Excerpt

Prologue

I was about to downshift.

The motor of the old 911 purred only inches behind my ears, its tenor pulse as familiar to me as the treble of my wife's laugh. I couldn't be a hundred percent sure, but I thought I'd also sensed the telltale progression of airy metallic pings that would be the sign that my first true love was coming down with a little valve clatter.

She'd been prone to it her entire life, but still, damn.

It didn't take long for reality --- my peculiar reality --- to descend and for damn to morph into it doesn't really matter.

The car and I were old lovers; I'd owned her, or she'd owned me, for almost a third of my forty-two years. Neither of us was a virgin when we got together. She'd been assembled by others' hands way back in 1988 and I didn't fondle her wheel or feather her pedals for the first time until 1993, just shy of my thirtieth birthday.

The Porsche and I were gobbling up concrete in the fast lane of Colorado's Interstate 70 right where it begins to climb dramatically into the Rocky Mountain foothills from the table plateaus below Morrison. After an initial long rising straightaway and then a gentle, almost ninety-degree arc that completes a surgical slice through the spine of a Front Range hogback, the freeway suddenly stops messing around and shouts at drivers to take notice, that they've really, truly entered some legendary hills.

Fat bends in the road hug the contour of the soaring mountain and as those curves begin to meld into an ever sharper incline, under-endowed cars struggle to maintain their speed. Fully laden big rigs drift over toward the right shoulder where they fight the steep rise in elevation with the resolve of tortoises. They're slowing not because they want to, but because the gravitational reality of Colorado's main route into the Rocky Mountains offers them no alternative.

I was coming up on that first long right-angle curve, the one just before the highway transects the hogback. That's the spot where I was about to downshift.

A man standing on the bluff above the Morrison exit near Red Rocks caught my eye. Why? Probably because of all the recent news about the sniper. But this guy was too obvious to seem dangerous, and I didn't see a rifle in his hands. He was a man wearing a baseball cap and a fleece jacket, alone on the side of the road. He was leaning forward and gazing over the westbound lanes, his elbows resting on a fence, his right hand pressing a mobile phone to his ear. For the second or two that I spotted him above me he didn't seem to move a muscle. He was staring down at the traffic, seemingly mesmerized by us all.

He was, I decided, probably a plainclothes cop doing surveillance for the damn I-70 sniper.

I downshifted into third as I zoomed past him and shot toward the upcoming climb with a fresh boost of torque and enough raw power and confidence to soar past anybody or anything that might be blocking my path on the curving ascent ahead.

The interstate flattens out for a prolonged stretch prior to the brash incline of Floyd Hill. Buffalo Bill's grave and the Chief Hosa campground come and go. Exits weave off toward the mountain suburbs of Genesee and Evergreen. As I passed those landmarks my wheeled love held eighty, and joyfully toyed with ninety. For me and the German girl with the perfect body and the motor to match, the mountain curves and passes were mere playthings. And that moment, that day, I was trying to let it all be about the driving; I barely noticed any of the scenery flying by. In fact, the only reason I recalled seeing the Evergreen exit at all was because on the overpass I spotted another man standing with yet another cell phone to his ear.

More law enforcement? I wondered. Odd.

For half an eye blink, just before I flashed below him, I could have sworn the man was pointing at my car or gesturing toward me with his free hand, but I wiped the image out of my consciousness by letting myself be consumed for an instant with the juvenile fantasy that the bridge was the finish line and I was an Earnhardt cousin raising a fist skyward at the checkered flag at Daytona.

A third man. A third cell phone.

No overpass the third time.

This man was a little farther down the road, near the top of the hill where Highway 65 joins up with the freeway. A white Escalade was parked on the right shoulder, hood up in the air, emergency blinkers pulsing. The man I spotted --- I was looking for guys near the road by then --- stood at the rear of the SUV, and he, of course, had a cell phone to his ear. As I passed by I could see him talking, and nodding. His eyes, I thought, seemed to be tracking my red Porsche's progress as his neck rotated to follow me down the road.

Nodding.

First? A simple, huh? Followed by an uh-oh.

Then came the damn.

Could this be it?

Could it?

I've never known what the next section of I-70, the one just west of El Rancho, is called, but I always figured that it had to have a name. It's the kind of stretch of road that over the years should have earned a nefarious handle. Something like the "Death Drop" would have been appropriate.

