Jack Be Quick Ch. 03

If you haven't read the earlier chapters you really ought to go back and read them now. Otherwise it's going to be like coming into a theater after the movie started.

In case you missed my earlier warnings, there isn't any explicit sex in this story.

Hans

*****

DO WE HAVE ANY FRIENDS IN UTICA?

The next morning was my time to see Red. No, I don't mean I was angry. I went to exchange cars with Jerry's friend whose name was Red. The loaner was a small Pontiac four door sedan, dark blue, a couple of years old. It had to be one of the smoothest driving cars I'd ever used, although the suspension was a little stiff. Red cautioned me against giving it too much gas in a turn, but otherwise it seemed pretty ordinary. I did notice that it went through a quarter tank of gas in a hurry, but I wasn't going on any long drives so that didn't make much difference.

Red had said that when I came back for my Ford it would handle differently from what I was used to, and I should allow a day or more for him to get me familiarized with it. When I went back to pick it up I took Trudy along so we could both get clued in together.

I honked the horn as I stopped at Red's overhead door and it went up to admit us. I got out of the car and Red was shaking my hand when Trudy stepped out on the far side. Red's head moved a bit as he saw that there was somebody with me, and then he did a double take that would make a TV comedian proud. "Trudy!" he shouted.

"Uncle Red!" She rushed around the front of the car and almost leaped into his arms. For five whole minutes I was forgotten. Then Trudy reached out for me and explained. "Uncle Red lived next door to us for years. He gave me driving lessons on the sly when I was twelve years old. He used to be a race car driver and he knew all about how to fix everything, and in his free time he was at our house more than his own and we all loved him. I never even knew that we weren't related until after he moved away. Uncle Red, will it be all right for me to tell my mom and dad that I've seen you? I won't get you in any trouble, will I?"

"By all means, tell 'em I said hello. I've only been back here since Labor Day, and I've been busy getting the shop and test area set up. I'll have to get over to see your folks when I get a little free time."

"What are you doing? What sort of a business is this?"

"I call it 'Drive and Survive.' I have a few clients from the private sector, but my bread and butter work is government contracts. I equip and maintain cars that have to keep people out of trouble, and I teach people how to make 'em work. Then there are some sidelines that we can talk about later. My goodness, look at you. I always knew you'd grow up to be gorgeous. Jerry, the FBI guy, told me that Jack had a girlfriend and that you were both going to school in Boston, but I never had a clue that the girlfriend would be my little Trudy."

Red called to a man who was halfway under a Chevy Lumina. He wheeled out and Red had us give him our cell phones, without any explanation. Then we were off in my Ford with Red driving, out of the city to what looked like a rundown, abandoned farm. He drove past it and turned in on a dusty crossroad, then off at an angle on a dirt lane that snaked around onto the farm, ending behind the old barn. A man stepped out, holding a shotgun. Red waved and yelled, "Hey, Kelly." The man returned the wave and stepped back into the shadow of the barn.

We drove between two huge, bushy cedar trees that brushed lightly against the car, and emerged into an open space that I'd estimate at twenty acres. In the foreground was a blacktop track that looked like part of a formula one racecourse. It had one long straightaway and curves this way and that, including a couple of right angle corners. Beyond all that was a huge area of blacktop that looked like a parking lot without lines. Orange cones were placed to mark out some sort of a pattern, but I wasn't up high enough to make out its shape. Way off in the far corner of the field I could see a small oval dirt track, with the turns at the far end banked steeply while the nearby end was flat.

Red parked and turned in the driver's seat to face both of us, me in the front passenger seat and Trudy in back. "When you came to drop off this car, it had a six cylinder engine, standard automatic transmission, and front wheel drive. It weighed about twenty-five hundred pounds. In the speed range that the engine operated in, it could put out about a hundred and twenty horsepower.

