Lone Wolf #12: Phoenix Inferno Read Online Free PDF

it’s him?”
    “Who else?”
    “No,” Wulff said, “I guess he’s not so stupid at all.” The Fleetwood was rocking at eighty; the suspension, suddenly intimate underneath him, was screaming. “We can’t outrun them,” Wulff said. “The car won’t take it.”
    “Main access road,” Owens said, his hands stiff on the wheel. “He would have them patrolled. He just got lucky, though. I got to believe he’s lucky.”
    “He’s only lucky if they get us,” Wulff said. The transition to the
us
he noted was automatic; he no longer regarded Owens as an enemy. Owens was in it with him; there had not been any question of that now for several hundred miles. Maybe that would make him a damned fool when Owens used a sudden, unexpected opening to drop him like meat and take him into Carlin, but that was the kind of chance you had to take. Everything was a chance. Everything was an odds game; if you didn’t shoot craps you couldn’t stay in. “They’re gaining,” Wulff said. Turning he took a quick look; the car had closed within a city block or so, barely a tenth of a mile back. “They must have equipment on it.”
    “No fucking good,” Owens said. “There’s never any goddamned traffic on these roads,” he said with sudden urgency. “Goddamn it to hell, why does it always work out that way? When you need traffic you don’t have it. “
    “Would traffic have stopped you?”
    “Probably not,” Owens said, “but we were a special case. We were very determined.”
    “Not determined enough.”
    “How lucky we got,” Owens said seriously and slapped the wheel. “We can’t outrun them,” he said, looking at Wulff quickly, then back at the road. “You know that, don’t you?”
    “I thought it was worth a try.”
    “They’re closing,” Owens said, “they’re closing fast now.”
    At ninety miles an hour the Pontiac was burning rubber, laying down little tracks behind it as it sprung up on them. There was now a distance that could be measured in car-lengths. The first shot hit, leaving a little blister in the glass, a spreading web that looked like a bloodstain.
    “Sons of bitches,” Owens said. His hands were flat and tight against the wheel. Otherwise there was no change in his expression and he seemed to be in control of himself. Not for nothing, Wulff thought, looking at the man, had he been a stunt man for an exhibitionist. Either that or he was one hell of a fabricator of tales. But the other looked more likely. “If they get close enough they’re going to hit,” Owens said flatly. “They’re using rifles.”
    “They won’t get close enough.”
    “I don’t see how they can keep in back of us,” Owens said. “They’re gaining like a son of a bitch,” His voice was that of a man striving successfully not to panic, moving instead the other way, toward the absence of effect. It came hard but it would last.
    “Leave it to me,” Wulff said, “we’ll see if we can’t back them off a bit.”
    He took out a.45 he had been holding, not the one he had leveled on Owens at the beginning when it looked as if the man might be difficult to control—a.45 was only a mess at short range, you wanted to use something much lighter and cleaner, like a Beretta automatic—and held it back on the Pontiac. Another splinter had joined the one already there, this one slightly more toward the left, the dimples intersecting. Wulff kept his head below seat level, looking up over it, held the.45 steady. “Keep on driving,” he said to Owens, “just concentrate on the road. This could be kind of messy.”
    “It’s messy already,” Owens said. His hands were smooth and precise on the wheel. “Short of getting dead I don’t see how it can be much worse than it is already.”
    “You’d be surprised,” Wulff said, “you’d be surprised.” But he had to admire Owen’s control. The man was remarkable, there was no question about it; considering everything, he had held up very well and now the