Bad Penny

by John D. Brown

  Then Tony realized he was standing out in the middle of the field with nothing between him and the men in the truck. He turned and ran, high-stepping it through the tall grass toward the fence.

  Ed gesticulated, and the driver punched the gas and sped after Tony.

  Frank had his throttle pressed all the way down. His speedometer said he was going sixty. He was flying through the meadow grass, but it wasn’t going to be enough.

  Tony looked back, stumbled, regained his footing.

  The pickup roared behind. The passenger’s side door flew open.

  Tony tried to juke right; the pickup corrected. He tried to juke left, but the pickup was on him. Tony’s eyes were wide with desperation. Frank could see it all the way from where he was.

  Ed struck Tony with the passenger side door and knocked him flat into the grass.

  The driver jammed on the brakes.

  Tony tried to rise, but Ed jumped out the open door. He struck Tony in the face with the side of a gun. Tony reeled back, and then Ed grabbed him by the arm and nape of his neck. He opened the back door of the king cab and shoved Tony in.

  Frank sped toward the gate.

  Ed stepped up on the running board and turned to look directly at Frank. He brought up his index finger and pointed it under his chin then flicked his finger away. To Ed and his associates in prison, that meant you had just shot yourself in the head. Then he climbed inside and slammed the door.

  The driver floored it. He didn’t go after the girls. He cut a tight left turn, then straightened up and headed back toward the dirt road. The pickup’s motor roared, the exhaust pipes rumbled, the big knobby tires threw grass into the air.

  In the distance at the other end of the field, Carmen and the girls continued south at a steady pace.

  Tony had kept them safe. The dumb kid. He’d delayed Ed and the others just enough for Frank to get there. Otherwise, Ed surely would have sped down the field and caught Carmen and the children. There was a gate at the far end. Ed would have loaded them in and driven through and left Frank behind.

  Now it was time for Frank to return the favor. He slowed down to make it through the open gate, then shot through it into the next field and gunned his machine. The motor whined. The grass slapped the cowling. A moment later he passed Tony’s snowmobile and headed after Ed.

  Up ahead the truck slowed to pick up the guy with the gray and white baseball cap who’d been taking pot shots at Frank from behind the chicken coops. The guy jumped in with Tony, and the pickup took off again. But the delay allowed Frank to narrow the gap between him and the truck.

  The truck hit something in the field and bounced violently into the air, daylight showing under the fat round axles. It slammed down, jostled, and continued on. Frank moved to the side to miss whatever was hiding in the grass. A moment later he passed by and saw they’d hit a ditch. Then the truck was at the gate. They braked hard, turned left, and floored it up onto the dirt road.

  Frank kept the snowmobile at full speed and reached the gate only a few seconds behind. He pulled his brake hard and fish-tailed out onto the dirt road. Then he jammed the thumb throttle all the way forward. The motor whined again. The studs of the track bit in.

  The grass in the field had been deep. He suspected the track hadn’t been a hundred percent efficient, which meant the speedometer had overstated his speed. But this dirt road was an entirely different matter. The pickup might be able to go faster out on a freeway, but this wasn’t a freeway. It was an uneven dirt road with plenty of turns, which meant the race went to the one with the fastest acceleration.

  He shot forward, the springs and shocks of the steering skis bouncing over the hard dirt. In front of him, the yellow pickup kicked up dust and gravel. When it neared the first T in the road, its brake lights lit up, but it took the corner a little too fast and almost flew off the other side. The driver braked hard, skidded to a stop, and went partway off the road. He gunned it back up on the road, but he’d lost quite a bit of his lead. He was about to lose more.

  This dirt road was built up above the level of the fields and so the shoulders dropped off a number of feet on either side to a strip that ran in front of the barbed-wire fences. In this section, the drop-off was probably five feet or more.