The girl from Stuttgart and I were cresting the El Rancho hill above that long, steep downhill section of highway. The lanes that stretch out below teeter on the edge of an almost straight ridge as it descends at an acute angle into the rocky canyons along Clear Creek. To the right, off the downhill shoulder of the road, is a cliff. How high is the cliff? Too high. Lots of air. From the concrete lanes drivers can't even see how far they'd soar if they misjudged their way on that side of the interstate.

It's just as well. It isn't a survivable fall.

Experienced truckers find low gears in order to spare their brakes on this stretch of 70, and their crawling rigs almost always clog the right two lanes on the downhill side. The slope is steep enough that inexperienced mountain drivers, and even some experienced ones, see their carefully modulated seventy miles per hour become eighty-five or ninety or even ninety-five before they figure out exactly what effect gravity is having on their control of their cars. I knew from dozens --- hell, hundreds --- of prior journeys along the route that I could count on a stream of red brake lights flashing on in front of me as drivers fought to harness the sudden increase in speed foisted upon them during their descent.

I also knew that at the bottom of the long downhill a constellation of geographic features and design complications conspired to further confound the drivers who were already struggling with the gravitational challenges of the cruel section of road. Within the space of a few hundred yards at the bottom of the hill, the posted speed limit was suddenly reduced from seventy-five to fifty, Highway 6 merged into I-70, the number of westbound lanes decreased from four to three and then suddenly to two, and --- and --- a not-so-subtle wall of rough granite a few hundred feet high insisted that the roadway make an abrupt change in course almost ninety degrees to the west. For the half mile or so that came next, the narrowed path hugged the radically curving outlines of Clear Creek. Towering granite walls loomed overhead on both sides.

Despite the upcoming hazards I wasn't foreseeing a need to tap my girl's brakes on the downhill. History told me that the Porsche and I could dodge the trucks and weave past the slower cars regardless of how many lanes were available. The Carrera and I only needed one lane for ourselves, we didn't need all of it, and we needed it only briefly. The posted speed limit was inconsequential to me; taking a highway curve at eighty miles an hour that pedestrian cars took at fifty meant nothing to me and my little fräulein.

We were both designed for it, regardless of what the highway engineers and the Colorado State Patrol might think to the contrary.

I first noticed the flatbed truck when I was in the fast lane about a quarter of the way down the hill below El Rancho. The rig --- it had a tall cab and an extended, stake-lined open bed that was filled with neat rows of fifty-gallon metal drums --- was in front of me a couple of lanes over, nearing the halfway point of the long descent. It appeared to me that the driver of the truck was making a rookie mistake, moving into the lane adjacent to mine to try to pass a couple of tractor-trailers crawling hub-to-hub in the two far-right lanes. The computer in my head immediately organized the equation: The eighteen-wheelers were in low gear going, maybe, twenty miles per hour. I was doing eighty-five, ninety. The open-bed truck had accelerated to something in the vicinity of thirty-five or forty to pass the bigger trucks. In the left two lanes in front of me, five or six smaller vehicles dotted the highway between me and the converging rigs.

The cars, SUVs, and pickup trucks were cruising downhill at various speeds between sixty and eighty.

The skill of the drivers? I decided that the safest thing for me was to assume that the other drivers sucked.

The algebra wasn't complicated: Would the flatbed truck with the oil drums finish passing the tractor-trailers and vacate its current lane before the cluster of cars and pickups in front of me were forced to squeeze together into the fast lane --- the one smack in front of me --- to avoid the temporary blockade caused by the three big trucks descending in consort down below?

It was going to be close, I decided.

Without any further deliberation my right foot shifted slightly at the ankle, the base of my big toe prepared to find purchase on the brake pedal, my left foot lifted up off the floor and hovered above the pad of the clutch, and the base of the palm of my right hand found the trailing edge of the gear shift, readying for the motion necessary to flick the smooth knob from fourth gear back down into third.

As I eased off on the accelerator and the rpm wound down, I once again heard the unwelcome melody of tinny clatter from the valves.

Got to tune you, baby girl. Got to tune you up.

It's the thinking that we don't try to do but that our magical brains do anyway that distinguishes the human animal from the machines we build. We can teach our machines to solve problems and even to ponder the value of various innovative solutions, but we haven't yet figured out how to teach the machines to recognize novel problems that will ultimately require us to use other machines to help us find solutions. For now, at least, that's still the stuff of humanity.

