Lone Wolf #9: Miami Marauder Read Online Free

barely able to back off and clear the rear bumper as the car, accelerating wildly then, went flat out ahead of them, moving at a hundred miles an hour Wulff estimated. Shaking, reaching out to grip the sack, his thought had been Calabrese, Calabrese had somehow tracked him but the surge of panic from the near-impact had wiped his mind clear, leaving him oddly empty in the aftermath and purged of that kind of fear. He knew that it could not have been Calabrese. No, it was only some lunatic, using Nevada for a playground.
    “You all right?” the driver said, struggling with the gears, getting the van up to fifty again. Wulff looked down at his palm which was bloody; he had not realized it but he had hit the dash hard, bracing himself and he must have been cut. He wiped the blood away leaving a little residue, just a scratch. “Son of a bitch,” the driver said.
    “I’m all right,” Wulff said, looking down the windshield, down the long flat line of highway now empty again.
    “That’s what you put up with,” the driver said. He seemed oddly abstracted now, not really in the cab at all. “The last fucking frontier, that’s what this is.”
    “The frontier is dead.”
    “Not here it isn’t,” the driver said, “this is what it all comes down to.” He had relaxed into the rhythm of the gears again, shifting the stick rhythmically, faint music purring out of the stereo as they got back to an even sixty. “Open season, shit, anything goes here.” He looked sidelong at Wulff. “You’re no ordinary hitch,” he said.
    “No, I guess I’m not.”
    “You didn’t hitch because you’re out of money. You had another reason.”
    “Something like that,” Wulff said. He settled back into the shiny, porous surface of the seat. The driver was all right, he had nothing against him at all, but he did not want to talk. So far the ride had been fine; aimless and quiet, they had not even talked about the waitress. Now, two hundred miles out of there, if the driver could keep up the pace, he could see Chicago by dawn and he wanted to sleep his way there. “It doesn’t matter though,” he said, “the important thing is to get there.”
    “Get to Chicago?”
    “Something like that,” Wulff said.
    “You got business in Chicago?”
    “You could call it that. You could call it that,” Wulff said, wondering how he was going to handle this, how he could stay out of contact with the driver without insulting what was after all a free ride. “More or less, I suppose.”
    “Has it got to do with that sack?”
    “What’s that?” Wulff said. The driver was looking at him now with an oafish smile. “What sack?”
    “That thing,” the driver said. “You haven’t let it out of your sight thirty seconds since you got in the cab. Except at the diner. It all has to do with that sack, doesn’t it?” and Wulff was turning toward him, trying to frame something which would both get the driver off his back and put the sack out of the question, wondering if he was heading into a confrontation of some sort when the driver saw something down the road. “Holy shit,” he said, pointing, and Wulff followed the line of sight along the windshield. Something about half a mile ahead of them, maybe fifty yards off the straight, flat road was burning in a field. The flames were arcing upwards ten to twenty feet; even through the air conditioning, Wulff could smell it. The driver was already working on the brakes again.
    “The Chevelle,” the driver said, “I bet it’s that fucking Chevy,” and the van came to a halt in stages, first the front part of it coming to rest, then like an accordion the middle and the rear banging up, and they were on the shoulder of the road, maybe fifty yards downrange from the burning automobile, the driver already wrenching, reaching for the door. There was no one else on the road at all in the early dawn; no reflection of headlights in either direction. “Fucking Chevelle,” the driver said,