"That was then. This is now. It has an eight cylinder engine with variable valve timing, a whole lot of special stuff on each cylinder head, a computer driven fuel injection system, and selective cylinder operation. There are two spark plugs and four valves for each cylinder. A mechanical blower provides instant supercharging when it's needed for quick acceleration at low speed, and a turbocharger takes over as the engine revs up. The drive train is all new, with a four speed automatic transmission that can be shifted manually with paddles above the steering wheel. It drives with the rear wheels, giving it a whole different way of handling in curves and sharp turns, more like a light truck or a NASCAR race car. You've got to learn how to do the turns safely or you'll spin out and lose control.

"Trudy, your legs must feel cramped in the back seat. To get the big engine in, going fore and aft instead of side to side, we had to move the front seats back. Even at that it was a tight fit. If anything has to be done to the engine, even a routine oil change, call Jerry's number and somebody will get it done for you.

"Don't ever let anybody look under the hood.

"You with me so far?"

Trudy asked, "How much power does this engine put out?"

"In its normal operating range, somewhere north of four hundred horses. That's based on dynamometer tests of similar engines. At max horsepower, probably close to eight hundred, but at such a high shaft speed that you'd never be able to use it except maybe in a racing hydroplane. The mechanical blower gives it a lot of low speed torque, and you won't find an engine that will give a car this much snap, short of a racetrack. But what's different about this engine is that it will operate smoothly, just like a regular car, when it's running on four cylinders. That'll give you pretty good gas mileage. The high performance options are all turned on and off with this one little switch on the steering wheel. We put that and the switches for cruise control, plus a panic button, on the steering wheel and took away the radio controls, so you'll have to select radio stations and adjust volume on the front panel of the radio, like most of the other people in the civilized world."

"Are you going to teach us to drive this thing?" I asked, thinking that learning by trying this and that might get us into some real trouble.

"Suppose you smoked cigars, and I took away your lighter and gave you a dynamite stick in its place. You'd still have a usable device, but if you didn't get detailed instruction you could blow your head off. That's just what we have here. I'll be here with you until you can almost do everything with your eyes shut, not only knowing what to do but being so practiced at it that it becomes second nature. And it's not just because I've loved this little girl of yours since she was a toddler. The FBI is paying for all this, and you, as a taxpayer, have a right to get the full value of this training.

"Now try hard to pretend that you've never driven a car before, and just pay attention to what I'm going to teach you. You both ready to do that?"

For the next four hours, nearly without a break, we learned to drive. For every maneuver and every trick, Red taught us when to do it, why, and how; it was demonstrated until we really caught on to what it felt like, what to use as our cues to know when to punch the gas or back off or hit the brake or spin the wheel; and what could go wrong and how to correct the problems. Then we'd take a turn at the wheel and learn by doing. First Trudy and then I executed the moves over and over until we could have done it all in our sleep. And then on to the next thing. After four hours were up, Red announced that we were about halfway there. Rather than go on we should call it a day and come back in the morning, when we'd be fresh.

By the time we took a lunch break the next day, we were pretty good at defensive driving. I was a little better than Trudy at most of the stuff on the regular track, including the J turns, but she was a little better on the skid pad. Anything that required split second timing I could do better, but anything that depended on the feel of the car she had me by a hair. She whispered to me that the difference was that her butt was more tender than mine, and I couldn't argue with that. Red gave us each two cards to carry in our wallets with our licenses, one that said we had completed the course, and another so that any time we did something that would normally get us in trouble, like driving on the sidewalk or hitting garbage cans with the bumper to send them flying like hockey pucks, we could show the card to the police and they'd let the FBI take care of it.

We had lunch at a little diner that normally we'd never have set foot into. The place looked like a dump, but the food was great. Red got a smile and a hello from everybody, including the guy in the kitchen, and going there for lunch was more like visiting his friends than going to a restaurant. I thought we were all finished with our training, but instead Red told us that the afternoon would be spent on firearms training with Kirk.