Unbidden by me, that's exactly what my mind was busy doing in the next few milliseconds as it changed effortlessly from the consideration of the algebra of gravity, variable speeds, crappy drivers, available lanes, and currently present vehicles, into the consideration of the calculus of a problem set that included an entirely novel set of variables: three men on cell phones watching traffic at three different locations on the same small stretch of Colorado interstate, constricted flow on a historically dangerous downhill section of highway, and an open-bed truck that was lined with seemingly innocuous big black drums.

My brain's assessment of those facts was confounded by one brand-new piece of information that it threw into the problem set: Big, rectangular red lights were beaming on each side of the back of the flatbed truck that was transporting the big metal drums.

The truck driver was hitting his brakes.

Wow.

I reached an instant, terrifying conclusion: The truck wasn't accelerating to pass the two tractor-trailers. It was braking to stay even with them.

Why?

My mind chose to take the developing conundrum one step further, instinctively including a seemingly extraneous variable in its calculation: the y variable, the variable that I'd been consciously adding into almost every novel problem set that had crossed my path over the past few days.

The y variable was the small matter of the standing commitment from the Death Angels.

How to precisely weight the y variable had been proving to be a tough thing for me to figure, primarily because the people charged with implementing the y variable had proven to be an imaginative bunch. Before I was even consciously aware that I actually had the acute new problem --- the driving-down-this-hill and surviving this apparent Death Angels assault problem --- I was actively struggling with the chronic dilemma I'd had since Adam left Providence, which was the whole general Death Angel survival problem.

The novel problem? The current assault? I read it this way: Over the last ten minutes or so I had apparently been driving past a series of predetermined checkpoints manned by men with mobile phones who were sending along news of my progress to the driver of the flatbed with the black drums on the back so he could precisely time his descent on this treacherous downhill stretch of Interstate 70.

But why? What do they have planned?

My brain was ready with the answer.

Instantaneously, the whole scenario made such perfect sense that I wasn't even surprised when the first shiny black barrel somehow slid uphill off the truck bed and bounced hard off the concrete ribbon of highway.

Instantly, left foot: clutch.

Right foot: brake.

Right hand: downshift. Fourth to third.

The tach needle jumped. The rpm soared close to the red zone. The 911 flexed and she readied. She knew me well, and she knew I wouldn't have done what I'd done to her unless something important was up.

The second and third barrels seemed to fly off the truck simultaneously a fraction of a second later. A pickup truck a couple of hundred yards in front of me swerved right --- too hard --- to avoid one of the drums. He overcompensated to the left before severely overcompensating once more back to the right. By then he was up precariously on two wheels, and a split second later the crew-cab Dodge slid left until it careened into the air, launched by the sloped Jersey barrier that separated the uphill lanes from the down. I heard and felt the resulting crash as the flying truck exploded into the vehicle of some unsuspecting driver in the uphill lanes, but I was beyond the conflagration before my eyes could make any sense of it.

I didn't dare take my eyes from the road to check the mirror and the carnage.

Left foot: clutch.

Right foot: brake.

Right hand: downshift. This time into second.

The old girl's engine screamed in protest at the back pressure I was insisting she endure. I wasn't worried about her, though; she wouldn't let me down. She never had.

And hey, there was no valve clatter at those rpm.

In front of me --- and not very far in front of me --- the barrels continued to tumble off the flatbed in twos and threes. The first ones off were bouncing past me on the highway just as the latest ones were tumbling from the bed of the truck.

A Lexus SUV, desperate to avoid a collision with a flying drum, sideswiped a Nissan sedan fifty yards ahead. Together they kept weaving into and away from each other, their dance completely filling the little space that remained between the three side-by-side trucks and the center highway barricade, effectively obliterating my only easy avenue to escape the tumbling drums.

The barrel that I knew was the one that was destined to hit me --- the one that figuratively had my name on it --- slid solo off the truck's flatbed, bouncing once, only once, before hanging back up in the air as though it were a guided missile waiting for me to drive into position beneath it.

Which, of course, I was about to do.

That is apparently what fate required of me at that moment.

And that's precisely what I was doing.

ONE

Where to start with this guy? This shrink?

Honesty?

Eventually, maybe. Soon, hopefully.

Not the first day, though. Certainly not the first hour.

Not with a stranger. The stakes were way too high.

The first day? The first day --- it was a fine autumn day --- he'd have to settle for the truth.

Not the whole truth, not nothing-but-the-truth. But the truth.

We'd both have to settle for that.