  The dust was heavy in the air, but the T in the road was clear enough to see. Frank slowed, but not nearly as much as the pickup had, and dropped onto the slope of the shoulder. When he reached the T, he dropped out of sight, cutting the corner, using the banked curve of the shoulder like someone on a high-speed race track. After banking the turn, he came flying up out of the barrow pit having made the turn. The snowmobile caught air and slammed down just about the middle of the road with a clunk and skid. He punched it again; the paddles bit in, and the snowmobile raced forward. One of his ear plugs fell out, and the sounds that had been muffled came in loud and clear.

  The pickup wasn’t too far ahead of him now, and he was gaining on it. Dust billowed up behind the big tires. Bits of gravel and rock flew past. Frank squinted and ducked low behind his shot-out windshield. Dirt coated his teeth and the inside of his mouth. It was stinging his eyes, making it so he almost couldn’t see.

  He moved to the left, to the driver’s side of the road, and suddenly was out of the dust plume. The shoulder dropped steeply away to a thick growth of cattails. Up ahead the fields gave way to some kind of marsh.

  The driver saw him in the mirror. Ed opened the slider in the back window and stuck his pistol out. He fired twice. Missed twice.

  Beyond the pickup, two men on four-wheelers were coming this way, gazing toward the house and what must now be a spectacular column of smoke. A dog sat up behind one of them. The men saw the truck and snowmobile racing toward them and moved over to hug the shoulder.

  Frank steered the snowmobile back behind the pickup. A few moments later he flew past the men and the barking dog. Then he moved back out of the dust plume and gunned the throttle.

  The snowmobile was jerking and bouncing over the hard dirt, but he pulled closer to the truck. Close enough to shoot. He grabbed the P90 with his left hand, kept the throttle down, and took aim at the rear tire on the driver’s side. He squeezed, banged, missed. Squeezed again, banged, hit the rear bumper. Squeezed again, banged, hit the tire. A piece of rubber flew up and off, but the tire didn’t burst. He must have only knocked off a bit of the fat tread. He prepared to take another shot.

  Then the driver jerked over in front of Frank and braked hard. The wheels locked and skidded over the dirt. The brake lights shone through the dust.

  Frank turned the wheel, trying not to wrench it because if he did, he’d tumble, and tumbling at almost eighty miles per hour into the steel bumper of a pickup was not a good way to extend your days upon the land.

  He shot past the pickup, an inch from scraping the sidewall, and had one hundredth of a second to see he was headed for the side of the road where the shoulder dropped away to the marsh. One hundredth of a second later he shot out over the edge of the road, airborne, the engine whining into an even higher pitch because there was nothing holding the track back.

  You can fly quite a distance in just one or two seconds at eighty miles per hour. Frank soared over the cattails and the barbed-wire fence that was half submerged in the water. He released the submachine gun, grabbed the steering handles with both hands, and pulled with all his might. He stood, pressed down on the running boards, trying to move his weight to the back, desperately trying to keep the snowmobile from nose diving.

  A moment later, and more than forty yards from the road, he hit the brackish water at an angle with the flat of the track. The four hundred pound Polaris didn’t quite skip, but it didn’t sink. It kind of bounced and surge forward like a huge rock.

  Frank crammed the throttle lever forward and heaved up on the front of the snowmobile. The motor whined; the track spun with the speed of 120 horses; the studs bit into the water like a high-performance version of a paddle boat, and Frank shot forward.


  A mound of firm ground rose forty or fifty yards away. A sturdy black cow stood on it munching grass, swishing its tail, looking up to see what has just splashed into the marsh. Frank headed for the cow.

  The cow took a couple of chews on its cud, trying to figure out what in the world was on the water. Then it realized the thing was coming its way and splashed into the water, sprinting for another hummock.

  Frank rode up on the firm land all covered in grass and small prickly thistle-like plants and took stock. The water drained from the snowmobile as well as his pants and boots.

  Out on the road, Ed and his driver were barreling along, dust flying up behind. But beyond the pickup, that road made a ninety degree left hand turn around this marsh. If Frank took the diagonal across the marsh, he could cut them off. On the far side of the water was an open spot in the fence where it looked like someone had been making repairs, probably those two on the four-wheelers with their dog.

