We reached 123d Street, the last place to cross back to Miami Beach before 826 ran across at North Miami Beach, and Oscar kept heading north. Deborah told Doakes by radio as we passed it.

“Where the hell is he going?” Deborah muttered as she put down the radio.

“Maybe he’s just driving around,” I said. “It’s a beautiful night.”

“Uh-huh. You want to write a sonnet?”

Under normal circumstances, I would have had a splendid comeback for that, but perhaps due to the thrilling nature of our chase, nothing occurred to me. And anyway, Debs looked like she could use a victory, however small.

A few blocks later, Oscar suddenly accelerated into the left lane and turned left across oncoming traffic, raising an entire concerto of angry horns from drivers moving in both directions.

“He’s making a move,” Deborah told Doakes, “west on 135th Street.”

“I’m crossing behind you,” Doakes said. “On the Broad Causeway.”

“What’s on 135th Street?” Debs wondered aloud.

“ Opa-Locka Airport,” I said. “A couple of miles straight ahead.”

“Shit,” she said, and picked up the radio. “Doakes- Opa-Locka Airport is out this way.”

“On my way,” he said, and I could hear his siren cutting on before his radio clicked off.

Opa-Locka Airport had long been popular with people in the drug trade, as well as with those in covert operations. This was a handy arrangement, considering that the line between the two was often quite blurry. Oscar could very easily have a small plane waiting there, ready to whisk him out of the country and off to almost anyplace in the Caribbean or Central or South America-with connections to the rest of the world, of course, although I doubted he would be headed for the Sudan, or even Beirut. Someplace in the Caribbean was more likely, but in any case fleeing the country seemed like a reasonable move under the circumstances, and Opa-Locka Airport was a logical place to start.

Oscar was going a little faster now, although 135th Street was not as wide and well traveled as Biscayne Boulevard. We came up over a small bridge across a canal and as Oscar came down the far side he suddenly accelerated, squealing through traffic around an S curve in the road.

“Goddamn it, something spooked him,” Deborah said. “He must have spotted us.” She sped up to stay with him, still keeping two or three cars back, even though there seemed little point now to pretending we weren’t following him.

Something had indeed spooked him, because Oscar was driving wildly, dangerously close to slamming into the traffic or running up onto the sidewalk, and naturally enough, Debs was not going to let herself lose this kind of pissing contest. She stayed with him, swerving around cars that were still trying to recover from their encounters with Oscar. Just ahead he swung into the far left lane, forcing an old Buick to spin away, hit the curb, and crash through a chain-link fence into the front yard of a light blue house.

Would the sight of our little unmarked car be enough to cause Oscar to behave this way? It was nice to think so and made me feel very important, but I didn’t believe it-so far, he had acted in a cool and controlled way. If he wanted to ditch us it seemed more likely that he would have made some kind of sudden and tricky move, like going over the drawbridge as it went up. So why had he suddenly panicked? Just for something to do, I leaned forward and looked into the side mirror. The block letters on the surface of the mirror told me that objects were closer than they appeared. Things being what they were, this was a very unhappy thought, because only one object appeared in the mirror at the moment.

It was a battered white van.

And it was following us, and following Oscar. Matching our speed, moving in and out of traffic. “Well,” I said, “not stupid after all.” And I raised my voice to go over the squeal of tires and the horns of the other motorists.

“Oh, Deborah?” I said. “I don’t want to distract you from your driving chores, but if you have a moment, could you look in your rearview mirror?”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean,” she snarled, but she flicked her eyes to the mirror. It was a piece of good luck that we were on a straight stretch of road, because for just a second she almost forgot to steer. “Oh, shit,” she whispered.

“Yes, that’s what I thought,” I said.

The I-95 overpass stretched across the road directly ahead, and just before he passed under it Oscar swerved violently to the right across three lanes and turned down a side street that ran parallel to the freeway. Deborah swore and wrenched her car around to follow. “Tell Doakes!” she said, and I obediently picked up the radio.

“Sergeant Doakes,” I said. “We are not alone.”

The radio hissed once. “The fuck does that mean?” Doakes said, almost as if he had heard Deborah’s response and admired it so much he had to repeat it.

“We have just turned right on 6th Avenue, and we are being followed by a white van.” There was no answer, so I said again, “Did I mention that the van is white?” and this time I had the great satisfaction of hearing Doakes grunt, “Motherfucker.”

“That’s exactly what we thought,” I said.

“Let the van in front and stay with him,” he said.

“No shit,” Deborah muttered through clenched teeth, and then she said something much worse. I was tempted to say something similar, because as Doakes clicked off his radio, Oscar headed up the on-ramp onto I-95 with us following, and at the very last second he yanked his car back down the paved slope and onto 6th Avenue. His 4Runner bounced as it hit the road and teetered drunkenly to the right for a moment, then accelerated and straightened up. Deborah hit the brakes and we spun through half a turn; the white van slid ahead of us, bounced down the slope, and closed the gap with the 4Runner. After half a second, Debs straightened us out of our slide and followed them down onto the street.

The side road here was narrow, with a row of houses on the right and a high yellow-cement embankment on the left with I-95 on top. We ran along for several blocks, picking up speed. A tiny old couple holding hands paused on the sidewalk to watch our strange parade rocket past. It may have been my imagination, but they seemed to flutter in the wind from Oscar’s car and the van going by.

We closed the gap just a little, and the white van closed on the 4Runner, too. But Oscar picked up the pace; he ran a stop sign, leaving us to veer around a pickup truck that was spinning in a circle in its attempt to avoid the 4Runner and the van. The truck wobbled through a clumsy doughnut turn and slammed into a fire hydrant. But Debs just clamped her jaw tight and squealed around the truck and through the intersection, ignoring the horns and the fountain of water from the ruptured hydrant, and closing the gap again in the next block.

Several blocks ahead of Oscar I could see the red light of a major cross street. Even from this far I could see a steady stream of traffic moving through the intersection. Of course nobody lives forever, but this was really not the way I would choose to die if given a vote. Watching TV with Rita suddenly seemed a lot more attractive. I tried to think of a polite but very convincing way to persuade Deborah to stop and smell the roses for a moment, but just when I needed it the most my powerful brain seemed to shut down, and before I could get it going again Oscar was approaching the traffic light.

Quite possibly Oscar had been to church this week, because the light turned green as he rocketed through the intersection. The white van followed close behind, braking hard to avoid a small blue car trying to beat the light, and then it was our turn, with the light fully green now. We swerved around the van and almost made it through-but this was Miami, after all, and a cement truck ran the red light behind the blue car, right in front of us. I swallowed hard as Deborah stood on the brake pedal and spun around the truck. We thumped hard against the curb, running the two left wheels up onto the sidewalk for just a moment before bouncing down onto the road again. “Very nice,” I said as Deborah accelerated once again. And quite possibly, she might have taken the time to thank me for my compliment, if only the white van had not chosen that moment to take advantage of our slow-down to drop back beside our car and swerve into us. The rear end of our car slewed around to the left, but Deborah fought it back around again.