The armored truck seemed to be accelerating on the straight. Johnny Boy kept pace, then worked his way closer, checking his phone all the time. The wing on the Merc was less than a foot from the truck’s heavy steel bumper, the closest Johnny Boy had ever gotten to another moving vehicle. He didn’t like it. They were going fifty now. What the hell was the guy thinking? He thought they’d drive those babies like a goddamn school bus, not a Saturn Five.

Just then his phone screen stopped beach balling.

Devices found: MAX.

“Well, I’ll be damned.”

He looked up just in time to see but not avoid the high edge of a sidewalk. With a bone-jarring crunch, the Merc was thrown four feet in the air as its speed dropped from fifty to five. Its wheel disintegrated and the axle fractured. Johnny Boy yelled as he got a face full of airbag.

The Subaru was scorching the surface streets, the devil himself on its tail. Still no tire screech, no slide. All-wheel drive on hot, sticky Pirellis just holding on.

“Next intersection maybe,” said Eddie, as they passed Johnny Boy’s SUV. Inside, Johnny Boy, dazed and disorientated, nose bleeding onto his shirt, tried to find his phone.

“Got about one minute left,” said the Yo-Yo.

They saw the back of the truck ahead, waiting at a light to go left. The light was changing to yellow. The truck would just get through. Left turn lane still full. Spencer grimaced, decided to go for it, shifted down, pedaled down, barreled down the straight-ahead lane.

A guy in a Porsche in his own sweet hurry was waiting to cross the intersection, nosing forward, watching Spencer’s light change. He decided to go, though, while his own light was still red.

Spencer had seen it but was committed to the move. Too fast now to abort, he touched his horn, tried to make the left turn even sharper just as the Porsche stopped. It was too tight, though, and understeer came in. He was turning the wheel and nothing much was happening. Seconds, seconds, everything going into a slow-motion heartbeat that would take up pages of a witness report. He touched the brake with his left foot, felt the front end bite again. Their bumpers kissed and Spencer lost his. Under his wheel with a crunch. And then they were around and through and they’d actually passed the truck as Spencer was trying to get things back in shape.

They slowed and waited for Max’s truck to catch up. The Yo-Yo and Eddie peered at their phones.

“Get us close,” said the Yo-Yo. Unfazed, totally unfazed by how close they’d been to getting cut out of a pile of twisted Japanese and German metal by a fireman’s oxy torch.

The truck rumbled past them, and Spencer fell into its wake, matching its speed and drawing up close.

“Not getting anything,” said Eddie.