‘How are you coping?’ she asked.
Disoriented, he answered only by shaking his head.
‘Not well,’ she whispered.
Joe looked past her, down at the granite and bronze markers. As if from very far away, he heard himself say, ‘Lost forever,’ speaking as much about himself as about his wife and daughters.
When he returned his attention to the woman, she was gazing past him, into the distance. As the sound of a racing engine rose, concern crinkled the corners of her eyes and creased her forehead.
Joe turned to see what was troubling her. Along the road that he had travelled, a white Ford van was approaching at a far higher speed than the posted limit.
‘Bastards,’ she said.
When Joe turned to the woman again, she was already running from him, angling across the slope toward the brow of the low hill.
‘Hey, wait,’ he said.
She didn’t pause or look back.
He started after her, but his physical condition wasn’t as good as hers. She seemed to be an experienced runner. After a few steps, Joe halted. Defeated by the suffocating heat, he wouldn’t be able to catch up with her.
Sunlight mirroring the windshield and flaring off the headlight lenses, the white van shot past Joe. It paralleled the woman as she sprinted across the grave rows.
Joe started back down the hill toward his car, not sure what he was going to do. Maybe he should give chase. What the hell was going on here?
Fifty or sixty yards beyond the parked Honda, brakes shrieking, leaving twin smears of rubber on the pavement behind it, the van slid to a stop at the curb. Both front doors flew open, and the men in Hawaiian shirts leaped out. They bolted after the woman.
Surprise halted Joe. He hadn’t been followed from Santa Monica, not by the white van, not by any vehicle. He was sure of that.
Somehow they had known that he would come to the cemetery. And since neither of the men showed any interest in Joe, but went after the woman as if they were attack dogs, they must have been watching him at the beach not because they were interested in him, per se, but because they hoped that she would make contact with him at some point during the day.
The woman was their only quarry.
Hell, they must have been watching his apartment too, must have followed him from there to the beach.
As far as he knew, they had been keeping him under surveillance for days. Maybe weeks. He had been in such a daze of desolation for so long, walking through life like a sleeper drifting through a dream, that he would not have noticed these people slinking at the periphery of his vision.
Who is she, who are they, why was she photographing the graves?
Uphill and at least a hundred yards to the east, the woman fled under the generously spreading boughs of stone pines clustered along the perimeter of the burial grounds, across shaded grass only lightly dappled with sunshine. Her dusky skin blended with the shadows, but her yellow blouse betrayed her.
She was heading toward a particular point on the crest, as if familiar with the terrain. Considering that no cars were parked along this section of the cemetery road, except for Joe’s Honda and the white van, she might have entered the memorial park by that route, on foot.
The men from the van had a lot of ground to make up if they were going to catch her. The tall one in the green shirt seemed in better shape than his partner, and his legs were considerably longer than the woman’s, so he was gaining on her. Nevertheless, the smaller guy didn’t relent even as he fell steadily behind. Sprinting frantically up the long sun-seared slope, stumbling over a grave marker, then over another, regaining his balance, he charged on, as though in an animal frenzy, in a blood fever, gripped by the need to be there when the woman was brought clown.
Beyond the manicured hills of the cemetery were other hills in
a natural condition: pale sandy soil, banks of shale, brown grass, stink weed, mesquite, stunted manzanita, tumbleweed, scattered low and gnarled dwarf oaks. Arid ravines led down into the undeveloped land above Griffith Observatory and east of the Los Angeles Zoo, a rattlesnake-infested plot of desert scrub in the heart of the urban sprawl.
If the woman got into the scrub before being caught, and if she knew her way, she could lose her pursuers by zigging and zagging from one narrow declivity to another.
Joe headed toward the abandoned white van. He might be able to learn something from it.
He wanted the woman to escape, though he wasn’t entirely sure why his sympathies were with her.
As far as he knew, she might be a felon with a list of heinous crimes on her rap sheet. She hadn’t looked like a criminal, hadn’t sounded like one. This was Los Angeles, however, where clean-cut young men brutally shot gunned their parents and then, as orphans, tearfully begged the jury to pity them and show mercy. No one was what he seemed.
Yet . . . the gentleness of her fingertips against his cheek, the sorrow in her eyes, the tenderness in her voice all marked her as a woman of compassion, whether she was a fugitive from the law or not. He could not wish her ill.
