exceptions, and for Alix London the exception came when she got behind the wheel of a truly fine sports car. It was a passion she’d come by relatively late; she’d been twenty-six when Gian-Carlo Santullo had introduced her to the thrill and challenge of his Lamborghinis. As in most things, she was a quick study, and for the rest of her stay in Italy it was those weekends in Ravello with their splendid, solitary drives along the winding, windy Amalfi Coast that she looked forward to most eagerly.

  “Whoo,” she heard Chris murmur, her foghorn voice a couple of notches lower than usual and uncharacteristically subdued. When Alix turned to look at her she saw that Chris was still sitting rigidly upright, apparently holding her breath, her eyes like saucers, her head still pressed against the headrest.

  She slowed at once and pulled over to the side. “Chris, are you okay?”

  Chris let out the air she’d been holding in. Her posture relaxed, and her eyes returned to normal size. “I’m okay, yes. It’s just that I always feel a little peculiar when the gravitational pressure exceeds five Gs.”

  “I’m sorry,” Alix said sincerely, “I didn’t—”

  “Don’t be sorry, it was great! How fast were we going?”

  “Not that fast, really. A little under ninety. But it took less than ten seconds to get there. That’s what you were feeling.” She thought it best not to mention that one of the gauges on the dashboard actually measured G-forces.

  “What was all that noise? Is that normal?”

  “That noise was four hundred pound-feet of torque, five hundred and twenty horsepower, and seven thousand rpm. And yes, it’s normal. It’s all part of the Lamborghini experience. Did it scare you? I should have warned you.”

  “Damn right it scared me.” She grinned. “I also absolutely loved it. Come on, let’s do it again. Can we do it any faster? What a kick.”

  “With pleasure. We still have a fair amount of straightaway before the curves, and not another car around. Want me to take it to its limit?”

  “You bet, but I’d rather not get airborne, if it’s all the same to you.”

  “I don’t think that’ll happen, but you never know.”

  “Oh, hell, I’ll chance it.” Chris set herself back against her seat again, gripped the raised edges, compressed her lips, and stared straight ahead. “Let ’er rip!”

  This time, with Alix having grown re-accustomed to the car’s unique electronic gearshift “paddles,” they got up to ninety even faster. At twelve seconds they hit a hundred and twenty, and after that she had to stop looking at the gauges and concentrate on the driving. They were just short of a hundred and fifty miles an hour, still going up, when she finally eased up as the road began to climb a ridge and gently curve to their left.

  “I never thought I had the fast-driving gene,” Chris said, a bit short of breath, “but I have to admit, that was terrific.”

  Alix nodded happily, more relaxed than she’d been since they’d left Santa Fe the day before. “Maybe we’ll get some more open road after we get through the next patch.”

  The next patch constituted the precarious, swinging, cliff-edge curves that ran above the Chama River, the area where Henry Merriam had died, and Alix instinctively slowed even more. On the left, up against the ridge and just coming into view, was a decrepit rest stop that she hadn’t noticed on the way up and wouldn’t have noticed now if there hadn’t been a truck parked in it and a dark-haired young man leaning nonchalantly back against the hood with a campesino’s straw hat down over his eyes. He looked oddly at his ease in this lonely, forlorn spot, with his arms folded and one foot propped comfortably behind him on the bumper. But what caught her attention was how intently he appeared to be watching them—almost as if he were watching for them—from under the shadowed brim of his hat, despite the apparently relaxed pose. Something was off here. The skin on the back of her neck crawled.

  Chris had her eyes on the rest stop too. “That truck—we’ve seen it before. Yesterday, in Española.” She stared hard. “That’s it, all right,” she said when they drew close enough to read the name beneath the painting on the passenger door. “Bimbi. Remember?”

  “We’ve seen the guy too,” Alix said. “He’s the one who wanted a ride.”

  “He’s looking at us,” Chris said nervously. “What is this about? This can’t be a coincidence, can it?”

  “I wouldn’t think so. What I’m afraid is that he wants to play. That’s the downside of a car like this—the idiots in their souped-up junk heaps that want to race you.”

  “But how could he know we’d be here?”

  Alix shook her head. “No idea.”

  “He’s talking on a cell phone,” Chris said as they drew abreast. “Why would he be talking on a cell phone? Oh God, look, now he’s jumping in the truck. What’s going on? He’s still looking at us!”

  “Chris, I don’t have a clue, but I sure don’t like it.” The crawly sensation had crept halfway down her spine. If they hadn’t already been entering the first of the curves she would have turned and headed back the way they’d come. On the straightaway she could leave him in the dust. On the curves, it would be a different proposition altogether, more dependent on nerve and outright craziness than flat-out speed. That was especially true because the narrow road was quickly climbing the ridge. Already there was a sheer, eighty-foot drop-off on their right, with the shallow, gleaming river winding its way through the desert at its base.

