She pushed herself to her feet and began running, knowing she was only delaying the inevitable, knowing with dread certainty she would be lying dead in the next few minutes.
The Cord rolled majestically along the highway from Breckenridge, the morning sun gleaming on the bright chrome and new paint. Skiers wailing to the lifts waved as the elegant sixty-year-old classic swept past.
Giordino dozed in the enclosed rear seat while Lily sat up front in the open with Pitt.
Pitt had awakened in a stubborn mood that morning. He saw no reason to ski on rental skis when his own American made Olin 921s were in a closet only three miles up the road from the hotel. Besides, he reasoned, he could drive to the family lodge, pick up his gear and be sitting on a chair lift in half the time it took waiting his Turn to be fitted in a rental shop.
Pitt shrugged off his father's unexplained warning to stay clear of the lodge. He simply wrote it off as bureaucratic overplay. The Senator would have made the same impression on Hulk Hogan by telling the wrestler to Turn the other cheek after an opponent had kicked him in the groin.
"Who's shooting off fireworks so early in the morning?" Lily wondered aloud.
"Not fireworks," Pitt said, tuning in the sharp crack of gunfire and the explosive thump from grenades echoing off the mountainsides of the valley. "Sounds like an infantry firefight."
"It's coming from the woods up ahead!" Lily pointed"to the right of the road."
The smile wrinkles around Pitts eyes tightened. He i
ncreased the Cord's speed and rapped on the divider window. Giordino came awake and cranked the glass down.
"You woke me just as the orgy was getting started," he said between yawns.
"Listen up," ordered Pitt.
Giordino winched as the cold air flew into the passengers' compartment.
He cupped his ears. Slowly an expression of bewilderment crossed his face.
"Have the Russians landed?"
"Look!" said Lily excitedly. "A forest fire."
Giordino made a quick study of the black smoke that abruptly billowed above the treetops, chased by columns of flame. "Fuel concentrated," he stated briefly. "I'd say it was a burning structure, probably a house or condominium."
Pitt knew Giordino was on target. He swore and pounded the steering wheel, knowing with sickening certainty it was his family's lodge that was feeding the growing mushroom of fire and smoke.
He said, "No sense asking for trouble by stopping. We'll drive past and check out the action. Al, you come up front.
Lily, climb in the rear and keep your head down. I don't want you hurt."
"What about me?" Giordino asked in resigned indignation. "Don't I rate a little concern? Give me one good reason why I should sit up there exposed with you?"
"To protect your trusty chauffeur from harm, evil and unsavor-y felons."
"Definitely not a good reason."
Pitt tried another tack. "Of course, there's that fifty bucks I borrowed from you in Panama and never paid back."
"Plus interest."
"Plus interest," Pitt repeated.
"What I won't go through to protect my meager assets."
Giordino's weary despair sounded almost genuine as he scrambled through the open divider window and changed places with Lily.
Farther down the highway, a half-mile before the entrance to the lodge, people were stopping and crouching behind their parked cars, gawking at the swirling smoke and listening to the rattle of automatic rifles. Pitt thought it odd that the sheriff's department hadn't put in an appearance, and then he saw the bullet-riddled patrol car barricading the road to the lodge.
His attention was focused to his right and the inferno beyond when suddenly, at the very edge of his peripheral vision, he caught a vague form running down the road on a collision course with the Cord.