what’s ‘Oofa coals’ mean?” I asked, surprised at how clenched my own words were. The Peugeot’s headlights, in the rearview, drew closer. I couldn’t see driver or passenger, but if I were the latter, I would be preparing to shoot out—
Yup, there was the pistol, aiming at our tires. I swerved, and the only explosion I heard was that sinister pop of gunfire. It doesn’t sound as loud in real life as in the movies.
It’s a lot scarier, though.
Rhys said, “Uffach cols. It means embers of hell.”
The Peugeot pulled around and was flanking us now.
“Hang on!” Again, I stood on the brake pedal, pulling the handbrake simultaneously. We skidded forward some yards, further abusing the tires. The Peugeot shot past us again, but braked faster this time—and turned, sideways, blocking our way to civilization.
Brick warehouses crowded the road on either side, without even a sidewalk to try to squeeze around the green car.
“That’s some fairly mild swearing,” I said, breathless.
“It is not, for me,” he muttered.
The passenger door of the Peugeot opened, and a man with a pistol got out. He was wearing a ski mask.
Rhys said, “Isn’t it time to back up again?”
I considered that, considered how much more abuse this poor Citroën Saxo could take. If we ran, the Peugeot would just follow us again. Cat and mouse…and they got to be the cat.
The gunman approached us, especially ominous in the white illumination of our headlights, wreathed with foreign nighttime.
I said, “So how much does Aunt Bridge like this car?”
“She rarely drives it. She prefers the Metro.”
The brake engaged and the gearshift in Neutral, I gunned the engine. Both Rhys and the gunman jumped. “Good.”
The gunman wagged a gloved finger at me, a clear tsk-tsk. He came closer. At least he wasn’t shooting us—yet. He probably wanted to question us first. Then shoot us.
Fat chance, monsieur.
“You cannot run him over,” said Rhys, his voice firmer than at any point since this car chase started. Interesting.
I gunned the motor again, this time with less effect. “Well…I could.”
Damned if Rhys didn’t unfasten his seat belt and reach for the door handle! I lunged across his lap, grabbing his wrist before he could do it. “Wait!”
His eyes seemed bluer in the shadows and the reflected headlights. They were determined, too. Any macho points he’d lost by not noticing the tail, Rhys Pritchard gained back in spades at that moment.
I straightened away from him, released his wrist. “Put your damned seat belt back on,” I said. “I don’t plan on murdering anybody, whether they deserve it or not.”
He hesitated. The gunman was slowing, waving at us to get out of the car.
“Please,” I said, not taking my eyes off the gun. “Have a little faith, here?”
“Have faith?” But thankfully, the familiar click of a seat belt locking into place gave me the permission I needed. I gunned the motor a third time, dropped the car into Drive and burned rubber like a teenage boy showing off at a red light.
Then I released the brake.
The Citroën shot ahead. The gunman leaped out of our path.
I wasn’t aiming at him, anyway. Instead, I accelerated. Thirty kilometers per hour. Forty. Fifty—that was about thirty miles an hour. Sixty…
I rammed our Citroën straight into the passenger side of the Peugeot, behind the rear wheel. There was a crash, a jolt—but, just as I’d been taught, the car skidded out of our way.
The rear of a car is the lightweight end.
I flattened the gas, and the Saxo surged forward—with a nasty dragging sound that, after a few hundred feet, stopped when we bounced over our own bumper. Oops.
Behind us, the Peugeot tried to follow, not waiting for its gunman. But the car managed only a few lunges forward, unable to even navigate the turn to escape the warehouses framing them. As I’d hoped, I’d disabled the damned thing.
Yes!
Rhys sat quietly in the passenger side of the car as I retraced my turns back onto the motorway. I realized, in the near silence, that neither of us had bothered to turn off the radio. We just hadn’t noticed it, our lives being in danger and all. The music seemed particularly trivial, all of a sudden.
I unclenched my hands from the steering wheel, one at a time, and practiced my breathing. Then I said, “Could you check the map for the nearest train station? We’re going to be a little obvious if we keep driving this.”
Rhys shook his head, not in the negative so much as to clear out the debris. “I can. Where did you learn all that?”
“An old boyfriend of mine got special training—sort of a demolition defensive-driving course. Then he taught me. The bootleg turns, anyway. We only covered the theory of ramming.”
Lex had always been generous with the tricks he learned. We’d had a blast that week, taking turns pulling bootlegs and speeding in reverse around a big, empty QuestCo parking lot.
Funny, how all roads seemed to lead back to Lex Stuart.
“And he took it because…?”
“Because he got tired of having drivers and bodyguards. His family’s well off. It made him a pretty high abduction risk.”
“That’s lucky for us,” said Rhys, opening the glove box to pull out a map. I glanced at the stretch of his shoulder as he rummaged, suddenly longing for human touch. Any human touch. Rhys. Lex.
You’ve got to admit, the whole driving-lesson thing was ironic. I had only vague suspicions that Lex might be involved with the bad guys, here. But I had absolute proof that the lessons he’d given me had saved our butts. Maybe our lives.
Damn, my life was getting complicated.
Tai Chi is a moving meditation, a choreography of ancient circular motions done slowly and with purpose. Everything resolves into its opposite—expansion into contraction, inhaling into exhaling, tension into release—and back again. Yin and yang. Softness and strength. Mind and body.
I did a few basic forms in my hotel room in Poitiers, just to ground myself for bed. Though there are older, lesser-known combat techniques involved in Tai Chi, its main focus is on harmonizing your Chi, your life energy. After the previous two days, I figured my Chi could use all the help it could get.
It helped me sleep, anyway, despite some children yelling in Italian across the hall.
The next morning I compensated with a
