The two bullets met in the air between the cars.
Locke had fired from the driver's window; Fox had fired left-handed from her own, both rounds curving toward each other on converging arcs. They collided with a sharp clang and a brief spray of sparks, then dropped harmlessly onto the asphalt.
Locke's mouth moved slightly at the corners.
Intermediate versus Intermediate. Interesting.
He floored it.
The R8 surged back toward the Manhattan Bridge entrance and Fox was immediately in behind him, the Maserati's engine note rising to match. She was good, matching his lines, reading his angles, not giving him the half-second of clear sightline he'd need to put a shot through her windshield at this speed.
And then the night got louder.
The NYPD helicopter came in low over Third Avenue, its searchlight sweeping the street below. Someone on a high floor had called 911 three minutes ago. Someone always did.
Fox's pace changed the instant the light hit.
Locke registered it immediately, a fractional easing of pressure, the Maserati holding back half a beat and understood the calculation she was running. Two cars exchanging gunfire in Manhattan with aerial police observation was a different problem from a tail-and-observe operation. The operational math had shifted.
Good, he thought. Let it shift.
He hit the brakes.
The R8 came around in a controlled drift, driver's door already opening before the car had fully stopped. He stepped out - unhurried, the way a person moves when they've decided on something and the decision has already been made, with the M1911 in his right hand and the sunglasses still on his face.
Fox, completing a handbrake turn twenty meters back, took one look at him standing in the middle of the street and said "shit" with the flat economy of someone who had just reassessed a situation.
She wasn't wrong to.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
Locke put three rounds through the space Fox's Maserati was occupying as it spun on its axis, not trying to hit her, the car's spin made that a low-percentage shot but walking the impacts across the bodywork to signal clearly that backing off was the wrong choice. Shell casings rang off the asphalt.
Wesley, in the passenger seat, had abandoned any pretense of composure.
Locke got back in the car. Buckled his seatbelt. Checked the mirror.
Now the Maserati was behind him and the R8 was in front, and the dynamic had inverted cleanly.
Overhead, the helicopter had relayed the plates. The police radio frequency crackled with the report: one of the vehicles had been reported stolen forty minutes ago, which was, Locke noted with the particular satisfaction of a plan unfolding correctly exactly the moment he'd submitted the report. The R8 was a stolen vehicle. The Maserati was an unknown. The responding officers were going to have an interesting time sorting out the narrative.
More units were converging. He could hear the sirens organizing themselves from multiple directions.
He ran the Manhattan Bridge sightline through his head. Twenty-one bridges off the island. The Manhattan Bridge could be raised. Raising it required a decision chain that didn't move fast, police presence wasn't enough, not without injuries, not for what was currently classified as a 415, an armed disturbance between two civilian vehicles. New Yorkers watching from their windows were filing this under another Friday night rather than emergency.
He licked his lips.
This is exactly why I came to New York.
Big scene, the System had said. Bigger scene, bigger bonus. He wasn't trying to get away yet — he was leaning into the density of the situation, letting the chaos generate its own cover. Fox was behind him now, trapped in the same operational mess he was navigating, except she'd come in without contingency plans and he'd come in with a hundred of them.
He'd spent days on satellite maps of this city before he ever packed a bag. Every bridge, every tunnel, every dead-end block and one-way street that became a trap after midnight. HYDRA could come to New York. S.H.I.E.L.D. could come to New York. It wouldn't matter.
"Blockade the Manhattan Bridge!" someone said on the scanner frequency.
But nobody was blocking the Manhattan Bridge on the word of a dispatcher with a 415 call and no injuries. That required a chain of authorization that was not moving at car-chase speed.
The bridge came into view.
Locke accelerated.
Behind him, Fox made her decision, she floored the Maserati and closed the gap in four seconds, matching his commitment. Whatever she'd been calculating, she'd resolved it toward through.
Wesley was holding the door frame with both hands and not saying anything.
The bridge deck was beginning to move.
Not quickly, the mechanism was old, the separation slow, but it was moving. The center line of the deck was splitting, the two halves beginning their arc toward vertical.
Fox's door came open.
She leaned out left-handed, the barrel angled up and back toward the helicopter that was holding the searchlight on them, and fired twice. The light died. The sound of the helicopter changed pitch.
Darkness dropped over the bridge approach.
Bang.
The R8 hit the gap at the bridge's rising midpoint, not a gap yet, barely a seam, just a ridge of steel that the car cleared without drama and came down on the far deck as the bridge continued its slow rise behind them.
Then darkness behind as the Maserati's headlights disappeared from his mirror.
Locke let the R8 run for another thirty seconds, then took the first available turn off the bridge approach and worked his way into a residential grid, cutting speed to something that wouldn't attract attention. He pulled into a parking structure, killed the lights, and sat in the dark for two minutes.
Nothing followed.
He checked the System.
[Mission: Uninvited Guest — Complete]
[Reward: Achievement Points ×1,000 / Potential Points ×1,000]
He pulled up the updated totals. 1,300 AP, 3,300 PP. Still not where he needed to be, but moving.
He thought about Fox shooting out the helicopter light. Professional, efficient, no wasted motion, exactly what her file suggested. And at the end, she'd committed to the bridge jump rather than break off, which told him something about how she weighted mission objectives against operational risk.
She's going to be a problem, he noted. The right kind of problem.
He started the car.
Time to go home and get some sleep.
Monday was still on.
Plz Drop Some Power Stones.