  In the rearview mirror, she saw the pickup bumping onto the road and turning toward them. He was only a couple of hundred yards back,
and she could see that he was gunning the engine. This was not good; damn these stupid macho kids. “Better make sure your seat belt’s tight,” she told Chris, checking her own.

  Chris’s face was pale. “Thank God you’re driving. I’m having nervous palpitations and all I’m doing is sitting here. Alix, are you going to be able to deal with this?”

  “Deal with what? He wants to race, we don’t want to race. End of story.” So why was her scalp itching like this? Why could she feel the adrenaline practically flowing into her fingertips? No, there was something more than a simple race going on here. He had picked what was probably the most dangerous, isolated stretch of highway between Santa Fe and the Colorado border. Did he want to play chicken, was that it? And if so, would he take no for an answer? And who was on the other end of that cell—

  Chris had turned to stare out the back window. “He’s crazy!” she screamed. “He’s practically on our bumper! What is he doing?”

  When Alix glanced into the mirror she was shocked. Indeed, the idiot was only a few yards back and closing fast. They were going about thirty miles an hour now, and they were well into the curves; this was really dangerous. Did he actually mean to bump her, was that it? Was this some insane form of counting coup the youths went in for around here?

  But just as she was bracing for the impact, he swung left, into the lane for oncoming traffic, and drew level with them. If she hadn’t already decided he was genuinely crazy, that would have been enough to convince her right there, because the bends in the road and the jutting red-rock promontories limited his vision to just a few hundred feet. If something doing thirty or thirty-five miles an hour came around that next curve right now he was dead meat. She tried to get a look at his face in hopes of guessing his intentions, but the Lamborghini was too low and instead she found herself looking at the dusty passenger door panel, into the Kewpie-doll face of Bimbi, whose expression gave no clue.

  Still, she didn’t get truly, deeply scared until Bimbi suddenly swerved directly at her as they rounded an outside curve. Alix jerked the steering wheel to the right, but the front right corner of the pickup still caught them a glancing blow just behind the left front wheel well, provoking a little gasp from Chris. Alix hung on, managing to maintain control, but now she was no longer in any doubt about what was happening to them. This wasn’t a joyride by a testosterone-crazed kid; this guy was out to kill them.

  And now another vehicle, a lumbering, chugging eighteen-wheeler appeared rounding the bend just ahead, heading for them. Directly for them—for Alix and Chris—because the ponderous rig was in the wrong lane. Henry Merriam, the old art dealer, flashed across her mind. Was this what had happened to him?

  The pickup on her left was already swerving toward them again, but her mind was working very fast. There was no place to go on the right, that was for sure—no shoulder to speak of and only a two-foot guardrail that didn’t look substantial enough to stop them from going over the side if push came to shove. And even if there had been a shoulder and she’d pulled onto it and stopped, what then?

  To their left was the better option; even if the pickup was souped up, she had no doubt that with the Lamborghini’s fantastic acceleration and ground-hugging ability she could dart into the wrong-way lane ahead of him and quickly leave him behind. But that meant she’d be continuing around the bend in the wrong lane, with zero visibility. If that wasn’t worrisome enough, there was the monstrously wide semi itself that she’d have to get by. What would it do? If she played her cards right, it wouldn’t be able to switch lanes quickly enough to bring them into a head-on collision (which would probably put no more than a few dents in the semi but would pulverize the Lamborghini), but a simple, properly timed swerve to its right would mash them sidewise into the cliff wall. The question was, did the driver have the time and the reaction speed to bring it off?

  Well, she was about to find out. “Hang on,” she said through clenched teeth. “Here we go…”

  She took in a quick breath, downshifted, and stamped on the gas pedal. In two seconds they were fifty feet ahead of the pickup. She switched back to the right lane, which left them bearing rapidly down on the semi (or rather, vice-versa). They were close enough for her to see that the semi driver’s jaw had dropped; he couldn’t believe it. A line from Man of La Mancha flew into (and out of) her head: “Whether the rock hits the pitcher or the pitcher hits the rock, it’s going to be bad for the pitcher.”

