The Best American Noir of the Century

“How is it now?” he checked presently. The rearview mirror couldn’t reflect that far back.

“They haven’t grown smaller, but they haven’t grown larger.”

“We’ve stabilized, then,” he translated. “Dead heat.”

Then after another while and another look, “Wait a minute!” she said suddenly on a note of breath-holding hope. Then, “No,” she mourned quickly afterward. “For a minute I thought — but they’re back again. It was only a dip in the road.

“They hang on like leeches, can’t seem to shake them off,” she complained in a fretful voice, as though talking to herself. “Why don’t they go away? Why don’t they?”

Another look, and he could sense the sudden stiffening of her body.

“They’re getting bigger. I know I’m not mistaken.”

He could see that, too. They were finally peering into the rearview mirror for the first time. They’d go offside, then they’d come back in again. In his irritation he took one hand off the wheel long enough to give the mirror a backhand slap that moved it out of focus altogether.

“Suppose I stop, get out, and face him when he comes up, and we have it out here and now. What can he do? I’m younger, I can outslug him.”

Her refusal to consent was an outright scream of protest. All her fears and all her aversion were in it.

“All right,” he said. “Then we’ll run him into the ground if we have to.”

She covered her face with both hands — not at the speed they were making, but at the futility of it.

“They sure build good cars in Torino, damn them to hell!” he swore in angry frustration.

She uncovered and looked. The headlights were closer than before. She began to lose control of herself.

“Oh, this is like every nightmare I ever had when I was a little girl! When something was chasing me, and I couldn’t get away from it. Only now there’ll be no waking up in the nick of time.”

“Stop that,” he shouted at her. “Stop it. It only makes it worse, it doesn’t help.”

“I think I can feel his breath blowing down the back of my neck.”

He looked at her briefly, but she could tell by the look on his face he hadn’t been able to make out what she’d said.

Streaks of wet that were not tears were coursing down his face in uneven lengths. “My necktie,” he called out to her suddenly, and raised his chin to show her what he meant. She reached over, careful not to place herself in front of him, and pulled the knot down until it was loose. Then she freed the buttonhole from the top button of his shirt.

A long curve in the road cut them off for a while, from those eyes, those unrelenting eyes behind them. Then the curve ended, and the eyes came back again. It was worse somehow, after they’d been gone like that, than when they remained steadily in sight the whole time.

“He holds on and holds on and holds on — like a mad dog with his teeth locked into you.”

“He’s a mad dog all right.” All pretense of composure had long since left him. He was lividly angry at not being able to win the race, to shake the pursuer off. She was mortally frightened. The long-sustained tension of the speed duel, which seemed to have been going on for hours, compounded her fears, raised them at last to the pitch of hysteria.

Their car swerved erratically, the two outer wheels jogged briefly over marginal stones and roots that felt as if they were as big as boulders and logs. He flung his chest forward across the wheel as if it were something alive that he was desperately trying to hold down; then the car recovered, came back to the road, straightened out safely again with a catarrhal shudder of its rear axle.

“Don’t,” he warned her tautly in the short-lived lull before they picked up hissing momentum again. “Don’t grab me like that again. It went right through the shoulder of my jacket. I can’t manage the car, can’t hold it, if you do that. I’ll get you away. Don’t worry, I’ll get you away from him.”

She threw her head back in despair, looking straight up overhead. “We seem to be standing still. The road has petrified. The trees aren’t moving backwards anymore. The stars don’t either. Neither do the rocks along the side. Oh, faster, Garry, faster!”

“You’re hallucinating. Your senses are being tricked by fear.”

“Faster, Garry, faster!”

“Eighty-five, eighty-six. We’re on two wheels most of the time — two are off the ground. I can’t even breathe, my breath’s being pulled out of me.”

She started to beat her two clenched fists against her forehead in a tattoo of hypnotic inability to escape. “I don’t care, Garry! Faster, faster! If I’ve got to die, let it be with you, not with him!”

“I’ll get you away from him. If it kills me.”

That was the last thing he said.

If it kills me.

And as though it had overheard, and snatched at the collateral offered i(, that unpropitious sickly greenish star up there — surely Mark’s star, not theirs —at that very moment a huge tremendous thing came into view around a turn in the road. A skyscraper of a long-haul van, its multiple tiers beaded with red warning lights. But what good were they that high up, except to warn off planes?