Flash and Filigree Read Online Free PDF Page A

clearing the rise behind, very fast. The front wheels of the Delahaye were squarely aline the stone marker, the speedometer at sixty-five, when the amber went on the light below. Flat-mashing the pedal into the foam rubber mat, the Doctor peered keenly ahead, where for the eighth-mile the road fell like an unwound ribbon only rising briefly again past the exact bisection of the crossroad, and the whole, in this perspective, resembled nothing so much as a giant flat cross of the Greek Orthodox Church. The intersection was deserted but for a truck that stood on the right waiting against the light.
    In a high, singing speed, the Delahaye lay close to the earth, the tires sucked and clawed the concrete surface as the car dropped across the hill like a whining shell.
    Behind the wheel, slumped British racing style, the Doctor’s eyes were just at the level of the top of the steering wheel when his wrists went suddenly stiff and he raised himself looking intently ahead as the large truck below appeared to have made an almost indistinct motion forward. He sounded the horns in two long blasts and at the same moment glanced into the rear view mirror. The left half mirror showed the Doctor’s own brow go darkly knit while the other half held the black sedan, moving like a locomotive, apparently intending to pass on the right. In less than a second the two cars were plummeting abreast, and ahead the giant truck began to pull slowly out into the intersection. Dr. Eichner exchanged a quick, incredulous look with the two occupants of the other car, a man in front, one in back. The eyes of the driver were fast on the right fender of the Delahaye as he seemed deliberately to edge the black sedan closer alongside with a lead of one or two feet. The man in the rear seat began gesticulating wildly, looking from Eichner to the driver and back again, shaking his head and raising his shoulders as in exaggeration of anxiety or doubt. Dr. Eichner made an angry motion with his hand, as if to sweep them past, at the same time letting up on the accelerator. Across the face of the sedan’s driver appeared an instant’s consternation, turning his head to frown grotesquely at the man in the back and at Eichner, and then to glare down the road ahead. But instead of passing, the black sedan maintained the narrow lead, while now, dead ahead of Dr. Eichner, loomed the mammoth ten-wheel truck. Between the Doctor’s lips, the cigarette butt went suddenly sodden and leached. And as he floored the accelerator, breaking the lead of the sedan, and twisted the wheel convulsedly to the right, the Delahaye slammed twice into the black sedan with a savage ripping noise and the man in the rear was thrown back from the window toward the floor of the car. As he wrenched the wheel to the right again with all his strength, the two cars smashed together, but the Delahaye held its swerve to the right, and before the Doctor the windshield was a shattered haze of gray metal and high wheels where the amber light danced crazily above the scream of burning rubber and a sharp, double-crack as the left fender of the Doctor’s car clipped in clearing the great truck just below the tail-gate. Now wide to his right, as Dr. Eichner fought the wheel, the black sedan careened out insanely, almost turning over in midair until it leveled straight for an instant at blinding speed on the shoulder of the road, and twenty yards past the amber light, with a wild exploding sound, plowed squarely into a steel telegraph pole.
    The Doctor slowed the Delahaye as straight and cautiously reining a mad horse, he brought the car to a stop far down the road. But behind him, fused into the terrible pole, the pinioned twist of sedan belched one oily billow of smoke and burst into fire.
    The truck still sat in the intersection, while out halfway between the truck and the wreck, face down in the middle of the highway, was the dark clothed body of a man. Turned in his seat, the Doctor’s eye cut a line