Free Good Guy by Dean Koontz Page B

sprint to the Explorer and shoot him dead in the driver’s seat.
    About forty yards directly ahead was an exit from the parking lot. Tim waited perhaps a beat longer than he should have, then switched on the headlights, tramped the accelerator, and raced toward the street.
    Fate plays with loaded dice, so of course the light traffic abruptly became heavier. An eastbound trio of vehicles brightened toward him in excess of the speed limit.
    Expecting a gunshot, glittering glass, and a bullet to the brain, Tim remained committed to flight. As the Explorer shot into the street, however, he realized that the momentum lost in a right turn would ensure that one or all of the approaching vehicles would tail-end him.
    Brakes shrieked, horns blared, headlights seemed to sear him. Instead of turning right, he highballed straight across the two eastbound lanes.
    Without a further scream of brakes, although with a vigorous condemnation of horns, two cars and a panel truck sailed past behind him. Not one vehicle so much as kissed the Explorer’s bumper, but their turbulent breath buffeted it.
    When he barreled into the westbound lanes, oncoming traffic was at a safe distance but closing fast. Turning west, he glanced south, and saw that Kravet had sprinted back to the Chevrolet. The killer was in the driver’s seat, pulling the door shut.
    Tim continued turning, out of the westbound lanes, crossing the yellow median lines. He drove east, into the wake of the traffic with which he had almost collided.
    As he drew near the next major intersection, he checked the rearview mirror, then a side mirror, and saw the Chevy exiting the coffee-shop parking lot.
    With no respect for the stop sign, Tim hung a hard left turn, drove only fifteen yards north on a quiet cross street of older two-story homes, executed a U-turn, and pulled to the curb. He came to a stop facing the broader avenue that he had just departed, left the engine running, and killed the headlights.
    He snatched up the pistol, threw open the door, got out of the SUV, stepped into the street, and assumed a shooting stance, both hands on the weapon.
    The Chevy, out of sight but on its way, sounded like it had a much bigger engine than an ordinary sedan, confirming that it had been upgraded for pursuits and, regardless of what the DMV claimed, might be a supercharged police bucket.
    The glow of headlights bloomed, and a moment later the Chevy cut the corner.
    Point-blank, at risk of being run down, Tim squeezed off three shots, aiming not at the windshield, not at the driver’s-side window, but at the front tire as the car swept past him, fired two more rounds at the rear tire. He saw the front rubber deflate and peel, and maybe he got the back tire, too.
    Surprised, no doubt expecting to be shot himself, the driver lost control. The sedan jumped the curb, sheered off a fire hydrant, and slammed through a wooden fence in a shower of splintered pickets and a flailing mass of climbing-rose vines.
    A geyser erupted from the stump of the standpipe where the hydrant had been, a thick column of water that surged thirty feet into the night.
    As the Chevy rocked to a stop on the lawn, Tim considered going to it and pulling open the driver’s door. Kravet might be stunned, briefly disoriented. Perhaps he could be dragged out of the car and relieved of whatever weapons he might have before he was able to use one of them.
    Tim didn’t want to kill Kravet. He needed to know who had hired him. Linda would never be safe until they knew the identity of the man who had put the money on the bar.
    A bent cop who carried out contract killings on the side would be too tough to be cracked by a threat alone. But if the hot muzzle of a pistol was stretching one of his nostrils to the tearing point, and if, eye to eye, he had sufficient instinct to read correctly his adversary’s capacity for violence, he might spill the name. He was not, after all, a man of honor.
    Even as the Chevy sagged to a halt,