Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [184]
“What are you doing?” Mobius said.
“Trying to keep her away from you.”
“You’ll get hurt.”
“We’ll see.”
“You know what you don’t realize?” Mobius said. “There are two moves you can make here, continue straight or swerve, and they both lead to the same thing. No matter what you do. In game theory it’s called Hawk-Dove. Also known as Chicken.”
“What about what Alice does?”
“I have an ace up my sleeve there.”
“What’s that?”
“The end.”
“Goddamn you,” Pepin said, “I don’t want the end.”
“Yes you do, but you won’t do it. That’s why I am.” He hung up.
Pepin screamed at the phone and shook it, then got out of the car and looked around as if he expected Mobius to be nearby, as if their phones were connected by string, he wasn’t sure why. Alice’s bus, followed by another, pulled out of the parking lot. The last remaining bus had almost finished boarding.
“Where’re you guys headed?” Pepin asked a student.
“The Museum of Natural History,” the kid said.
Alone now, Pepin wrote:
There are two of us, of course, David and Pepin, interlocked and separate and one and the same. I’m writing my better self and he’s writing his worse and vice versa and so on until the end. A good reader—a good detective—knows this by now. If you don’t, look in the mirror. That’s you and not you, after all, because the person in your mind isn’t the person in the world. And if you don’t know this already, you will.
On the West Side Highway, Alice’s bus three cars ahead, Pepin caught sight in his driver’s side mirror of a black Ford F-150 pickup, something you never saw in Manhattan, so absurdly large and impossible to parallel park, its hemi roaring like a lion. In the cab, Mobius looked like a child steering the wheel of a giant yacht.
Pepin, in the center lane, let him pull alongside, slowly drifting back into his blindspot, then hit Send on the cell.
“What is it?”
“You said there were two moves I could make.”
“That’s right,” Mobius said. “Straight or swerve.”
“What do you think I’ll do?”
“You? You’ll always swerve.”
“Bingo.”
Pepin yanked his car left, driving the nose into the Ford’s rear wheel and spinning it perpendicular to his hood, pile-driving the truck down the road as white smoke swirled around them, Mobius’s arms stuck straight out as he fought the steering wheel, his shoulder pressed to his window, Pepin flooring the accelerator. Horns, behind and wailing past, stretched like strands of gum as the current of traffic flowed closely around their collision. There was a pop, as hollow and deadened as a spinnaker gone taut with wind, and the truck was shot airborne and flew over Pepin’s hood to become a cloud of smoke and destruction in his mirror, hailing glass as it rolled. He hooted, cursing happily, slapping the dash, and turned to look, the weaving traffic sealing off the wreck’s rising smoke, then cut his eyes forward and saw a car crossing into his lane. He swerved, felt the car fishtail and, overcorrecting, went spinning slowly, inexorably, his palms beating the steering wheel. He was briefly facing the traffic, the cars as vivid and fixed as the faces you blur by in a subway station, and then they flashed past, supersonic, as he slid diagonally into a guard rail—a collision so jarring that his neck and back cracked. He’d come to rest, alive. Through his shattered windshield he saw Alice’s bus shrinking into the distance, the kids’ faces plastered to the rear windows—and Mobius’s truck, miraculously righted, spectacularly damaged but operable, roaring by in pursuit.
He restarted the car. It drove, but just barely, the driveline or axle or something dragging along the road beneath him, the left wheel well so punched in that it restricted his turning. He hobbled to the exit at 96th Street and spotted a parking lot across Riverside.
“What the fuck happened here?” the attendant said.
Pepin dug a hundred-dollar bill from his wallet and slapped it into the man’s palm. “Park it somewhere safe.”
Then he ran.
It was hard, David felt, to remember much of anything