Preston straightens up. Points at Malcolm through the open window. His finger is thick. Manicured. Adorned with a gold ring bearing a family crest.
“Tell you what. Outrun me with that junk car. I dare you. To the I-15 junction. You win, I give you fifty thousand cash. Right here. Right now.”
Malcolm turns his head. Looks at Preston for the first time. Studies the man’s face. The arrogance. The certainty. The complete absence of doubt.
“And if you win?”
“You never drive through this neighborhood again. You take your junk car and disappear.” Preston grins, showing teeth that have clearly benefited from expensive orthodontics. “Deal?”
“Make it interesting.”
Preston’s grin falters for just a moment.
“Fifty thousand isn’t interesting enough for you?”
“Your company.”
The grin disappears entirely. Preston stares.
“My company? FinEdge? You want me to bet two hundred twenty million dollars against this?” He gestures at the Camaro. A sweeping motion of disbelief. “This heap of scrap metal?”
“You said it was junk.” Malcolm’s voice is calm. Level. The voice of a man who has stared down opponents at two hundred miles per hour. “Should be easy money.”
Something flickers in Preston’s eyes. Pride. Ego. The absolute certainty of a man who has never lost anything that mattered. The certainty that comes from a lifetime of winning simply because losing was never permitted.
“Fine.” Preston leans in close. His voice drops to something that’s almost intimate. “You want my company? Outrun me with that junk car, and I’ll sign over every single share of FinEdge Corp. But when you lose—and you will lose—you hand me the keys to this pile of garbage and I never see your face again. Deal?”
“Deal.”
Preston extends his hand. Malcolm looks at it. Does not move.
“I don’t shake on bets,” Malcolm says. “I finish them.”
In the guard booth of Ridgecrest Country Club, a security officer named James Holloway watches through the window. He has worked here for seven years. He has seen Preston Whitmore do this before. The confrontations. The insults. The alpha-male posturing. Always with the same type of target. Always with the same casual cruelty.
James shakes his head slowly. He doesn’t know who the man in the Camaro is. But something about his stillness. His calm. His complete lack of fear. Something tells James that Preston Whitmore has finally picked the wrong opponent.
The light turns green.
Both engines rev.
The route is simple. Two-point-three miles to the Highway 15 junction. Two straightaways. Two curves. Light traffic at this hour. A few cars that will need to be navigated around, but nothing significant.
Green light.
Preston launches first. The Lamborghini’s all-wheel-drive system hooks up perfectly, transferring six hundred ten horsepower to the pavement with surgical precision. The tires chirp once, then grip. Zero to sixty in two-point-nine seconds. The acceleration pushes Preston back into his leather seat.
In his rearview mirror, Preston sees the Camaro shrinking. Already falling behind. He smiles. Tastes victory.
Too easy.
But Malcolm isn’t racing yet. He’s waiting. Feeling the road through the steering wheel. Through the seat. Through the pedals. Listening to his engine. Reading the pavement ahead.
In Formula 1, the start is important. What comes after is everything.
The first curve approaches. A gentle right-hander. Maybe thirty degrees. The kind of corner that separates amateurs from professionals. Amateurs see a curve. Professionals see an opportunity.
Preston enters fast. Brakes late. Later than he should, actually. Showing off even though no one is watching. He feels the Lamborghini’s sophisticated traction-control system managing the weight transfer, keeping the car stable despite his aggressive input.
Malcolm enters faster. No traction control. No stability management. No computer assistance of any kind. Just a man and a machine and thirty thousand hours of muscle memory developed on the most challenging racetracks in the world.
He clips the apex perfectly. The Camaro’s rear end stepping out just slightly before hooking back up. He loses no speed. His line is textbook. Or rather, his line is what textbooks try to describe.
Preston loses four-tenths of a second. He doesn’t know it yet.
The first straightaway opens up. The Camaro’s V8 opens up with it. The sound changes. Deeper. Angrier. A mechanical roar that seems to come from the earth itself.
This is not the sound of a junk car. This is the sound of American muscle at full fury.
Preston glances in his mirror. His smile fades.
The Camaro is gaining.
Impossible. That junk car cannot be gaining on a Lamborghini Huracán.
But it is.
Malcolm’s foot is flat on the throttle. His hands are steady on the wheel. His eyes are fixed on the road ahead, already planning the next corner, already calculating speed and angle and grip. This is not a street race to him. This is nothing. A casual Sunday drive compared to what he has experienced.
He has raced at Monaco, where the margin for error is measured in centimeters and a moment’s hesitation means contact with concrete barriers. He has raced at Spa, where rain turns the track into a mirror and the brave separate themselves from the merely talented. He has raced against the best drivers in the world, wheel to wheel, at two hundred miles per hour with millions of people watching.
Preston Whitmore is not even in the same category. Preston Whitmore is not in any category that matters.
The second curve. A sharper left-hander. Maybe forty-five degrees. This one requires commitment. This one separates those who believe in their abilities from those who merely hope.
Preston brakes too early. Fear finally creeping into his calculations. His subconscious knows what his conscious mind refuses to accept. He is being hunted.
Malcolm doesn’t brake at all. He trails the throttle. Rotates the car with weight transfer alone. And exits the corner with the Camaro’s nose pointed straight at Preston’s rear bumper.
The maneuver is so smooth. So effortless. That it looks like the car is driving itself.
It isn’t. Malcolm is simply that good.
They are side by side now. The rumble of the V8 mixes with the scream of the V10. American muscle against Italian engineering. History against technology. Experience against equipment.
Preston looks left. For the first time, he sees Malcolm’s face clearly. Calm. Focused. Almost bored. The face of a man who has done this so many times that it no longer requires conscious thought.
The final straightaway. Five hundred meters to the junction.
Preston floors it. The Lamborghini screams forward, every one of its six hundred ten horses straining against gravity and air resistance.
The Camaro screams louder.
Malcolm passes Preston like Preston is parked.
The gap opens. One car length. Two. Three. Four.
By the time they reach the junction, Malcolm is so far ahead that he has time to slow down, pull over to the shoulder, turn off his engine, and open his door before Preston’s Lamborghini even crosses the invisible finish line.
Fourteen seconds.