Kirk was tall, with wavy gray hair and a little pencil mustache. He started us off with how to hold a handgun. "This is a forty caliber semi automatic pistol. You may hear people say that it kicks hard when you fire it. That's nonsense. There's always some recoil any time you send a bullet downrange, but compared to most, this is a low recoil handgun. Notice the word, handgun. Let that word remind you always that to make it work for you the hand and the gun must come together just right. Let's do it very slowly. Hold your hand out palm up and spread your fingers. Now I'm going to lay the gun in your hand. To hold it, wrap these three fingers up and around the grip. That's right. Now bring your thumb down over the top fingernail, like this. Notice how firmly you can hold it? Press the thumb hard onto that finger. That tightens your grip. Now place the other hand over the three fingers that are wrapped around the grip. Finally, put the thumb of the outside hand down over the first thumb. Notice that both thumbs are pointed at the target. That's it. That's all there is to it. Later, I'll teach you some ways to handle emergencies, but just remember that any time you can, you'll use both hands, and this is how you'll do it. You'll find that the gun's recoil won't be a problem, because you know the right way to marry your hands to the gun."

From there, we went into progressively more complicated things to do with a handgun, including making it go bang and making holes in things. We spent five hours with Kirk, and then he pronounced us competent to carry. He told us to come back the next morning and bring our laptop computers with us. That day we got more instruction, and more firing practice. But first he called in his assistant, who looked over our laptops and fixed us up with briefcases that would each carry a laptop and a pistol. They were leather, and had that brand new look and smell and feel. Then he took them into another room. When he brought them back a half hour later, they looked like some old things we'd been carrying all over a college campus for years.

While he was aging the briefcases, we helped fit shoulder harnesses on each other. A shoulder holster is a good way to conceal a pistol if you're wearing a jacket, but unless each strap is adjusted exactly right they can be very uncomfortable. When we had them right we knew it, because we could move, bend, stretch, and reach, and they moved with us like part of our bodies. Then there were gunbelts and tricky belt holsters that could be worn outside or inside the waistband. They were a lot easier to adjust but harder to get comfortable with. After we were all equipped and our last minute questions had been answered we were given a metal box, like a small footlocker, that had a combination lock. The bottom of the box was lined with boxes of ammunition. Then there was a gun cleaning kit, over on one side. The pistols were slipped into holsters and laid in carefully, and the rest of the holsters, shoulder harnesses, and belts topped it off. The box, which was pretty heavy with all that stuff in it, was secured in a recess on the floor behind the passenger seat, and an old blanket was tossed casually over it.

When I drove out onto the street that afternoon, I felt nervous, as if everybody could tell that we were not really just a couple of college kids on vacation. But the reality was that the car looked the same as always. The mud that had sprayed all over it on the skid pad had effectively camouflaged the new wheels, and everything else was the same as it had been, so after the first mile I started to calm down. The payoff was when Trudy turned to me with a dreamy look and asked, "Jack, did all that really happen? This wasn't all a dream, was it?"

"Just reach your hand around back of your seat. Feel the box?" She nodded. "Then it's all real. I'm Arnold Schwarzenegger and you're Jamie Lee Curtis. I guess that means Jerry is Tom Arnold. But

the most real part of all is that I love you. That never changes."

* * * * * * * * * *

The New York Thruway is a wonderful way to get from one end of the state to the other. Truckers love it because it avoids some of the hilliest country east of the Mississippi. But because it's so easy to drive it's been called the most boring of the eastern interstates, and I found myself doing all sorts of stuff to keep from getting hypnotized by the road. I made a ritual of checking all three of my mirrors in sequence. I varied my speed. I drove for a while in the left lane, then switched to the right. I passed trucks. I followed trucks. And I wasn't the only one who was bored. The driver of the big, black Lincoln behind us was doing all the same things I was.

"Holy shit!" I sat up straight and gripped the wheel so hard that my wrists hurt. "Trudy! Get on the phone to that FBI number, quick!"

She scrambled to get her phone and made the call. While it was ringing she asked, "What's wrong?"

"We've got a tail!"

As I said that, the phone was answered by a voice we'd never heard before. Trudy did the FBI verification routine and held the phone so I could talk into it. "We're being followed. A big black Lincoln sedan. We got gas west of Syracuse, and he's been with us ever since. Might have been on us before that, too."