A vicious sound, hard and flat, cracked across the cemetery, leaving a brief throbbing wound in the hot stillness. Another crack followed.
The woman had nearly reached the brow of the hill. Visible between the last two bristling pines. Blue jeans. Yellow blouse. Stretching her legs with each stride. Brown arms pumping close to her sides.
The smaller man, in the red and orange Hawaiian shirt, had run wide of his companion, whom he was still trailing, to get a clear line of sight on the woman. He had stopped and raised his arms, holding something in both hands. A handgun. The son of a bitch was shooting at her.
Cops didn’t try to shoot unarmed fugitives in the back. Not righteous cops.
Joe wanted to help her. He couldn’t think of anything to do. If they were cops, he had no right to second-guess them. If they weren’t cops, and even if he could catch up with them, they would probably shoot him down rather than let him interfere.
Crack.
The woman reached the crest.
‘Go,’ Joe urged her in a hoarse whisper. ‘Go.’
He didn’t have a cellular phone in his own car, so he couldn’t call 911. He had carried a mobile unit as a reporter, but these days he seldom called anyone even from his home phone.
The keening crack of another shot pierced the leaden heat. If these men weren’t police officers, they were desperate or crazy, or both, resorting to gunplay in such a public place, even though this part of the cemetery was currently deserted. The sound of the shots would travel, drawing the attention of the maintenance personnel who, merely by closing the formidable iron gate at the entrance to the park, could prevent the gunmen from driving out.
Apparently unhit, the woman disappeared over the top of the hill, into the scrub beyond.
Both of the men in Hawaiian shirts went after her.
4
Heart knocking so fiercely that his vision blurred with each hard-driven surge of blood, Joe Carpenter sprinted to the white van.
The Ford was not a recreational vehicle but a panelled van of the type commonly used by businesses to make small deliveries. Neither the back nor the side of the vehicle featured the name or logo of any enterprise.
The engine was running. Both front doors stood open.
He ran to the passenger side, skidded in a soggy patch of grass around a leaking sprinkler head, and leaned into the cab, hoping to find a cellular phone. If there was one, it wasn’t in plain sight.
Maybe in the glove box. He popped it open.
Someone in the cargo hold behind the front seats, mistaking Joe for one of the men in the Hawaiian shirts, said, ‘Did you get Rose?’
Damn.
The glove box contained a few rolls of Lifesavers that spilled onto the floor — and a window envelope from the Department of Motor Vehicles.
By law, every vehicle in California was required to carry a valid registration and proof of insurance.
‘Hey, who the hell are you?’ the guy in the cargo hold demanded.
Clutching the envelope, Joe turned away from the van.
He saw no point in trying to run. This man might be as quick to shout people in the back as were the other two.
With a clatter and a skreeeek of hinges, the single door at the rear of the vehicle was flung open.
Joe walked directly toward the sound. A sledge-faced specimen with Popeye forearms, neck sufficiently thick to support a small car, came around the side of the van, and Joe opted for the surprise of instant and unreasonable aggression, driving one knee hard into his crotch.
Retching, wheezing for air, the guy started to bend forward, and
Joe head-butted him in the face. He hit the ground unconscious, breathing noisily through his open mouth because his broken nose was streaming blood.
Although, as a kid, Joe had been a fighter and something of a troublemaker, he had not raised a fist against anyone since he met and married Michelle. Until today. Now, twice in the past two hours, he had resorted to violence, astonishing himself.
More than astonished, he was sickened by this primitive rage. He had never known such wrath before, not even during his troubled youth, yet here he was struggling to control it again as he had struggled in the public lavatory in Santa Monica. For the past year, the fall of Flight 353 had filled him with terrible despondency and grief, but he was beginning to realize that those feelings were like layers of oil atop another — darker — emotion that he had been denying; what filled the chambers of his heart to the brim was anger.
If the universe was a cold mechanism, if life was a journey from one empty blackness to another, he could not rant at God, because to do so was no more effective than screaming for help in the vacuum of deep space where sound could not travel, or like trying to draw breath underwater. But now, given any excuse to vent his fury on people, he had seized the opportunity with disturbing enthusiasm.
Rubbing the top of his head, which hurt from butting the guy in the face, looking down at the unconscious hulk with the bleeding nose, Joe felt a satisfaction that he did not want to feel. A wild glee simultaneously thrilled and repulsed him.
