blinded him to the ambulance which was backing out of a hospital entrance ahead of him.
He hadn't time to think or waver. He trod hard on the accelerator pedal, sending the Volvo past the rear of the ambulance, which kept coming. In the mirror he saw it reverse into the path of the Peugeot, and braced himself for the sound of the crash as he steered the Volvo into the nearest side street. But there was no crash. Instead he saw the Peugeot skid around the ambulance, straighten up with a screech of its smoking tires and roar after him.
At that moment all he knew was that he mustn't let himself be followed home. He drove past the turn he would have taken, and the next, and saw the Peugeot hurtle into the road behind him. He was already becoming lost in the maze of balconied three-story houses where quite a few of the streets turned corners only to lead to dead ends. He almost lost control of the car as he swerved into the next side turning—left or right, the meaning of the words had been crowded out of his head. He would have cornered again immediately, except that a cyclist with a wicker basket full of groceries on her handlebars was pedalling leisurely across the junction. She raised her greying eyebrows at him as he put on speed and swung into the middle of the road in his hurry to hide in the next side street, where an old man stripped to the waist was craning with a stick over the wrought-iron railings of his balcony in an attempt to dislodge something from the branches of a sycamore which sprouted from the corner of the sidewalk. There was no Peugeot in the rear-view mirror as he drove as fast as he dared to the corner—no sign of the Peugeot as he braked hard at the sight of a dead end less than a hundred yards ahead.
He needn't feel boxed in by the three-story houses so long as he'd lost his pursuer. He edged the Volvo forward past a parked Daimler so as to have room to turn around. He was easing his car across the middle of the narrow roadway when the Peugeot skidded around the corner and screeched sideways to a halt, blocking the road.
Don was aware of gripping the wheel and poising his foot on the accelerator pedal and awaiting his opponent's next move and feeling so absurd it almost paralysed him. Did he really propose to try to drive through whatever gap the Peugeot would leave as it came for him? Didn't only stuntmen attempt that kind of trick, even in movies? Then the fumes spurting from the exhaust pipe of the Peugeot faltered, gave a last black belch and died. The driver had switched the engine off.
They were in another kind of movie now, Don thought, the kind where whoever outstared the other at the showdown won. "Do your worst, Red-eye," he murmured, keeping his lips nearly still—and saw the driver fling open the door and climb out of the car.
"You're not disabled," Don said. He felt outraged and yet guilty, as though he'd brought the situation on himself by his earlier sly comment. The man stalked toward the Volvo, scratching his cheeks with nails as blackened as his stubbled chin, dragging at his face to expose more of the veins of his eyes and wrenching his mouth down. He let go of his face, having rendered it sufficiently hideous, as he reached the Volvo and commenced pounding on the roof.
Don stared at the flattened silver skull of the man's belt buckle, at the way his clogged navel winked beneath the ragged hem of his Adidas T-shirt, and waited for the pounding to subside. When he heard the roof begin to give, however, he lowered his window a couple of inches. "Are you likely to get tired of that pretty soon, do you think?"
Eight thick fingers clamped themselves in the gap, and the man's face descended into view. It looked to be suspended from its brush of dyed black hair that was shaved more or less clean below the tops of the ears, the weight of the cheeks having settled around the weak chin, pulling down the lower eyelids, which appeared to be collecting moisture like some kind of pinkish
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