  Frank gunned his engine and stood in a slight crouch, his feet firm on the jagged teeth of the running board. The snowmobile shot forward, off the firm ground, onto the soggy ground and swamp grass, and then out to the open water. He kept the nose high and throttle on full. The Polaris paddled across the thick water toward the gap in the fence.

  He wasn’t going anywhere near eighty, but he was going fast enough. He plowed through a swarming mass of gnats with his face and ended up eating a few through his nose. He gave another couple of cows standing a ways down something to gawk at and discuss around the local salt lick.

  Ed and his man approached the corner in the pickup and slowed. It was going to be close.

  Frank scared up a handful of ducks that beat away with thick velocity, and then he plowed through a mass of cattails and bumped up onto firm ground.

  Ed and the big yellow pickup turned the corner and accelerated.

  Frank punched it. He grabbed for the P90, then remembered he had dropped it when he’d first flown off on the road. It was now resting someplace in the muck at the bottom of the marsh. He reached around to pull the Glock out of his waistband and felt nothing. He reached farther. But it was gone. Long gone. In the marsh, in the field back by the house, along the road—no telling where.

  The pickup was coming fast. Frank looked around for a weapon. Up ahead was the portion of fence that the two men had been repairing. A small two-wheeled trailer rested off the side of the road. The ends of a couple dozen six-foot green fencing posts stuck out of it. These weren’t made out of wood, but steel, the cross-section shaped like a T with a single row of tabs running its length that looked like they belonged on the back of an alligator. The tabs were designed to hold metal wire clips that fastened lines of barbed wire to the post.

  Frank raced for the small trailer, slowed just enough to grab one of the posts, then took off for the road. A moment later he rolled up the shoulder and onto the hard dirt and faced the pickup down at the other end.

  Frank adjusted his grip on the post. About six inches from the bottom of the post was a metal plate in the shape of a tall chevron. When the post was pounded into the ground, the points of the chevron pointed up, resisting any pressure that would pull the post out of the ground. Frank raised the post in his left hand like a spear, the chevron plate pointing forward like a blade, and gunned it. Rocks and dust spat out from the track behind him.

  The American Indians had met with plenty of success throwing lances from horseback in these parts. And what was the snowmobile if not a replacement for the horse?

  Nobody was taking Tony. Not this time.

  Frank shot forward, but kept the post down at his side, hidden.

  Down at the other end, Ed’s driver gunned his much bigger horse. The motor growled, and the front of the pickup raised up a bit with the acceleration.

  17

  Threefer

  THE DISTANCE BETWEEN the two vehicles shrank rapidly. The Polaris was going a little over forty miles per hour. The truck was doing more than that. Maybe sixty. Which meant the combined force of any impact would be around 100 miles per hour. The post felt like it was eight or nine pounds. The big yellow truck with its big black tires had to weigh two tons. If he had a pencil and paper, Frank could work out the velocity, maybe the force per square inch on the tip of his steel lance. But you didn’t need paper to know that an eight pound shaft striking a king cab pickup at 100 mph was going to do some damage, especially where Frank was going to put it.

  The Polaris bumped and rattled as it flew over the ruts in the dirt road. Ed popped out of the passenger’s side window and took a pot shot that flew who knew where. He took another that whistled by exceedingly close.

  They were close enough that Frank could see Tony sitting up in the back seat. The driver hunched up over his steering wheel and grinned.

  Tony got down.

  Smart boy.

  The truck was closing fast, the grill looking huge, coming right at him. Frank lined himself just to the driver’s side of center. They probably weren’t going to try to run him over. You hit a 400-pound snowmobile at these speeds and you were going to have some problems. On the other hand, this was Ed and his druggie friends. Maybe they didn’t think much about velocities. Maybe all they saw was road kill.

  The words of Sam’s road kill prayer sounded in his mind. Good Lord, Frank thought, let’s hope the desk jockeys didn’t get that order mixed up.

  Ed’s gun banged; the muzzle flashed again, and the bullet struck the snowmobile’s engine shroud. That’s right, Ed. Use up as much ammo as possible now. That will be less for me to deal with later.