Dressed in a T-shirt promoting the videogame Quake, baggy black pants, and red sneakers, the fallen man appeared to be in his late twenties, at least a decade younger than his two associates. His hands were massive enough to juggle cantaloupes, and a single letter was tattooed on the base phalange of each finger, thumbs excluded, to spell out ANABOLIC, as in anabolic steroid.
This was no stranger to violence.
Nevertheless, although self-defence justified a pre-emptive strike, Joe was disturbed by the savage pleasure he took from such swift brutality.
The guy sure didn’t look like an officer of the law. Regardless of his appearance, he might be a cop, in which case assaulting him ensured serious consequences.
To Joe’s surprise, even the prospect of jail didn’t diminish his twisted satisfaction in the ferocity with which he had acted. He
felt half nauseated, half out of his mind — but more alive than he had been in a year.
Exhilarated yet fearful of the moral depths into which this new empowering anger might take him, he glanced in both directions along the cemetery road. There was no oncoming traffic. He knelt beside his victim.
Breath whistled wetly through the man’s throat, and he issued a soft childlike sigh. His eyelids fluttered, but he did not regain consciousness while his pockets were searched.
Joe found nothing but a few coins, a nail clipper, a set of house keys, and a wallet that contained the standard ID and credit cards. The guy’s name was Wallace Morton Blick. He was carrying no police-agency badge or identification. Joe kept only the driver’s license and returned the wallet to the pocket from which he had extracted it.
The two gunmen had not reappeared from the rugged scrub land beyond the cemetery hill. They had scrambled over the crest, after the woman, little more than a minute ago; even if she quickly slipped away from them, they weren’t likely to give up on her and return after only a brief search.
Wondering at his boldness, Joe quickly dragged Wallace Blick away from the rear corner of the white van. He tucked him close to the flank of the vehicle, where he was less likely to be seen by anyone who came along the roadway. He rolled him onto his side so he would not choke on the blood that might be draining from his nasal passages down the back of his throat.
Joe went to the open rear door. He climbed into the back of the van. The low rumble of the idling engine vibrated in the floorboard.
The cramped cargo hold was lined on both sides with electronic communications, eavesdropping, and tracking equipment. A pair of compact command chairs, bolted to the floor, could be swivelled to face the arrayed devices on each side.
Squeezing past the first chair, Joe settled into the second, in front of an active computer. The interior of the van was air-conditioned, but the seat was still warm because Blick had vacated it less than a minute ago.
On the computer screen was a map. The streets had names meant to evoke feelings of peace and tranquillity, and Joe recognized them as the service roads through the cemetery.
A small blinking light on the map drew his attention. It was
green, stationary, and located approximately where the van itself was parked.
A second blinking light, this one red and also stationary, was on the same road but some distance behind the van. He was sure that it represented his Honda.
The tracking system no doubt utilized a CD-ROM with exhaustive maps of Los Angeles County and environs, maybe of the entire state of California or of the country coast to coast. A single compact disc had sufficient capacity to contain detailed street maps for all of the contiguous states and Canada.
Someone had fixed a powerful transponder to his car. It emitted a microwave signal that could be followed from quite a distance. The computer utilized surveillance-satellite uplinks to triangulate the signal, then placed the Honda on the map relative to the position of the van, so they could track him without maintaining visual contact.
Leaving Santa Monica, all the way into the San Fernando Valley, Joe had seen no suspicious vehicle in his rear-view mirror. This van had been able to stalk him while streets away or miles behind, out of sight.
As a reporter, he had once gone on a mobile surveillance with federal agents, a group of high-spirited cowboys from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, who had used a similar but less sophisticated system than this.
Acutely aware that the battered Blick or one of the other two men might trap him here if he delayed too long, Joe swivelled in his chair, surveying the back of the van for some indication of the agency involved in this operation. They were tidy. He couldn’t spot a single clue.
Two publications lay beside the computer station at which Blick had been working: one issue each of Wired, featuring yet another major article about the visionary splendiferousness of Bill Gates, and a magazine aimed at former Special Forces officers who wished to make horizontal career moves from military service into jobs as paid mercenaries. The latter was folded open to an article about belt-Buckle knives sharp enough to eviscerate an adversary or cut through bone. Evidently this was Blick’s reading matter during lulls in the surveillance operation, as when he had been waiting for Joe to grow weary of contemplating the sea from Santa Monica Beach.