Free Lone Wolf #9: Miami Marauder by Mike Barry Page B

began to open up a little distance on the roads, dropping the car back fifty yards or so. He could be running right into a roadblock of course, but somehow he did not think that he was; there were just not enough State Police around to justify a roadblock or even an interceptor car unless they were messing with something more profound than a speeding violation which at this time Wulff was. Besides that, if he knew cop’s mentality at all and he guessed that he should, the radio car was not going to summon reinforcements. Getting help would be an admission of failure and no cop, given a choice, wanted to admit that he couldn’t handle something himself. When you came right down to it, cops and criminals functioned on the same mentality; the only thing that was holding back most police from being lawbreakers themselves was the existence of a police force that managed to coat over their impulses, give them a rationalization.
    Heavy thinking for a speeding chase but it beat worrying about what was going on behind. The Chrysler was surprisingly effective on the open roads. There was a miss in the engine toward the low rpm range and it stuttered and fumbled in the mid-passing zone of forty to sixty but above seventy-five miles an hour the big, aging car really came together, it handled more solidly and responsively at eighty-five than at twenty. It was really a shame that there were almost no roads in the country where the capabilities of these cars could be tested … crazy country this, whose production lines could turn out cars that could go at a hundred and twenty miles an hour, whose speedometers registered the fact that they could go at one hundred and twenty, whose every advertisement was inducement to try the cars at that speed … and then set up a network of cops, speeding violations, point systems, motor vehicle bureaus, traffic courts and insurance rating systems that made it as difficult as possible to use the cars up to that natural capacity. Crazy country: ambivalent country, maybe it was the same psychology in evidence that encouraged women to dress as provocatively as possible, which taught them from the age of twelve to be as conscious of the power of their bodies to incite, to inflame, as possible … and then made the natural response of men to these bodies as painful for them as possible. Maybe America took as much pleasure from denial as attainment but the sweetness of the pain could only be gauged by its difficulty … and his mind scuttled away from this, no point in thinking about it, no point in pushing his mind further and further into channels which would take him only toward revulsion.
    The country was an exercise in ambivalence any way you took it; the drug culture came out of an advertising society which made escape-on-the-cheap as glamorous as possible and only made the penalties for that escape visible when it was too late to change. Blame not the pushers, the distributors, the network itself, when they were only responding to a need which had been created by television.
    Yes, if you looked at things that way nothing made much sense at all. In his rearview mirror the pursuing car lurched, wiggled from one side of the road to another and then, all in one gathering simply disappeared, swerving right and out of the plane of sight. A high-speed blowout no doubt, the tires of the patrol car pushed past their capabilities by an engine which they could not control. Wulff allowed himself a small, tight smile of satisfaction, thinking of the sensations of the cop as the car went off the road, as terror and futility battled with one another in the cave of the dislocated car.
    Let him think about it in the ditch, Wulff thought, let him think about the consequences of pursuit … and then he was free again on the roads, he was moving at sixty and sixty-five, cutting back to an inconspicuous pace. The car as if blooded for the first time by the ninety-mile-an-hour chase tugging away at the accelerator like an