Free J. Daniel Sawyer - Clarke Lantham 01 by And Then She Was Gone

playing the creep up/fade back game, using the long spaces between exits to catch up and then using the traffic coming on at entrances to hide myself, I managed to barely keep up with him while staying mostly out of his mirrors.
    We kept this up for fifteen miles—I took the lead in the right lanes for a few miles at a time, then let him creep back up ahead of me as exits approached.
    As a tactic for remaining inconspicuous it worked splendidly—the road was open and there wasn’t a highway patrolman in sight. It would have kept working if he hadn’t realized in the last hundred yards that he was in the far lane and about to zip by his exit.
    One hundred yards—three hundred feet.
    Ninety five miles per hour—one hundred thirty nine feet per second.
    Gravity had to cross five lanes of traffic and get on to the exit—about eighty feet of open pavement and right through my car.
    He checked right and caught my eye, then yanked his wheel hard and barreled straight at my front quarterpanel. I swerved, crossed the line onto the shoulder, and my front wheel caught the dirt.
    The world ground to a stop around me. The wheel jerked right in my hands—I yanked hard to the left, pulled my foot off the gas and feathered the brake.
    My Civic lurched every which way, trying its level best not to plow me face first into the low concrete wall lining the embankment. The right wheels hit pavement again and the car bucked hard to the left, sending me back out into traffic as the exit lanes left the freeway for the 92 flyover.
    I shifted my weight on the wheel, but not as far, pulling slightly right as I careened through the second lane toward the far wall.
    The big rig behind me laid on his horn. I shut him out.
    My speed dipped below sixty. I crossed to the far shoulder, only about six feet wide now that I was well out onto the flyover.
    One more yank right, I dropped hard into third and the gerbils screamed at me as the tach hit 4k. My wheels caught and bit, then I started slowing down fast.
    The rear view mirror insisted that a Range Rover was trying to sodomize me.
    I swerved back into the right lane, the car not tilting so far this time, and I punched the accelerator. The Civic lurched forward, the tach hit 5k, I shifted up to fourth and the shimmy died away.
    Gravity was about a mile in front of me, away down at the left turn to head over the mountains toward Half Moon Bay. Four cars between us. Easy peasy.
    Round the reservoir, over the bridge, up and over the mountain. He played chicken with the oncoming traffic, taking every opportunity to pass. Trying to get me off his ass.
    Keeping up with him around the twenty mile per hour hairpins, redwoods and pines a hundred feet tall in solid walls on either side. Traffic thicker than camel dung.
    My wallet could feel the rates on my life insurance climbing by the mile.
    He popped around a Coca-Cola truck and screeched back into our lane just in time to avoid a shave by a Suburban trundling down the other side.
    The Suburban lead a tightly packed clump of traffic—I was stuck behind the rolling soda fountain for four miles. Every minute, I could feel Gravity slipping further and further down the other side of the mountain.
    At the top, the road split and I ate the passing lane. The little Civic had an aftermarket 2.8 V6, and I used every last cubic centimeter.
    I crested the mountain, then pushed along the far straightaway at seventy, barely holding onto the road through the switchbacks.
    I didn’t see him. All the way to the bottom and through the canyon—maybe he was still ahead, the road down here was clear enough he could have made good time. Or maybe he’d turned off somewhere.
    The traffic lights in Half Moon Bay were clear up to the Pacific Coast Highway. It wasn’t yet four, but I needed to get back to the East Bay—nothing out here was remotely related to the case. The closest thing was Kinksters Inc. in San Francisco. If I headed north along the coast I could hit that part