voice from outside, muffled but familiar. ‘You in there? Ben?’ It was a woman’s voice, American. Roberta Ryder’s voice!
Roberta took another swing at the window with the tyre-iron from her Citroën’s emergency kit. The reinforced glass was smashed in but it wouldn’t give. The train was fast approaching.
She yelled through the cracked window, ‘Ben, hold on tight. There’s going to be an impact!’
The howl of the train was getting louder. He barely heard the door of the Citroën slam and the sound of its whiny little engine. The 2CV lurched forward, smashing through the barriers and hurling its feeble weight against the heavy metal of the Mercedes’ rear end. Roberta’s windscreen was shattered by the wooden pole. Metal screeched against metal. She grabbed the gearstick and crunched brutally into reverse, dumping the clutch and skidding backwards for another hit.
The limo had been shunted forwards a metre, its locked wheels making trenches in the dirt. She rammed the Mercedes a second time, and managed to get the nose of the big, heavy car under the opposite barrier. But it wasn’t enough.
Ben was crouched tightly down in the back of the limo. Another impact sent him sprawling. The Mercedes was shunted across the second track, the remaining barrier clattering across its roof.
The train was almost on them, 250 metres and closing fast.
Roberta floored the accelerator viciously one more time. Last chance. The badly buckled 2CV crunched squarely into the back of the Mercedes and she whooped with relief as the limo was knocked clear of the railway lines.
The driver had seen the cars on the tracks. In the wall of noise that was descending on Roberta she could hear the scream of brakes. But nothing could stop it in time. For one terrifying moment the 2CV was locked to the Mercedes and sitting right in the train’s path, torn bodywork meshed together, her wheels spinning in reverse.
Then the wreckage disentangled and the car bounced backwards off the tracks to safety just a second before the train howled past with a great slap of wind. Its massive length hurtled by for ten seconds, then it was gone into the night and its little red lights receded away to nothing.
They sat silently for a moment in their separate cars, and waited for their hearts and breathing to settle. Ben tucked the Browning back into its holster and clipped it into place.
Roberta climbed out of the 2CV, looked at it and gave an involuntary groan. Her headlights were smashed to hell, dangling from their stalks amongst the twisted ruin of the car’s bonnet and front wings. She stepped over the tracks to the limo, knees shaky. ‘Ben? Talk to me!’
‘Can you get me out?’ said his muffled voice from inside.
She tried the Mercedes’ driver door. ‘Duh– smart thinking, Ryder,’ she muttered to herself. ‘Open the whole time.’ At least the keys weren’t in the ignition. That would have been really stupid. She climbed inside and thumped on the glass partition dividing her from Ben. His face appeared dimly on the other side. She looked around. There must be a button for the glass panel. If she could lower it, he could scramble out that way. She found what looked like the button and pressed it. No reaction. Probably needed the ignition on. Shit. She found another button and pressed that, and with a satisfying clunk the rear central locking mechanism opened.
He tumbled out, groaning and rubbing his aching body. He shut his jacket, keeping the holster carefully covered up.
‘Jesus, that was close,’ she breathed. ‘You all right?’
‘I’ll live.’ He pointed at the ruined 2CV. ‘Will it still go?’
‘Thank you Roberta’, she said in a mock-sarcastic tone. ‘How lucky you turned up. Thank you for saving my ass’
He made no reply. She threw him a look, then gazed back at the wreck of her car. ‘I really liked that car, you know. They don’t make them any more.’
‘I’ll get you another,’ he said, limping towards it.
‘Damn right you’ll get me another,’ she went on. ‘And I think you owe me an explanation as well.’
After a few twists of the key the 2CV engine coughed into life, making a terminal-sounding clanking noise. Roberta turned the car round, its wheels grinding against the buckled wings, and drove away. As they gained speed, the rubbing of tyres on metal rose to a tortured howl, and the wind whistled around them through the broken windscreen. The engine was overheating badly and acrid smoke began to pour from under the mangled bonnet.
‘I can’t go far in this,’ she shouted over the blast of wind, peering out of the shattered glass into the darkness.
‘Just get it down the road some way,’ he shouted back. ‘I think I saw a bar back there.’
The Citroën managed to see them as far as the quiet roadside bar before it finally expired from a pierced radiator. Roberta gave it a last sad look as they left it in a shadowy corner of the car park and walked in, past a couple of motorcycles and a few cars and under the flickering red glow of the neon sign over the doorway.
The bar-room was mostly empty. A couple of longhaired bikers were playing pool and laughing raucously in the back, drinking beer straight from the bottle.
They said little as they took a corner table away from the hard-rock blare of the jukebox. Ben went over to the bar and came back a minute later with a bottle of cheap red wine and two glasses. He poured a glass out for each of them and slid hers across the stained tabletop. She took a gulp and closed her eyes. ‘Boy, what a day. So what’s your story?’
He shrugged. ‘I was just waiting for a train.’
‘You nearly caught one, too.’
‘I noticed. Thanks for stepping in.’
‘Don’t thank me. Just tell me what’s happening and why we’ve suddenly become so popular.’
‘We?’
‘Yeah, we’, she said hotly, stabbing the table with her finger. ‘Since I first had the pleasure of meeting you earlier today, I’ve had intruders trying to kill me, friends turning out to be enemies, dead men disappearing from my apartment and asshole cops who think I’m a whacko.’
He listened carefully and with growing apprehension as she told him all that had happened during the last few hours. ‘And to cap it all,’ she finished, ‘I almost get mashed by a train rescuing your ass.’ She paused. ‘I take it you didn’t get my message,’ she added indignantly.
‘What message?’
‘Maybe you should keep your phone switched on.’
He gave a sour laugh as he remembered he’d turned it off during their interview earlier on. He pulled the mobile out of his pocket and activated it. ‘Message,’ he groaned as the little envelope logo flashed up on his screen.
‘Nice going, Sherlock,’ she said. ‘Then it’s just as well that when you didn’t call back, I decided to come and warn you in
