Deadline Man

The vise that has held my stomach all day tightens again.

“Could she be a cop?”

“I never saw a homicide detective who looked like her,” Amber said. “Back in the wonderful days before I was exiled to Bellevue. Let’s have some fun.”

Amber punches the accelerator and I am pushed against the back of the seat. She closes an empty two-block gap to the truck ahead of us in seconds, then swings left onto Broadway, headed to Capitol Hill. She’s quickly jammed in traffic. Broadway is two lanes, running through the heart of the hip business district. Even with the wind, the sidewalks are crowded. Couples, neo-grungers, the ever-present homeless. It’s mostly young people. They’re so thin.

Amber moves into the left-turn lane, signaling. Suddenly she shoots ahead and slides back onto Broadway, three cars beyond where she started. Somebody honks. She laughs and swings into a side street, gunning it around a traffic circle and going left. It’s so dark that it’s hard to see pedestrians, who dart across in the distance as mere shapes. From the side mirror, I see another pair of headlights take the circle and come toward us, fast.

“She’s very persistent.”

In a minute we turn back onto Broadway and crawl along with the traffic, hitting every light red. A crowd stands in front of the order window at Dick’s, craving burgers. Amber signals again, but this time she makes the turn and we slide into the drive-in parking lot. I can see the gray Ford brightly illuminated in the streetlights, waiting on Broadway to follow us in. Then we catch a break. A Mini Cooper backs out of a space behind us, blocking the Ford’s way into the lot.

Amber guns it again and shoots into an alley. We bump hard across a side street—I don’t even think she looked for oncoming traffic—and wind around couple of blocks and into another alley. We speed past the backs of buildings and dumpsters. A homeless guy with a shopping cart curses us. She has turned the lights off. The lots are small and the buildings uneven. After driving half a block she pulls the parking brake and turns into a dark niche. She stops the car with the parking brake. No red brake light betrays our presence. We’re in the loading area of a business, but concealed by the longer building on our right. A white delivery van is on the left. We’re six feet farther in from the front of the van. Amber turns off the engine, grabs my hand and pulls me down. We’re face to face below the gearshift and my side and back ache from the position. Amber giggles.

“This is fun.”

I hear the crunching of car tires, see a flash of lights, then hear a swoosh going down the alley. We just may have lost the blonde.

Amber tentatively raises up, then starts the car and tears out after her.

“What are you doing?”

“Aren’t you curious to see who’s pissed off at you?”

I readjust my seatbelt and sit back. “How did you learn to drive like that? Journalism school?”

“I was a history major,” she says. “I have brothers and I’ve watched a lot of action movies.”

Now we’re three cars behind the Ford as she turns onto Denny Way and descends out of Capitol Hill. She winds her way through the streets to get on Interstate Five. Amber confidently follows, keeping a distance of maybe two hundred yards. The task is made easier by the Ford’s brake-light malfunction: only one works. So every time the blonde taps the brake, she signals her position.

“Can you make out her tag?”

I can. She tosses a reporter’s notebook at me and I write it down. Just an ordinary Washington state tag.

The freeway traffic runs fast and thick, and the Ford accelerates quickly, changing lanes. Amber doesn’t match lane change for lane change, but keeps the same distance.

“She’s going for I-90.”

“Got it.” Amber moves to one of the lanes that will merge into the freeway headed east. Sure enough, the Ford takes the exit. We follow and drop into the noisy tunnel that carries traffic out of downtown and under the Mount Baker neighborhood. It’s a long, narrow run, not a time to be worrying about earthquakes, and not for the claustrophobic. Amber seems unperturbed. She hides beside an eighteen wheeler in the middle lane while the Ford takes the fast lane.

Then we blast out of the tunnel onto the floating bridge over Lake Washington. The water is dark and at eye-level, churning white caps in the wind. The Ford is gone.

“Do you see her?”

“Fuck.” Amber keeps her speed constant. Ahead is an anonymous stream of red tail lights. A wave crests over the concrete barrier, splashing my door. Amber runs the wiper.

“There,” she says. Perhaps other waves caused traffic to slow down—the one-side brake light flashes half a mile ahead. The Jetta rattles for a moment then responds, jumping up to 80 to close the gap.

“I’m getting creeped out driving back toward the ‘burbs,” Amber says.

We’re almost to Mercer Island, and as the lighted exit looms the Ford signals.

***

Darkness is the primary matter here. The road is narrow and serpentine. On both sides, huge trees rise up to block out even the marginal light of the moonless sky. The big houses sit mostly far back, behind trees, hedges and gates, invisible except for a fleeting window or security light, but none powerful enough to penetrate far into the gloom. The water is everywhere nearby, but you’d think you were far from shore in forest primeval. Even the wind has surrendered to the overpowering blackness. The road is treacherous. As it winds around, a sharp drop-off would put a careless or unlucky driver through the roof of houses just below the grade, as the island falls off to the priciest lots near the water. The Ford drives the speed limit. Amber drives with her lights off.

I don’t even bother to ask if that’s a good idea. She seems fine. We’ve come this far. Now we’re on the Rock, the Alcatraz for the rich in the Puget Sound region, which doesn’t lack for affluent enclaves. The isolation would drive me nuts—even though it’s minutes from downtown Seattle, if the traffic is light. No wonder Megan Nyberg took every opportunity to get the hell out. I watch the substantial homes pass by and wonder which one was hers. Yet their lights are barely visible in the overwhelming darkness. I half expect Megan’s ghost to step out in front of us. My mind is beyond addled.