Blind God's Bluff A Billy Fox Novel - By Richard Lee Byers Page 0,107

onto the seat beside me.

As I sped toward Dale Mabry Highway, I hoped Lorenzo was okay. I didn’t think crashing into the robot had hurt him. That was his gift. But Timon could punish him.

He probably wouldn’t spend the time, though. Not while he still had a race to win.

As I turned onto the crowded eight-lane road, I spotted the Pharaoh standing on the corner. He blew a smoke ring.

For maybe a minute after that, everything seemed normal. Well, normal except for my driving, as I kept it above ninety and cut back and forth through the congestion. A traffic cop could have made his quota for the month just by pulling me over and writing all the tickets I deserved.

Then, as I headed into an intersection, other cars surged forward from both sides of the cross street, even though I had the green light. I jerked the wheel and swerved through without anybody hitting me, but the situation ahead was no better. Suddenly, like someone had pushed a button—which I guessed Timon more or less had—nobody was braking or yielding anymore. Cars crashed together in what amounted to a demolition derby.

Still, I had to keep trying to weave my way through, and the only way was to drive even crazier. I jolted over a concrete divider, rocketed along left of center for a moment, then jerked the T-bird back an instant before a semi would have hit it head on. I slammed Shadow’s side of the car into the back corner of a Sentra that was sitting across three lanes with steam fuming up from under the crumpled hood. The impact slammed me into the steering wheel, but the Nissan spun out of my way, and the T-bird survived the collision and kept rolling. I swerved into the parking lot of the Mons Venus strip club when the pavement there looked clearer than the next little patch of highway. The Pharaoh and three identical blondes watched as I knocked over a newspaper box and cut back onto the road.

“Timon’s coming,” said Ren.

I glanced back. Sure enough, Timon was closing fast. He’d switched from the dinosaur to something that wasn’t quite an M1025 Humvee but mostly looked like one, including the machine gun on the roof. And naturally, traffic did its best to get out of his way, like he was an ambulance or something. The only thing slowing him down was the obstacle course of wrecks that couldn’t move.

I looked for a way through the mess ahead. Shadow, Red, and Ren hung out the windows and shot backward. The almost-Humvee’s machine gun returned fire. Nobody hit anything. There was too much in the way, and the vehicles were veering around too much.

“He’s gaining!” yelled Ren.

And the tangle of careening, crashing cars and wrecks ahead of me looked thicker than ever. Muttering “Screw it,” I reversed, hit the gas until I got to a relatively clear spot, cut the wheel a quarter turn, and dropped the shifter into Drive. The T-bird swung around to face the oncoming Humvee. It sideswiped a disabled SUV doing it, and bounced my other selves and me around, but it was still drivable afterward.

“Shit!” said Ren. He’d just figured out what I meant to do. Shadow grinned like a wild animal showing its fangs.

“Yeah,” I said, “shit.” I hit the gas.

Since the puppets behind me had been trying to clear a path, there was almost a straight line from Timon to me. We could play chicken if we wanted to, and we did. We raced toward one another.

Meanwhile, the guns blazed. At first, trying to shoot and drive at the same time, Timon couldn’t hit anything. Then the T-bird’s windshield shattered, showering me with bits of glass, and a bullet hole popped open in the hood, before the machine gun wandered off target again.

My team was shooting straighter, but the Humvee was up-armored. Sparks danced on the front of it as rounds hit and glanced away.

If the guns didn’t matter, then it really was a game of chicken, and his ride was bigger and heavier than mine. On top of that, he was a supernatural being, and I was just a guy.

But I’d played this scary game before. If I was lucky, he hadn’t, and according to Murk, he could die here in dreamland, even if it wasn’t likely. Put it all together, and I was betting it meant he’d flinch.

I’d just about decided I was going to lose that bet when he finally jerked