  The truck was closing fast, seconds from impact.

  The driver’s eyes went all narrow and mean. He moved slightly to the side. He was clearly smart enough to know that hitting a snowmobile at these speeds straight on wouldn’t work, but clipping one with the pickup’s thick steel bumper just might do the trick.

  Now was the time.

  Frank rose up on the running boards. He brought the lance aloft with his left hand, right hand steering and keeping the throttle pressed down. He cocked the lance back.

  The driver’s eyes went wide.

  Frank yelled and hurled the post as straight as he could at the center of the windshield.

  The driver, as expected, jerked the pickup to avoid the shaft, but he was too close, which meant he moved the truck and his child-molesting, narco grin directly into the lance’s path.

  “Ya-ta-hey,” Frank said.

  Then he realized he’d cut it too close. He leaned, tried to move the Polaris out of the path of the hurtling pickup, but they were going to impact. Frank lunged to the side, away from the Polaris and truck.

  The pickup hit the side of the snowmobile with a crash and crunch. Something struck Frank’s boot and spun him in the air. He flew down the road, over the edge, then slammed into the slanted shoulder at somewhere close to forty miles per hour. He bounced, tumbled, figured he would die from a blow to his head, then saw the barbed-wire fence and knew it would be decapitation.

  It was neither. He crashed to a stop in a scrubby stand of wild rose bush.

  Behind him the big Polaris flipped and rolled, caught air again. It was coming right at him. If it hit him, he was dead. But the Polaris crashed to the ground five feet away, rolled once end over end past Frank, then slammed into the dirt on its side.

  Frank was dazed. He was disoriented. But he climbed to his feet. His rib cage and part of one forearm was burning road rash. His elbow pinged. And his leg had a hitch in it. He looked down. A stick as thick as a pencil and nine inches long poked straight out of his shin.

  Frank turned toward the pickup.

  The truck was stopped, pointing across the road. The steel post stuck straight out of windshield. “Moron,” Frank said and began to shamble toward the truck. He’d make sure Ed and the driver were securely out of this picture, and then he’d fetch Tony. With every limping step, his wet pants and boots squished with water.

  The side of the truck’s bumper and par
t of the panel were smashed in where it had hit the Polaris. Had Frank not flung himself to the side with his mighty catlike reflexes, that fender would have been the spot of his demise. He would have definitely made one hell of a bug splat.

  Frank hoped Ed was in shock. He hoped a piece of windshield glass had skewered him in the eye.

  But the driver, who’d just been sitting there, moved. He turned and looked at Frank. Frank’s heart sank a bit—the post hadn’t skewered him. It appeared to have missed and gone right between him and Ed.

  Frank hurried his shamble.

  The driver saw Frank and went all white-eyed.

  Frank’s leg was starting to throb, but he pushed himself to run. If he could just get close enough to jump up on the running board.

  The driver shouted something unintelligible, then put the truck in gear and punched it. The tires spun. If the driver cranked the wheel one way, he’d have no problem running Frank down. No problem at all.

  But the driver cranked the wheel the other way.

  Fight or flight, and he’d chosen to flee. After all, he didn’t know Frank had lost his guns. The motor roared, and the pickup bumped back out onto the road.

  “No!” Frank shouted. He half ran, half shambled forward, but the pickup roared away and left him to choke on its dust.

  Cowards. Cowards!

  He turned and shamble-loped back to the Polaris and righted it. The windshield was gone. The shroud was in pieces, revealing the motor underneath. Frank straddled it and found the handlebar was bent. He turned the ignition. Nothing. He pulled the kill switch up, turned the key again. This time the motor turned over, coughed, and started.

  He was going to chase their worthless hides out onto the freeway if he had to. He was going to chase them down and rid the world of their scum.

  Frank pressed the throttle and the motor revved, the studs of the track bit in. He raced up onto the road, gave it more throttle, but something wasn’t right. The back end bumped and kicked, and then the Polaris ground to a stop.