Cat in a Jeweled Jumpsuit

He hated the ostentatious way you had to rev the engine before kicking off onto that aerial act of balancing a thousand-pound machine like it was an English bicycle. And the thing tilted like a pinball machine on curves and turns, defying gravity.

Elvis had loved the rush of speed, at first in any wheeled vehicle, than in any kind of mood-altering pills by the fistful.

Matt only felt safe being sober, maybe sometimes in the worst, humorless sense of the word. He really had to look into buying a car, when he had a minute, now that he had the money. At least motorcycle helmets guaranteed a measure of anonymity, as well as safety, he thought, fastening his. He felt instantly cocooned, muffled, disguised, and glanced back at the dark knot of people gathered against the station building's lit panel of glass door.

Then the Vampire swooped him away on a rush of air, sound, and motion, a magic carpet that roared. The motorcycle thumbed its chrome tailpipes at the deserted streets as he made his way toward the lights and the main thoroughfares. Its Vampire whine lifted into the wind and then skittered away like an echo.

The full moon rode over his shoulder, almost as if it was an unborn twin to the silver 'cycle . . . a high, shy shadow of the machine clinging to the ground. Matt could hear a distant howl borne by the wind. They kept pace, the moon and the motorcycle.

And then the second whine accelerated.

It was gaining on him.

The moon hung in its same position, eternally fixed to match the Vampire's speed.

Matt checked the side mirrors.

A single moon of blinding light flared in his right mirror.

Either a car with one defective headlight was behind him, or another motorcycle was taking this same route.

He couldn't make out much beyond the reflected Cyclops eye of light tailing him. Whatever sped behind was black and cloaked by the night itself.

He swerved suddenly left at an empty intersection with no stop signs.

The light swerved with him, showing up in his left mirror.

No car could maneuver that quickly.

Matt accelerated, the lighted dashboard dials seeming to intensify with the increased speed, as if the Vampire, given its head, was grinning like a Jolly Roger and showing neon teeth.

He knew the route; otherwise he wouldn't have dared hit . . . fifty, fifty-five. The area was industrial, not residential, at least.

He didn't know why, but he felt impelled to shake the shapeless form behind him.

It was like being a kid again, this visceral panic, this unshakable sense that something ugly was gaining on him.

Basements sometimes did that to you. Dark placessymbolically and implicitly connected to the blackest regions of imagination and primal fear.

Usually open streets had no potential for terror, not to men who thought they knew how to defend themselves, or at least to avoid obvious trouble.

But this burr of light that kept to the same, tail-gating distance, waltzing with the Hesketh Vampire in a dance nobody had requested or assented to . . . he had to lose it.

Matt recalled an abandoned service station coming up at the next intersection.

He would zip into it, through the empty gas lanes, around back and out the other side, onto a small road leading to an office park with a maze of buildings. He'd lose the thing that followed him there.

Islands of gas pumps looked like totems in the sick light from too few street lamps. He zoomed between them. A hard right almost had him reaching a foot to the ground to keep the cycle from overbalancing. But the Hesketh held, or he did, and the perilous, semihorizontal turn was history.

He fought the inclination to slow down as the maze of one-story buildings hunkered ahead like a Monopoly-board Stonehenge, lacking all rough edges and romance, but still a complex trap of confusing turns and dead ends.

He'd never navigated this place, but at least he knew it was there, and what it was. Whoever hid behind that single eye of light behind him couldn't know even that.

A few security lamps spread a thin layer of light between the buildings. Matt turned left, and then right and right and left, angling for the complex's opposite corner.

He lost the following light on the first turn, but the noise from both machines boomeranged from the glassand-stucco canyon they shot through.

He recognized that losing someone else meant risking losing himself, but by now his hands were sweating inside the leather gloves, and all pretense was lost. Some- one was following him who didn't mean to let him escape. He must escape.

Simple.

The tight maneuvers were making him breathless. This was insanely dangerous, to him and his menacing shadow. It had come down to who would survive the insanity first, and last.

The Vampire spurted out onto the empty freeway access road, jolting over potholes left by the searing summer heat. Matt's teeth and bones were starting to ache from the grinding pace, from tension.