This time, she saw it easily. Three black SUVs, driving side-by-side in formation, coming down the 210 towards them about a kilometer in the distance. There were maybe three or four cars between the Subaru and the oncoming pursuers, but that was it in the way of cover.
“I see three of them,” Parkowski said.
“Fuck,” DePresti said. His voice was shaky. “Three?”
“Yup.”
They traveled at over seventy miles per hour now, well above the speed limit, but the SUVs were rapidly gaining on them. The road in front started to clear up as they reached roughly the halfway point between Los Angeles and the city of San Bernardino.
“Same assholes as before,” Parkowski added. “Black Chevys.”
DePresti floored the accelerator. His car in theory, was faster than their pursuers, but who knew what modifications they might have made to their SUVs to improve them. “Christ, they’re pulling out all of the stops.” He swerved around a late-model minivan, and had more or less an open road in front of him.
The three SUVs were now right behind them. Parkowski braced herself, expecting them to try to fire on them again, but oddly no submachine guns appeared from the heavily tinted windows.
Instead, they had broken their formation and were trying to surround the Subaru.
Maybe their tactics had changed. Instead of trying to eliminate her and DePresti, perhaps they were now trying to capture them by boxing them in.
DePresti drove erratically, trying to shake them, but the pursuing cars closed on his vehicle. “Grace, we’ve got to do something,” he said, swerving to the right around one of the few remaining cars on the freeway. “Traffic is going to start picking up once we hit San Bernardino, and they’re going to be able to trap us once we slow down. I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up.”
She nodded. “What do we have in the car?”
“Our bags, my bike helmet, my scuba gear,” DePresti said. “Not much. I just cleaned it out.”
“I’ll go check back there.” She unbuckled and climbed into the Forester’s back seat, almost flying out the shattered window as DePresti swerved to the left into the freeway’s shoulder. Parkowski was shocked that there weren’t any California Highway Patrol cars or even local cops on the road, but maybe that was by design. Whoever was in these SUVs had seemingly unlimited resources.
There wasn’t much available in the trunk to her. Everything DePresti had said was there, plus an emergency kit and some trash. But nothing jumped out as a possible course of action.
An idea came to her.
“Mike, how do you feel about your scuba tank?” she yelled to the front.
“If you need to use it, use it,” he yelled back.
Parkowski threw everything from the trunk into the rear seat except for the tank, then climbed into the trunk herself. “Unlock the car.”
A moment later she heard the
She grabbed on to the back of the seat with one hand and used the other to open the Subaru’s rear door.
The wind from the outside blew in her face as she was now exposed to the elements. It was a dry, warm air, and if they weren’t in a life-or-death situation, it would have felt good on her face.
Parkowski saw the three pursuing cars now, weaving in and out of traffic as they tried to get in a position where they could box DePresti’s car in and force them to stop. Their windows were all tinted, she couldn’t see any of the occupants, but mercifully there weren't any submachine guns pointed at her. She waited until one of the cars, the middle one, was diagonally to her left and flung the scuba tank out of the Subaru.
Parkowski timed her throw perfectly. It impacted the SUV’s driver’s side windshield and went cleanly into the vehicle.
Unlike in the movies, the tank didn’t explode. Instead, she could see the cracks in the windows of the SUV as the high pressure tank bounced around; the vessel had been breached somewhere along its exterior.
The black SUV careened off the road.
Both of its twins were slow to respond. The car to Parkowski’s left was able to accelerate and avoid the impacted Chevy, but the one to her right was not. Its front bumper slammed into the rear of the SUV that Parkowski had hit.
The SUV that had originally been counterattacking went airborne, flipping over back-to-front before skidding and sliding towards the median, upside-down. The second SUV went slightly off-axis, the right side tipping up and the entire car putting all of its weight on the left two tires, before coming back down. It, too, turned sideways from the collision and slammed into the railing on the other side of the freeway.
That, Parkowski briefly thought, was like the movies.
She closed the trunk and quickly climbed over the back seat.
“I got two of them,” she told DePresti with a smile.
“Great, but that means there’s one still left,” he said. Their victory was apparently short-lived. He was pushing the Subaru as fast as it could go, but the SUV was gaining on them.
They were going well over a hundred miles per hour and she wasn’t wearing a seatbelt.
