Free Bed of Nails by Michael Slade

ratcheting from the heavy machinery, each bin, silo, conveyor housing, bucket elevator, and hopper car offered itself as a pipe bomb.
    The hopper blew apart when the Olds rammed into it. That blast set off a cascade effect as the pressure wave from the primary explosion billowed layered dust into clouds in other areas a microsecond ahead of the flame front.
    BOOOOM!
    The series of secondary explosions rocked the street as each blast set up and then set off the next. The ground shook like an earthquake at five points on the Richter scale. A ball of fire rolled out to wrap the fugitives in the Olds in a blanket of flames. As powerful as dynamite or natural gas, the combined force of the multiple grain-dust explosions hurled the car back across the Low Level Road, where what was left of the Olds pierced the parked oil tanker as blazing shrapnel, blowing it sky-high like a hellish geyser.
    Heat from that eruption singed Red Beard’s beard.
    The shock wave almost knocked the biker and the Mountie off the hog.
    All that remained of the fugitives rained down as ash.
    “When you Mounties get your man, you really get him,” the biker said.

DEAD END
     
    Vancouver
    November 5 (Two days later)
    The newspapers were spread across one of the three antique library tables that had been joined in a U to make up C/Supt. Robert DeClercq’s desk at Special X. The papers were calling it a “miracle” that no innocent bystanders were killed in the high-speed chase. Denny the Barkeep had earned his fifteen minutes of fame through a series of inside-scoop interviews in which he recounted how he had “fingered both killers for the Mounted Police” because it was his “bartender’s duty to protect the producers, directors, and casting agents of the industry that I hope will soon employ me.” As for those who’d been at work in the grain elevator that night, never had they been so thankful for labor strife. The threat of a wildcat strike fomented by two malcontents had pulled the staff away from their posts shortly before the Olds came in for a landing. Lucky too was the trucker who’d run from the rig. He had—to quote one reporter—“experienced an epiphany, the effect of which was to veer him toward a new career. He will either try out for the Olympic team as a sprinter or switch to transporting Brussels sprouts instead of flammables.”
    “Is it serious?”
    “What, Chief?”
    “Your new relationship?”
    DeClercq tapped the photograph of Chandler on the front page of The Province. Snapped as Zinc and Red Beard arrived on the customized chopper at the scene of the explosion on the Low Level Road the night before last, it caught the inspector hugging the outlaw’s back like a gang girl. The cutline for the candid shot read, “Strange bedfellows.”
    “I’m his bitch on a rigid.”
    “I don’t want to hear,” said DeClercq, wincing. “Your sex life is none of my business, Inspector. As long as whatever you do on his rigid you continue to do out of uniform.”
    “You’re a card,” punned Zinc as he pinned a tarot card to the Strategy Wall in DeClercq’s office, located on the second floor of the Tudor building at Thirty-third and Heather. Here, at the West Coast headquarters of the RCMP—a string of structures that stretched four blocks south to Thirty-seventh—the floor-to-ceiling corkboard that sheathed both windowless walls of this airy, high-vaulted corner loft was the operational heart of Special X. Fiftyish, lean and wiry, his dark hair now graying at the temples and flanking even darker, brooding eyes, DeClercq was, above all other skills, a military strategist, so when he worked a case, he worked it visually. The Strategy Wall was his equivalent of the campaign maps on which generals have moved toy soldiers around for centuries.
    “He’s a card too,” Chandler said, pinning a photo of the vic found suspended upside down at the Lions Gate beside the tarot card depicting the Hanged Man.
    “Déjà