"No!" The panic was on him completely. He let up on the brake and jammed down again over and over. He felt a metatarsal in his foot snap. Now at sixty mph and climbing, his auto continued to skid and weave. Cars veered from his path, horns blaring.
The doctor jammed the start/stop button for the engine but the motor kept up its demonic roar.
Think!
The gearshift! Yes! Neutral. He shoved the lever to the central position, and, thank God, that did the trick. The engine still howled but the transmission was disengaged. He pitched forward as the car slowed, dropping to sixty-five, sixty.
Now the brakes.
Which were not working at all.
"No, no, no!" he cried.
Consumed with panic, paralyzed, he could only stare forward as the car raced, against a red light, toward the intersection ahead, noting the vehicles stopped or slowly crawling in the cross-traffic lane, perpendicular to him. Cars, a garbage truck, a school bus. He would strike one of them broadside at close to fifty mph.
A splinter of rational thought: You're dead. But save who you can. Hit the truck, not the bus! Go right, just a bit! But his hands couldn't pace his mind, and tweaking the wheel sent the car veering directly toward a Toyota sedan. He gaped at the panicked face of the driver of the tiny car he was speeding directly for. The elderly man was as frozen as Nathan Eagan.
Another twitch of the wheel and the doctor's car struck the rear driver's side of the Japanese vehicle, a few feet behind the man at the wheel.
The next thing that the surgeon knew he was coming around, after the air bag had knocked him unconscious. He was frozen in position, embraced by bones of steel from the crumpled car. Trapped. But alive, he thought. Jesus, I'm alive.
Outside, people running. Mobile phones were filming the accident. Pricks... Had at least one person had the decency to call 911?
Then, yes, he heard a siren. Would he end up in his own hospital? That would be rather ironic, maybe the same ER doctor he'd helped out...
But wait. I feel so cold. Why?
Am I paralyzed?
Then Nathan Eagan realized that, no, he had complete sensation; what he was feeling was liquid cascading over his body from the mangled rear portion of the Toyota he'd virtually cut in half.
Gasoline was drenching every inch of his body from the waist down.
CHAPTER 45
Amelia Sachs hit eighty on the FDR.
This was not easy to do. Incurring horn blares and extended fingers, Sachs ignored the protests and concentrated on finding gaps between cars, braking furiously, zipping through lane changes. Keeping the revs high, high, high. Fifth gear at the most. Fourth--she called it the gutsy gear--was better. And the meat and potatoes, third.
When you move they can't getcha.
And the corollary: When you move they can't get away.
"No," she was saying into the hands-free, speaking to the patrolman from the precinct near her mother's town house. "He's there somewhere nearby. It's his MO. He... oh, shit."
"What's that, Detective?" the officer asked.
She controlled the skid as she swept past the car that had braked hard to make an sudden exit that neither its driver, nor she, had been planning on. The Torino and the Taurus, distant relatives, missed a potentially deadly kiss by two inches, tops.
Sachs continued, "His MO is he's nearby when there's an attack. He could rig an accident and leave but he doesn't. He probably flipped the switch and waited to make sure the vic"--her voice choked--"to make sure my mother would get to the trap. He's only had a ten-minute start and we don't think he's got a car. Gypsies a lot."
"We're sweeping, Detective. Just--"
"More bodies. I want more bodies out there. He can't get that far!"
"Sure, Detective."
She missed what else he said, if anything. Concentrating on fitting between two vehicles in a space no third vehicle was meant to pass through. Over the roar of the Torino's engine she couldn't tell if contact was made. Horns blared. Sue me, sue the city, she thought. And, irritated that she'd lost seconds braking, she downshifted hard and explored the redline zone once again.