  “Alix…” a frozen, wide-eyed Chris squeaked. “We’re…we’re…”

  Thirty yards before the impending crash, Alix lightly tapped the brake pedal so that she could accelerate into the curve, then swung abruptly left, into the opposite lane, accelerating as much as she dared. The semi driver, startled as he was, managed to haul the steering wheel hard to his right in an effort to crush them. Too late, though. She was already halfway down the forty-foot body of the truck-trailer, so that the cab went scraping along the rock wall five or ten feet behind her. For a fleeting second she exulted, thinking they were home free, but then, as in one of those slow-motion nightmares, the trailer came fishtailing around, straight for them and certain to mash them against the wall. She had no choice but to accelerate even more and shoot for the diminishing, dismayingly small opening between the back end of the truck and the wall of rock.

  She almost made it, too, but the weirdly sliding back corner of the trailer caught them hard on the passenger door side. There was a stunningly loud bang! as the side air bag next to Chris’s head deployed, and now it was the Lamborghini that was fishtailing over the narrow road. Alix knew better than to lean on the brakes, which would have eliminated what little steering control she had. Instead, she tried hard to steer “into” the skid. Unfortunately, “into the skid” meant heading for the edge of the cliff. Fortunately, the guardrail was sturdier than it looked. Also springier. When they ran into it, it bounced them jarringly back onto the road. She caught a dreamlike glimpse of her shoulder bag flying out the open window and into the void. The car was spinning slowly but uncontrollably, and now the rock face loomed ahead. It was the rear of the Lamborghini that would take the hit, she could see that, and there was nothing to do now but hit the brake pedal and pray for the best. As she flinched instinctively, there was another ear-splitting bang! and now the front air bag exploded into her face.

  CHAPTER 16

  She didn’t know how long she’d been out—not long, she thought, probably only seconds. What woke her up was an acrid smell as penetrating as ammonia, and when she opened her eyes she saw that the car was full of a powdery gray haze, apparently from the air bags, which were now slowly deflating. Her nose hurt, but when she touched it there was no blood, and no give or wiggle either. Other than that—

  In her fog she’d forgotten about Chris. “Chris! Are you all right?”

  No answer. Chris’s head drooped on her chest. Alix’s heart sank. She touched her friend’s shoulder. “Chris?”

  Chris’s head jerked weakly up. “Uh?”

  “Chris, are you okay?”

  It took a while for her to answer. “Yes…no…I don’t think so. My head…”

  “Don’t move. I’ll call for help.” But even as she reached around for her cell phone she remembered that it had been in her shoulder bag, which was now probably floating down the Chama on its way to the Rio Grande and eventually the Gulf of Mexico. The thought of the cell phone reminded her suddenly of the guy in the pickup truck, about whom she’d also forgotten. And the eighteen-wheeler. My God, she was really in a daze. She looked anxiously up. The Lamborghini had spun completely around so she was looking back down the road, and there they were, a hundred yards back. The jackknifed truck, its trailer upright, its cab on its side, was more or less wrapped around the pickup, which was also on its side. Dust was still rising from the jumble. Nobody moving. Good. As far as she was concerned, she had no problem with them being dead.

  “Alix,” Chris mumbled, “I don’t…I can’t quite…” And then her eyeballs rolled
up, her head fell limply back, and she was unconscious again.

  Alix was terrified for her. Chris was obviously injured, maybe seriously. She needed to get to a hospital fast. But what was to be done? She felt herself near panicking. They were on a road that might not see another driver for hours. No cell phone, no—

  When the calm, reassuring female voice came over the navigation speaker, it was as if Alix were hearing the voice of God.

  “This is your Always On-Call service. We have received a signal that your air bags have deployed. Do you need assistance? We have you on Highway 84, four miles northwest of Abiquiu, New Mexico. If you cannot reply—”

  By that time Alix had found her voice. “Yes, we need assistance!” she shouted, close to crying with gratitude. “My friend is…”

  “And you honestly think he was trying to kill them?” Ted asked, somewhere between astonished and skeptical. “Run them over the cliff?”

  “I do, yes,” Lieutenant Mendoza said. “Absolutely.”

  Ted just sat there silently shaking his head. Mendoza had called him twenty minutes ago and asked him to come by his office; something important had happened up above Española. He had just finished giving Ted the details.

  “But look, Eduardo,” Ted said at last, “why jump to a conclusion like that? They were driving a fancy sports car, they were in open country, lowrider country. Why wouldn’t it make more sense to assume the pickup was trying to drag them into a race, or maybe playing a stupid game of chicken, and things just went wrong when the semi came around the bend?”

  “Because…” Mendoza turned his Lobos cap backward to underscore the seriousness of the situation and began ticking points off on his fingers. Pinky: “One, the guy in the semi wasn’t some innocent lug who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was a thug, an ex-con. The two of them were, and this wasn’t the first time they’d worked together.” Ring finger: “Two, the story London told made sense.”