The agent didn't seem overly excited by my news, but he wasn't the one being followed by a big, scary looking car. "Travel at exactly eighty-eight miles an hour so I can track you. In about thirty miles you'll come to an exit for Utica. The ramp is long, almost like a separate highway. Take that exit and gradually slow down. Keep the phone on so we can talk."

Trudy clipped the phone to the dash and plugged in the connection to our car's sound system. I asked her, "Can you climb into the back and get out our Saint Christopher medals?" referring to our pistols by the pet name we used for them.

She scrambled back there, nimble as a twelve year old. I heard the combination dial spinning, followed by little clicks that told me she was getting her shoulder harness on. Then she asked, "Can you lean forward a little so I can get your straps clipped to your belt?" It took some twisting and squirming, but in about a minute she had me all hooked up. Then I heard her drop the magazine out of a pistol, rack the slide, squeeze off a dry fire, click the safety on, and slam a magazine into place. She handed the gun to me, and while I was slipping it into the holster I heard her going through the same sequence with hers.

The phone clicked and the agent came on the line. "I heard you getting your hardware on. Having it in plain sight invites people, anybody really, to get alarmed and call the police on a regular phone connection. The ones you really have to watch out for are the toll collectors, who are trained to be the eyes of the state police. If you have a vest that you can slip on without wrecking the car, this would be a good time to do it."

A few minutes later he was back. "Your exit's coming up. Once you're on the ramp, do exactly the speed limit for two miles and then start gradually slowing down." As I turned off from the main roadway, the Lincoln followed as if we were towing it on a long rope. When we slowed down, so did the Lincoln. The agent came back on. "Turn your power switch on now." I did. "Up ahead there's a curve, and then you'll see a dump truck in the median. As soon as you see it, switch your emergency flashers on and floor the gas pedal. As you pass by the truck, let up on the gas and slow down to the speed limit."

The truck came into view, a huge dump truck heaped up with sand or dirt or something. On the front it had a V-shaped snowplow blade about as big as a small house. The driver started it forward to block off the ramp, and we just got by as he was bringing the plow blade onto the pavement. I was watching the roadway ahead, but flicking my eyes to the mirrors to keep aware of everything happening around us. I didn't need to look at Trudy because she was behind me, clutching onto my bucket seat to keep from being tossed around in the back. Her breath on the back of my neck felt scorching hot.

The Lincoln was about a hundred yards behind us. Our Ford was still accelerating, and we were doing well over a hundred miles an hour. The Lincoln was probably doing ninety by then, too slow to catch us but too fast to swerve and avoid a collision with the truck. It struck the huge snowplow blade, which acted like a ski jump. With a sound like an explosion, the Lincoln shot up in the air, twisting as it went, and crashed down twenty yards away in a cloud of dust and flying parts. Two state police cars appeared with lights and sirens on, headed for the crash site.

As we approached the toll booth, the agent on the phone said, "Good job. Turn your flashers off. Enter the small parking lot on your right. Park there, headed out toward the ramp. Keep the engine idling, but you can lean back and catch your breath for a half hour or so. Keep the windows up and the doors locked, and don't do anything without checking with me first." He sounded as calm as if he were reading us a bedtime story.

Our bucket seats didn't recline the way the bench type seats with separate back cushions do, but the whole seat could tilt back about halfway, like a reclining chair without a footrest. I tilted back a bit and let my muscles relax. My leg muscles loosened up first, but even after my hands were loose my arms were still tense, and it took a while to get back to normal. My shoulders hurt. Across my back I was still tight, ready for a fight. As Trudy climbed back into the shotgun seat she grunted with the effort to get her muscles to cooperate, so I knew it wasn't just me.

Gradually the adrenaline drained away, leaving us feeling lethargic. I asked, "How did you know you could get my shoulder harness on me while I was driving?"

"I just thought we should have our guns on us, and I could see all the moves in my mind to get you hooked up without getting out of your seat. I don't know if I could do it now, but at the time it seemed as clear as if I had printed instructions. You were doing such a great job of staying in control and I wanted to help, be part of the team. How did you feel while all that was going on?"