engine roared. The tires smoked, and when he checked through the rear window and released the clutch, Corinna took off like a shot, wheels rolling, headers growling. It was all flash. It was shock and awe, a rocket launch backward, crossing lines of traffic. It was a neighborhood in reverse. Some people honked, most slammed on their brakes, snarling the traffic and turning it into a maze for the Steele Street crew to navigate—and through it all she held on.
He made his first turn while still in reverse, with an instant 180-degree pivot of the car’s front end around the brake-locked rear wheels, swinging them into forward motion and pressing her back into her seat with pure heart-pounding g-forces. Then he started up through the gears. The second turn was into a frighteningly narrow alley. She gripped the armrest on the door, her knuckles growing whiter with each passing second.
They weren’t sliding off anything. Oh, hell, no. They were flying, nearly airborne on the turns.
They whipped past trash cans, dumpsters, and through a section where lines full of clothes flapped and billowed in the breeze behind chain-link fences, where people were out in their backyards, watching in consternation and flashes of horror as Corinna flew down the small, rutted road.
This was a car crash waiting to happen. She knew it down to her belly.
The next turn had her pressed up against the door, a hard, chassis-rocking left back onto pavement. Fifty yards later, he downshifted, double-clutching into a hard right, and they tore down another alley just like the last one. He might not know who he was, but he sure as hell knew this part of town, and he sure as hell knew how to drive.
Up ahead, she could see the parking lot of an industrial site, a conglomeration of big, rattletrap-looking, multistory metal buildings all crammed together, and she knew, if they could just get to the parking lot without hitting a dumpster, or somebody’s garbage can, or, heaven forbid, somebody, they’d be okay.
She was wrong.
Corinna caught some air launching off the slightly higher dirt alley onto the asphalt of the parking lot, and while Jane was literally absorbing that bit of automotive rock and roll, Con accelerated around the corner of the first abandoned building and cut a sharp left, then a sharp right into a U-shape recess. A dark, empty space in the far wall loomed up in front of them, and he headed straight for it, double-clutching his downshifts again, smoothly and quickly easing back on the speed, but not nearly enough.
Oh, no, not even close.
The building came rushing at them, the empty space in the wall looming closer. They roared past the words TATSUNAKA PRODUCE painted in large, fading letters above the loading docks. Ahead of them, on either side of the opening, large, metal sliding doors were hanging off their tracks, looking like the open maw of a car-crushing, street rat–eating shark monster.
Holy cripes. Holy, holy … She sucked in a breath and held it. Holy, oh, hail, Mary, full of grace. Holy, oh, holy, holy…
They passed through the door into darkness.
Mary, Mary, Mary, Mother of God, O Mary, pray for us sinners.
He finally hit the brakes, really hit the brakes, and Corinna’s front end slanted down steep-steeper-steepest with Jane backpedaling like crazy, virtually crawling backward over the top of her seat, until a strong arm came across the interior of the car and held her in place.
“You’re fine” were the last words she heard before she and the amnesiac and the rocket-hot GTO fell into an inky black abyss.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Alpha One, come in,” Jack said, trying to raise Con for about the tenth time, and failing again. Hell. “Alpha One, come in. We’ve got a bearcat on the loose.”
This was no good. He and Scout were parked in a restaurant parking lot not too far from Coors Field, Denver’s baseball stadium, and not too far from Steele Street, still in lower downtown.
When they’d reached the Buick Regal, Jack had pulled off his black watch cap and put on a Rockies baseball cap and a pair of clear glasses with silver frames. He’d handed Scout a blue bandanna, and she’d done one of those hippie-girl-cruising-through-Thailand-and-the-islands things, roping it through her hair and tying it all up on top of her head. He’d seen her do the same thing with a silk scarf, add a pair of dangly earrings, and look like she’d just walked off the cover of a fashion magazine.